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When a giant slide reopened in Detroit last week after a two-year hiatus, videos of children cascading down the 40-foot structure at high speeds drew laughter and genuine concern.
The six-lane slide was only open about half the day before parking. officials closed it due to security concerns. But the clips went viral, as did a local rapper’s rhythmic public service announcement.
“You can break your back on the giant slide,” Gmac Cash raps on his latest release. “You can even break your neck on the giant slide. You can even hit your head on the giant slide.”
Gmac adds that the $1 ride is “like jumping off a roof” and “you can lose a tooth on the giant slide.”
Fans placed the song about clips of kids flying down the slide in sacks of potatoes. One video racked up 1.2 million views on Saturday afternoon. Actor Lamorne Morris, who was the guest host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Monday, he featured a clip of the song on the show, saying, “I’m so sorry, Beyoncé. That’s the jam of the summer.”
Gmac, 29, is a Detroit native who has gone viral for other songs based on news events, including “Coronavirus,” which has more than 4 million views on YouTube.
“I’m like the voice of Detroit,” he told Mademoiselleosaki on Tuesday. “Because anything that happens in the city, I’ll make a song about it.”
I hadn’t planned on doing a song about the giant slide, but the requests kept coming.
He relented, he said, and laid the line in a matter of minutes. And he “just went crazy,” he said.
The song is also based on his personal experiences with the slide. As a child, he estimates that he slid down the giant slide “more than 100 times,” though he remembers a less intimidating structure back then.
“It was very pretty, very yellow and blue,” he said. “But now it just looks like a rusty building or something.”
First erected in 1967 in Detroit’s Belle Isle park, the slide was replaced years later with a similar structure, the Detroit Free Press reported at the time.
A 40-foot slide in Detroit closed hours after opening on August 19 due to safety concerns. (Video: Kenyatta McCadney via Storyful)
The slide was closed in 2020 when the pandemic started. But when it reopened last weekend, it quickly became clear that something was amiss. Children raced down the slide at unusually high speeds and were thrown into the air on each slope, causing some to crash hard into the metal frame. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources, which manages the park, said in a statement to the media last week that there were no injuries.
The riders could have been sped up by a new layer of wax on the slide, the Free Press reported. Park officials said in a Facebook post Sunday that they “scrubbed the surface and started spraying a little water on the slide between rides to help control speed.”
The slide reopened on Friday, a few days after officials released a video on how to slide properly. Riders must be at least 4 feet tall, fit their entire bodies into a potato sack, and then lean forward all the way down the slide, their Facebook post says.
Gmac said earlier in the week that it planned to go down the slide this weekend. He is not afraid.
“You have to stay focused and lean forward,” he said, adding that it’s “like riding a bike.”
Source: www.washingtonpost.com