Rap City is my happy place.

Chris Thomas, St. Ides & Sprite Commercials.

This week’s episode of The Almanac of Rap is from our first ever live event. We linked up with The Questions and Itsthereal of The Blog Era for a triple podcast team up that is equal parts interview and trivia. You can listen to this and past week’s episode here.

This current newsletter has nothing to do with that episode. Gotta keep things fresh!

For the last few days I have been binging old episodes of Rap City on Youtube and it has been quite the journey.

One of my main observations about the show is that Chris Thomas was a really strange host and by strange I mean… bad? Okay that may be a step too far but let’s look at how he handled this interview with Penny Ford (L) and Jackie Harris (R).

They are members of the group SNAP! and if you don’t know who the group is they made a version of a song called The Power that I’m sure you’ve heard before.

Here they are performing it live at The Apollo:

The other version was by Chill Rob G and it sounds almost exactly the same.

But back to that Rap City interview. There is so much wrong with it but the main thing is how uninformed Chris Thomas was about who the hell Penny Ford is. She sang with Zapp, Klymaxx, The Gap Band and The S.O.S. Band before joining SNAP! and then left that band at their height to do stuff with Soul II Soul. And to boot her half sister is Sharon Redd who sang Never Give You Up (De La interpolated it on 4 More)

• Fun Facts:
  - Chaka Khan was supposed to be in SNAP! but Penny took the gig instead.
  - Penny Ford is from Cincinnati. I wonder does my mom know her folks, my mom knows everybody.

So you can only imagine how irritating it was to sit down with some random dude who keeps calling you a ‘young lady’ and doesn’t know your resume. I mean granted Wikipedia didn’t exist back then but there had to be some sort of press release or something!

By the end of the interview she is visibly annoyed and so happy that it’s over. It’s not a long interview at all but the cringe sets in almost immediately. Don’t take my word for it tho, here is the video in all of it’s glory.

The video also features footage of Digital Underground’s Sex Packets release party and I don’t know what’s better; seeing a young Tupac being happy or seeing Shock G’s brother play Humpty Hump so that Shock G could be there. I can’t believe that people used to actually think that Humpty Hump was a real person.

The other cool thing about this video is the commercials. This episode has an MC Lyte 900 number spot but in my binge watch I’ve also been reminded of campaigns by St. Ides and Sprite.

This clip doesn’t have all of the St Ides songs but it’s got quite a few and if you want to hear more here is a 40 minute mix that I think does the series justice.

Sprite has a really long history of using hip hop in it’s commercials and while I won’t be breaking them all down I do wonder if they are aware of the fact that they are the main soda that people use to mix their lean. They’ve gotta know about this right?

This is like how Philly, White Owl or Dutch Masters had to know that niggas was using their cigars to smoke weed long before it was legal but I digress.

Here is a compilation of Sprite campaigns over the years including I Like The Sprite In You, Obey Your Thirst and the Voltron joint.

I wish they would have included the 5 Deadly Women campaign. It’s up on youtube in bits and pieces but that’s not as fun as linking one long video.

Okay that’s it for now. I’m gonna go keep watching Rap City and try to find Yo MTV Raps or something. Maybe I’ll hunt down Video Music Box. There are so many other regional music video shows that I’ve been discovering based on this binging!

Anybody got any suggestions? Feel free to leave a comment!

BONUS - And speaking of music videos there are some new releases over in the Rec’s N Effect section but a true highlight is my brother Von Pea finally dropping this video for the song we did. Gone head and run them streams up!