It's been thirty-one years since the band broke into the mainstream and thirty four years since Debbie Harry walked out of Max's Kansas City and onto the stage at CBGBs and in that time enough static mythology and reductive history has been written that what Blondie did right so long ago to secure an enduring place in pop has been well and truly obscured. The band has weathered every pop music trend to come along since their foundation from rap/hip hop to goth and industrial as well as a couple of punk revivals along the way but, at every turn, they always manage to produce a couple of Top 40 hits that tend to endure long past the fad in question's expiration date. Call it chameleonic, call it good timing, call it adept writing, while Blondie has always been very much in a niche of their own (New Wave might be the closest neighboring qualification), somehow they never seem to totally fall out of fashion.
How do they do that? The truth is that Blondie's strength has always been in in their ability to pen crossover hits, but their secret lies in the fact that they only ever capitalize on a fad once as it's already drawing to a close (thus catching the last hopeful breaths of the devout) and then move on; they make the sound in question their own on their own terms for a minute and then arc directly away from it so they can never exactly be pinned down; but they never stray so far from their center that they can't find their way back. The Singles Collection shows the persona piracy that the band committed and was celebrated for in their first five years alone and illustrates just how savvy a band they were; in five years, Blondie released fifteen singles and, other than being unmistakably the work of Blondie, no two really sound alike – just that combination of Debbie Harry's come hither power and some keyboards are the only common threads.
Assembled chronologically as they are on the Singles Collection, it's very easy to chart the course that the band took and almost laughable now because it's all spread so thin stylistically, but still jaw-dropping in its own way because they all still work. Beginning as a campy rock n' roll act with a deeply novel streak through them, the first few singles (as well as their B-sides) all play easily into the rock-and-pop art Warhol-ian design that first got them off the ground and drew them notice. “Rip Her To Shreds,” “X Offender” and “Contact In Red Square” all bob and weave around simple and unaffected rock cliches with Harry playing rock's answer to Mae West – the unimpressed and unamazed femme domine. It sets the precedents for everything that would follow and, while there isn't really a punk bone in any song's body here (“Rip Her To Shreds” and “X Offender” strut around The Who a bit but, other than that, it's all embryonic New Wave), at the time – because of the band's attitudinal pose – 'punk' seemed like the safest place to put the band by virtue of geography and timing. By the time the “Hanging On The Telephone” single hit on October 30, 1978, they were getting pretty good at the shtick; as bored as harry ever sounded, by then she was sounding a little less breathless and a little more confident, at least enough to throw a little weight around to back the bravado.
With a hair too much comfort in that spot, the band had to move in order to avoid being pigeonholed and, in the move they'd make next, they set the tone for the rest of their careers.
“Heart Of Glass” ditches every vestige of rock and punk power and picks up disco instead; forcing Harry to actually sing which puts her back at 'breathless' square one. The incredibly slick disco of the song (best exemplified by the 12” version of the song) serves as an all-new face for Blondie driven home and made believable by the B-side, “Rifle Range” which ups the stakes by thoroughly blanching one of Blondie's most raucous early live numbers and painting its face pretty.
That worked for a while; disco was good to Blondie through the “Sunday Girl,” “Dreaming” and “Union City Blues” singles (and begins a path that Brit-pop luminaries including The Cure and Depeche Mode would follow) and the band began to build a loyal following along the way – until disco died in North America in July 1979 – an event that left a lot of bands stylistically homeless. Blondie was one of the few bands that landed on their feet as they played the eulogy for disco (“Atomic”) and backed it on a single with the white girl reggae of “Die Young Stay Pretty,” the song tat gave them a back door out. With that crisis averted but nowhere to go (for the moment), Blondie flopped back into rock with most anthemic grace in “Call Me” and that looked good for a while. It looked good until rap started to gather steam and Blondie saw another idea to lift.
“Rapture” was, again, another crossover hit for Blondie and it had the added benefit of opening a whole other audience up to what was happening in Central Park. Of course, “Rapture” is about as authoritative a document of rap as anything Al Yankovic has ever done, but it was a gateway for a lot of middle class white kids to discover the first wave of rappers including Run DMC, Melle Mel and Grandmaster Flash. The turn didn't hurt Blondie's bottom line either – in spite of most of the lyrics being utterly meaningless. The B-side hedges bets with some comic surf rock (“Walk Like Me”) as well as a couple of remixes for good measure (Sheryl Crow would borrow “Live It Up” for the intro of “All I Wanna Do” over a decade later) and exploiting the sound of island pop (“Island Of Lost Souls”) before calling it a day. In each case, the cynic will say that all of these songs were bill-paying measures done to keep a creatively bankrupt band out of hawk but, when one really listens (and, without the filler, it's easily done on the Singles Collection 1977 – 1982), it's possible to pick out the moments of genius in the band's shameless ransacking of sounds they have no real hold on; each time Blondie changes here, it's perfectly easy to like and listen to in the same way any good mixtape is. Many bands are not possessed of the ability to forget themselves, and end up becoming anachronistic when they don't change. By te same token though, the only thing Blondie did for five years (and many after that too) was change; it was a cut-throat survival tactic, but they were always able to pull it off and draw new ears each time.
Artist:
www.blondie.net/
www.myspace.com/blondie
Download:
Blondie – “Heart Of Glass” (7'' Single mix) – Blondie Singles Collection 1977 – 1982
Blondie – “Rifle Range” – Blondie Singles Collection 1977 – 1982
Blondie – “Heroes” (Live) – Blondie Singles Collection 1977 – 1982
Album:
Blondie Singles Collection 1977 – 1982 is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
