Comment When a giant slide reopened in Detroit last week after a two-year hiatus, videos of kids hurtling down the 40-foot structure at high speeds sparked both laughter and genuine concern. The six-lane slide was only open about half a day before the park officials shut it down for safety 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 new 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 the roof” — and “you might lose a tooth on the giant slide.” The fans were positioned the song over clips of kids flying down the sides of a slide in potato sacks. One video had garnered more than 750,000 views by early Wednesday morning. Actor Lamorne Morris, who hosted “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Monday, introduced a clip of the song on the show, saying, “I’m so sorry, Beyoncé. This is the jam of 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 the Washington Post on Tuesday. “Because anything that happens in town, I’ll make a song about it.” He hadn’t planned to do a song about the giant slide, but the requests kept pouring in. He gave in, he said, and took the track down within minutes. And he “went crazy,” he said. The song is also based on his personal experiences with transparency. As a child, he estimates he went down the giant slide “over 100 times,” though he remembers a less terrifying construction back then. “It was really beautiful, really yellow and blue,” she said. “But now it just looks like a rusty building or something.” First built 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. The slide was closed in 2020 when the pandemic started. But when it reopened last weekend, it quickly became apparent that something was amiss. Children went down the slide at unusually high speeds and were thrown into the air on each slope, causing some to fall hard on the metal structure. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources, which manages the park, said in a statement to news outlets last week that there were no injuries. The riders may 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 some water on the slide between rides to help control the speed.” The slide will reopen Friday, officials said in a statement that included a video on how to properly slide down. Riders must be at least 4 feet tall, fit their entire body into a potato sack and then lean forward all the way down the slide, the post says. Gmac says he plans to go down this weekend. He has no fear. “You have to stay focused and lean forward,” he said, adding that “it’s just like riding a bike.”
