How Much of a Different Country than the U.S. Today Was Harlem in 1979?: Wednesday Focus (January 15, 2014)
The Sugarhill Gang: “Rapper’s Delight” (1979):
Big Bank Hank:
Check it out:
I’m the C-A-S-A, the N-O-V-A, and the rest is F-L-Y.
You see I go by the code of the doctor of the mix, and these reasons I’ll tell you why.
You see I’m six foot one, and I’m tons of fun, when I dress to a T.
You see I got more clothes than Muhammad Ali, and I dress so viciously.
I got bodyguards, I got two big cars, that definitely ain’t the wack,
I got a Lincoln Con-tin-en-tal, and a sunroofed Cadillac.
So after school, I take a dip in the pool, which is really on the wall,
I gotta color TV, so I can see, the Knicks play basketball…
That last line raises a question I have been wondering about for quite a while…
Henry Jackson’s persona, Big Bank Hank, is, in this particular section of this Hip Hop song:
- At the first level, boasting about how great he is–rich, famous, sexually attractive, etc.
- At the second level, making sure his listeners know that he is still a regular guy–he likes to do things that ordinary people like to do, like watch the New York Knicks play basketball.
- At the third level, undermining his boasting–it is so over the top, and his claims are so hyperbolic coming from a kid whose assets are a boom box, a tape loop, and an ability to talk fast and think and rhyme on his feet.
The question: When Hank says “I gotta color TV”, is that part of level 3–he’s such a loser that he thinks owning a color TV is a big deal–or, on Sugar Hill in Harlem in 1979, was it still somewhat of a big deal to own a color TV? Adjusting for changes in the consumer price index, the real price in 1979 of a less-reliable cathode-ray 20-something inch color TV was ten or more times the $150 or so for a more-reliable LCD 20-something TV today–even though the 1979 color TV was 1/5 the real price of the first mid-1950s color TVs…