Sports
Do the "Kingdome"
In 1981, The Mariners' Lenny Randle Invented the Sports Rap
s the Seattle Mariners flounder down the stretch in their attempt to nab a Wild Card playoff berth, perhaps the M’s should look to their past for inspiration. In order to get out of their current funk (4-6 in the last 10 games at the time of writing this), they need to recapture their funky past in the form of the obscure 1982 single “Kingdome,” by Lenny Randle and the Ballplayers.Randle, an infielder for the Mariners in the early 1980s, formed a band and headed to the studio during the baseball strike of 1981 to record an homage to the Mariners’ erstwhile home, the Kingdome. I always knew the Kingdome was clunky, leaky dome, but I never knew the “Kingdome” was a dance. Thanks to the release of the 2014 compilation Wheedles Groove: Seattle Funk, Modern Soul & Boogie, Volume II, 1972-1987, Randle’s dome-inspired dance craze has resurfaced in a year when the M’s have made a bit of a resurgence. Coincidence? I think not.
Randle’s song was released three years before the Chicago Bears’ “Super Bowl Shuffle,” which is often thought of as the first—and quintessential—pro sports team rap song. We shouldn’t be surprised by Randle’s creativity and ingenuity. Writing “Kingdome” is the second-most innovative thing Randle did in 1981, following this:
According to Randle in the compilation’s liner notes (side note: if you have ever wondered why there is a Grammy for liner notes, look no further than this album), he was looking for something to do during the strike and recorded this song and “I’m a Ballplayer” to raise funds for a fan with cerebral palsy. Also according to Randle, the song, when finally finished and released in 1982, was a “huge sensation.” A quick web search does not corroborate this claim, but I’m going to give Randle the benefit of the doubt, because there doesn’t seem to be a central repository online or in the Library of Congress for songs about domes, or something along the lines of “rap music – 1980s – songs about domes.”
To further complicate matters, there is no music video for the “Kingdome,” which is why in the lore of sports dancing it is forgotten, obscured behind the shuffling moves of Bears Jim McMahon and William “The Refrigerator” Perry. Without video, all we have is audio and lyrics, and even then, there is great mystery to exactly how this dance actually translates on the dance floor.
To assist our readers, our crack research team at Propeller has dissected the lyrics to the song.
Lyric: “There’s a dance going around Seattle, and it’s moving across the land / All the folks are doing it—they’re even doing it in Iran.”
Analysis: Again, I’m not doubting the claim that the song and dance was a “sensation,” though I can find no evidence that one year after the release of U.S. hostages in Iran, the Ayatollah and the people of Iran momentarily put aside their anti-American sentiment to get caught up in a funky dance about one of the worst American stadiums of all time.
Lyric: “Raise your hands high in the air, and you make them like an arc / You can do it at home, you can do it in the dark.”
Analysis: From what I can tell, this is the actual dance: putting your hands above your head in dome form. There may be swaying or gyrations involved as well, but that’s unclear.
Lyric: “Now when you’re in the King, you gotta check out the Astroturf / Now check out the turf—that’s Astroturf!”
Analysis: No analysis needed. This speaks for itself.
Lyric: “As you’re running to first, and heading to second / and you’re going to third, and your heading home / you gotta break on down and do the Kingdome.”
Analysis: This explains a lot, actually. Out of 14 teams in the American League, the Mariners ranked 11th in runs scored in 1981 and tied for second-to-last in 1982. Since the song was a sensation, that leads me to the conclusion that Randle—and perhaps other Mariners players—rounded third but rarely scored, because they stopped in the base path to raise their hands in the air and “make them like an arc.”
Lyric: “You can do it at home, but never alone / Go ahead, Jerome.”
Analysis: It’s unclear what happens if you attempt to do the “Kingdome” alone, but I see this as a warning and did not want to find out for the sake of this article. Jerome, by the way, is guitar player Jerome Andrews, who shreds a nice solo at this point in the song. From a rhyming standpoint, Randle hit the jackpot finding a guitarist whose name rhymes with “home” and “dome.”
These are not sample lyrics, by the way. Randle repeats some of these lines with a little variation, but this is pretty much the song, other than the fact that Randle and his back-up singers say the word “Kingdome” 101 times. Randle, who gets a cowbell credit on the song, brought in his 10-year-old niece Rashawna to sing back-up, along with Mariners players Larry Anderson, Bryan Clark, Al Cowens, Julio Cruz, Todd Cruz, and Dick Drago.
After listening to the song, the 2014 Mariners could recapture their groove of a month ago, as long as they didn’t perform the dance while heading home, or, of course, alone. Ideally, this dance should be done before the game as part of warm-ups. If the players wanted to add anything to “The Kingdome,” they should raise their hands like an arc and then crumble to the floor at the end of the song.
Matthew Kauffman Smith is a freelance writer and music critic.
In March, he wrote the Album Bracketology that produced a champion album of 2013.
