"Rapture"


Back to back
Sacroiliac
Spineless movement
And a wild attack


"Rapture" is most famous for being the first number one song to feature rapping since Lorne Greene's "Ringo". However, clumsy rhymes (even by the old-school standards of the day) about a disco-era Purple People-Eater somehow failed to bring rap into the mainstream; it was also the last number one song to feature rapping until Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" ten years later. And of course rap took after that.

To a ten-year-old boy like myself, this was just about the coolest song ever. A man from Mars! Eating cars! And bars! And guitars! What's not to love? I especially enjoyed imagining the guitar player fighting with the Man from Mars during the solo at the end. Yet I never gave much thought to what Debbie Harry was singing in the rest of the song. So I looked it up. And... huh?

According to Wikipedia,"the sacroiliac joint is the joint between the sacrum, at the base of the spine, and the ilium of the pelvis, which are joined by ligaments. It is a strong, weightbearing synovial joint with irregular elevations and depressions that produce interlocking of the bones." Well that's even sillier than a club-hopping alien who ate your head.

It's a strange word to have in a song that's not a mnemonic tune designed to help med students in their anatomy classes. ("The hip bone's connected to the sacroiliac bone...") It's even stranger that the word is just hanging there as if it were a common interjection, like "Spleen!" or "Pancreas!". A sentence is called for, or at least a phrase.

Perhaps "Total Eclipse Of The Sacroiliac"? (Can one turn around with an eclipsed sacroiliac?)

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