I’m On E

This song had me mystified for years, wondering what ‘E’ was. My first assumption, and probably yours too, was the drug Ecstasy. It’s the most obvious conclusion to jump to, especially since it’s such a jacked-up song. But, as it happens, Ecstasy was not yet a thing in 1978. Well, technically it was a thing, but not a popular thing. E didn’t become mainstream until the 80′s, so it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to write a song about being on it in 1978.   And even if it had been, Debbie Harry is absolutely not the kind of person to glorify her drug escapades. So, of course, “E” means the E train. Which, if you actually paid the slightest bit of attention to the lyrics and knew anything about New York City, you would have figured it out pretty quickly. It took me an embarrassingly long time to connect the dots, but it makes complete sense now. Debbie wrote a lot of songs about her less-glamorous-than-expected New York lifestyle, and that lifestyle involved a lot of shlepping up and down the island of Manhattan in high heels and while carrying a guitar. Debbie Harry might look like a glamour goddess, but you can’t question her regular-girl street cred. She sings about regular-girl things and that makes her so much more appealing than someone who only presents their fabulous rock-princess side. The world of Blondie is all about aching feet, cold pizza, riding the bus and stalking guys who don’t like you. Just like yours and mine.

I’m Gonna Love You Too

This is when my crotchety geezer self complains that they don’t make music like they used to and cranks up the Buddy Holly. My rational younger self realizes that a lot of innovations have occurred since then, and many of them have been for the better. But when you put on something really great from the 50′s, like a Buddy Holly classic, it’s hard not to wonder what all that innovation was for, anyway. Because four or five guys with instruments in a studio was all anyone needed back then, and look how great they sounded. On the other hand, without innovation, would we have Blondie and their cover of this song? If anything, it’s even better than the original.

I Know But I Don’t Know

This is one of the few, if not the only, Blondie songs where Debbie Harry sits back and lets one of the boys do some singing. Because she’s altruistic like that. And guess what, it sounds just like a Blondie song, only slightly manlier. It shows you that, as Deborah has always had to remind us, Blondie is a band. There’s more to their sound than Debbie and her pulchritude. Like any good band, they’re a team of collaborators, not a bunch of hired guns backing a hired gun-ette. Would they still be iconic if Debbie Harry had been frumpy, or a dude? Well, frumpy dude Debbie probably wouldn’t be on quite so many Hot Topic products, but I believe they’d still be popular and important. Because what matters is being a great band. There has to be substance underneath the peroxide; peroxide on its own might sell records, but it’s not going to last very long in the memory.

Hello Joe

Hola, Joe. A tribute to Blondie’s dear old comrade Joey Ramone, who passed on in  2001 at the too old to rock’n'roll, too young to die age of 49. I’ve never had much use for Ramone et al. but I find this a moving tribute. It’s more personal than star-burnishing. There’s something vaguely grave-robberish about the whole tribute album industry, and it seems like every time anyone famous dies there’s a million mawkish ‘homages’ from people they barely had any connection with. The attitude seems to be, ‘let’s grab a piece of attention while everyone’s thinking about this dead person’. There’s definitely a whiff of exploitation on the wind whenever there’s a celebrity death. Ramone himself was recently ‘exhumed’ via posthumous new album. I can’t judge the quality of that or the motivations of the exhumers, nor do I even care very much about Ramone’s legacy, but I do feel that there’s something profoundly undignified about digging up and releasing old tapes the artist didn’t deem worthy of finishing during his lifetime. It feels like a desperate stab to bleed some extra cash out of a dead icon’s memory. And if you can’t get cash at least get some press. This isn’t like that at all. For one thing, Joe’d been dead two years when The Curse of Blondie was released. And of course, this isn’t just anybody, this is Debbie Harry – a onetime lover and lifelong friend – writing about some plainly very personal recollections. About as fine a tribute as Joey Ramone has ever gotten, and top of the list for best tributes to dead rock stars in general.

Heart of Glass

I’m rounding off an extended run of girl-power entertainment today. It totally wasn’t planned, because I don’t plan these things, but we’ve enjoyed a week’s plus of awesome female singers from Billie Holiday to Lily Allen, all of whom I admire for different reasons. Though it wasn’t planned, it did get me thinking deeply about women’s roles in culture and who some great female role models might be. I came to the conclusion that while the male-dominated, patriarchal film and publishing industries aren’t letting very many truly empowered females emerge into the pop culture sunshine, music is a different community entirely. Music has always been a home for the eccentric, the outrageous, the unconventional – anyone too crazy or too unwilling to stuff themselves into more conventional career paths. Anyone with the wherewithal to learn an instrument or write song, and the exhibitionism to do it in public can conceivably be a rock star. Music is a special creative medium in that it’s collaborative but not prohibitively so. Painters and writers are lone visionaries working in isolation – there is something particularly narcissistic in working alone and taking all the credit for it, and the people doing it tend to live inside their own heads. Film-making on the other hand is such a complicated web of interconnected tasks and talents that not even the most visionary director can truly take full credit for his films. Music lies somewhere in between, balancing between personal vision and team effort. What I’m saying is, it’s the perfect art form for crazy personalities to flourish, and it’s from music that all the really great, ahead-of-their time, transgressive, trailblazing heroes and heroines have come. At least for me. I’ve always particularly looked up to rock stars – female, male or hazy cosmic ones – simply for finding a way to be their weird selves when being your weird self wasn’t an option for many people, thanks to society having a stick up its ass. All of which brings be to one of my favorite people, Debbie Harry, who for me pretty much created the image of sex-positive feminism. She took the image of the gorgeous hot chick and made it her own, made it a cool creative thing to be – not a skank or a bimbo or a nasty backbiting bitch, but nice cool person with something to say for herself. She taught us that if construction workers call you “Blondie!!”, embrace that image and have fun with it.

The Hardest Part

Oh, this Blondie song isn’t about stalking some dude. Unless it’s about running him down on the highway. It’s more like one of those songs that sound cool but the words are basically gibberish, but no matter, because it’s great anyway. Because, well, just watch the video. Debbie Harry’s video dance moves are wooden, especially by today’s standards. The dark wig doesn’t suit her, and her teeth look weird. No, who am I kidding? Debbie is perfect. She looks amazing as she always does, wig or no, and she doesn’t need choreography to be a magnetic presence. Why can’t all pop music be this much fun?

Hanging On The Telephone

Have you noticed how many Blondie songs are about being a stalker? This, One Way Or Another, I’m Gonna Love You Too, and The Tide Is High being the most blatant examples. Plus many others that are just slightly creepy, like Picture This, Susie and Jeffrey, or X Offender. In fact, most of Blondie’s songs cast Debbie Harry as a romantic obsessive. Sometimes merely a deeply in love romantic, sometimes the kind of romantic who follows a guy downtown to spy on him and knows what his mom’s up to at any given time. Or the insane type who drives her car into a wall with her fiancee inside. That might sound like the work of a disturbed mind, but somehow Debbie still comes off as a sweetie-pie. Maybe because she is a sweetie and she’s just playing a campy role. Or maybe she really is horrible and insane but gets away with it because she’s so pretty. Probably the first. The persona works and she continues to be appealing and iconic to girls young enough to be her daughter. How does someone so ridiculously beautiful still feel like a cool best friend? Debbie comes off as a slightly amped-up version of a regular cool chick, the kind of little bit crazy, little bit fast, cool but nice neighborhood girl we all kind of looked up to at one point or another. So it’s really kind of adorable that she’s always stalking and creeping and spying. Because everybody kind of does that to some extent. We’re all hanging on the telephone, like Debbie says.

Good Boys

Think it’s impossible to recapture that old spark? Not so! This is the best Blondie song since their Parallel Lines heyday. Blondie started strong, making the most euphoric rock known to man in the late seventies, but on their last two albums in the 80′s it felt like they’d lost their touch. They disbanded and though Debbie Harry pursued a solo career, she couldn’t quite match the verve and energy of her younger self. It was surprising that their comeback was so good. It hasn’t been all solid, but Good Boys matches every best Blondie moment. It would seem improbable that they could ever write another song to compare to Heart of Glass, but this is it. And it’s true – good boys never win.

Funtime

Hey baby, we like your lips! Hey baby, we love your pants!

Not a high quality video here, but some incontestable things can be learned. One, Iggy is both very flexible and highly adept at ‘Home Alone Face’. Two, it seems Iggy served as the unchained id to Bowie’s Apollonian ego, to mix reference points. Boy, those two had funtimes together. Three, Tin Machine would have been loads better had Iggy been asked to join. We can tell this because those other guys who are not David or Iggy are actually Hunt and Tony Sales, future Tin Machine members. Four, despite the immense wattage of David plus Iggy, I still prefer Blondie’s rocking cover version.

 

Fade Away and Radiate

I always found this song kind of creepy and haunting. Though ‘haunting’ is such a tired, tired adjective. It seems, to go by the words, she’s talking about nightlife – night wrapped in neon. Making this the least celebratory ode to nightclubbing ever written, if such it is. The year being 1978, it may be about Debbie Harry’s adventures as a Studio 54 habitue, adventures with Andy, New York brilliant night life, though she sounds awfully rueful about it. But the lyrics being very vague, and the mood being very low, who can tell. Deciphering pop songs is a pointless task anyway, just like writing about art is pointless – “So, yes, the painting has great swaths of yellow which create a textural effect.” Um, I’ll try to imagine it. You get what you get from it, and you’ll get what you get from a pop song. Besides, Blondie were never famed for the depth of their songwriting. It was more about the energy and the image. And speaking of Blondie, seems they have a new album out, Panic Of Girls, which I will get back to you on, as soon as I’ve absorbed it.