Chart Week: September 19, 1981
Song: “General Hospi-tale” – The Afternoon Delights
Chart Position: #35, 9th week on the chart. Peaked at #33 for two weeks.
I’ve been reading through the RFTS archives and was surprised that I’ve never written properly about a novelty song, stuff like “Pac-Man Fever” or “The Curly Shuffle,” for example. I probably should have held off until one of those popped up on an old AT40, but this record was so strange that it required my first novelty song post.
We can’t talk about this track without reviewing how important daytime soap operas once were. In the age before the wide adoption of cable TV, your only afternoon viewing options on sick days or visits to grandma’s were the three hours of soaps shown on each network.
My mom’s mom was a Days of Our Lives devotee. That meant for the hour it aired, shit shut down in grandma’s house. The grandkids had to either shut the hell up or go outside. Grandpa had the good sense to take a post-lunch nap each day. She watched Days because the NBC station was the best signal they could grab with their gigantic antenna at their house out in the middle of nowhere. She watched the other NBC soaps, too, but Days was the show that got grandma’s full attention. You risked her wrath if you interrupted in any way.
The biggest soap of that era, though, was ABC’s General Hospital. At its peak, over 13 million people watched it each day. It was a launching pad for Rick Springfield’s career.[1] Fellow GH alum Jack Wagner could wind up in this series at some point. It is one of three daytime soaps still airing on traditional TV today, and celebrated its 60th anniversary earlier this year.
Most importantly, it gave us the biggest storyline in soap history: Luke and Laura. I never watched GH, and was in the fourth-through-sixth grades at its prime, yet even I knew all about Luke and Laura. You should read up on their storyline. It was bonkers, even for a soap. Despite their relationship beginning with a sexual assault, Luke and Laura’s union endured, and eventually crossed over into the pop culture mainstream like no other daytime soap characters did before or since. When Luke and Laura got married, 30 million people watched. THIRTY MILLION!!! For comparison, NBC’s Sunday Night Football was the highest rated series on TV last year, averaging a little over 18 million viewers per week. I know, different times, more choices, etc. Regardless of all that, General Hospital was a ratings behemoth. Soon every soap was looking for their own L&L.
Naturally outsiders tried to capitalize on GH’s success. A group of songwriters and singers in Boston thought a pop single about the show might be a hit. In a truly wild choice, they presented the record in a proto-rap style.
It was pretty awful. My first thought when hearing it again was of Sam Malone rapping an editorial during his brief foray into TV sports.
I doubt the housewives and shut-ins who were General Hospital’s prime audience were ready for rap in 1981. Even vanilla rapping like this was probably frighteningly close to “Black music from New York” for a lot of folks in the heartland. I just can’t see my grandma tapping her toes and humming along when Casey played it on Sundays.
However, GH was so big that the song got some airplay. It spent five weeks in the Top 40 and peaked at #23 on the R&B chart. I find it hard to believe Black radio stations actually played it, but what do I know?
The lyrics and delivery of them are clunky. I’m not sure any of the people who made it had actually listened to a true rap song. The music is cheesy and overwhelming. It wants to be funky, but the end result was profoundly un-funky.
And the group’s name? Get the fuck out of here.
You can make an argument that this was the third hip hop song to crack the Top 40 after “Rapper’s Delight” and “Rapture.” So maybe it has some historical significance?
And, TBH as the kids say, since white people trying to rap sounded like this song for the next two decades, does that make it a highly influential piece of music, even if it influenced people to produce shit?
No, that can’t be right. It’s a bad song. It deserves no props. The charm that carried other novelty tracks of that era is completely missing. On the rare occasions when I hear it, I quickly switch away. There’s a reason it was buried in the slag heap of historically bad music, and that had nothing to do with the waning popularity of soaps. Some may find it silly and harmless. I think it’s trash. 1/10
Springfield’s former #1 “Jessie’s Girl” was still at #13 this week. ↩