Blondie

The 1976 debut that essentially invented American New Wave, Blondie’s <i>Blondie</i> emerged from the same seedy, gunk-coated, art-damaged New York as the Patti Smith Group, Television and the Ramones. But unlike the group’s more angsty peers, Blondie was made up of fun-loving, thrift-store-shopping outsiders who sounded more like The Shangri-Las than The Stooges. Combining venomous pop songs with skinny ties, the boisterous, irresistible Blondie was too punk to get airplay on American radio, but too compelling and ambitious to stay confined inside the graffiti-coated walls of CBGB forever. The band’s lean, 33-minute debut wouldn’t be a hit in the States, but American radio would soon sound like the band’s pioneering mix of modern aggression, keyboard throb and fearless pop hooks. Tracks like “X Offender”, “Little Girl Lies” and “In the Flesh” hearken back to the days of early 1960s girl groups, and <i>Blondie</i> was indeed produced by girl-group pioneer Richard Gottehrer, who went into the production game after co-writing songs like “My Boyfriend's Back” and “I Want Candy” (his friend Ellie Greenwich—the famed co-writer of Phil Spector-era tunes like “Be My Baby” and “Leader of the Pack”—even laid down some background vocals for <i>Blondie</i>). With Gottehrer's help, the art-punks in Blondie naturally came through with pop-gold, which they often filtered with some Velvet Undergroundian grit that wasn't exactly made for AM radio: “X Offender” may have been the album's first single, but it's hard to imagine too many mainstream DJs spinning a tune about a prostitute falling for the cop that's booking her. The rest of <i>Blondie</i> presages such future sounds as grunge (“Rip Her to Shreds”) and pop-punk (“Kung Fu Girls”), while “In the Sun” plays like the giddy throwback surf-rock of The Beach Boys or Jan & Dean—but with more shark teeth and sunburn. Elsewhere on the album, the wet synthesiser of “A Shark In Jets Clothing” sends a finger-snapping <i>West Side Story</i> throwback hurtling into space. A comic-book mix of violence and goofiness, <i>Blondie</i> didn’t make a huge splash in the US. But Australia sent the lovely ballad "In the Flesh" up the charts. “It created huge problems when we finally got to Australia, because the people that were tuned to such things knew we were a New York underground punk rock group from the depths of the Bowery,” drummer Clem Burke would later remember. “But then the other half of the audience expected a band that played light pop ballads.” The dissonance may have been confusing in 1976. But time has shown that it's what made Blondie so thrilling and unique.