Blondie

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Essential Albums

  • Autoamerican (Bonus Track) [2001 Remaster]
    Autoamerican (Bonus Track) [2001 Remaster]
    Autoamerican (Bonus Track) [2001 Remaster]

    The fifth album from Blondie, 1980’s Autoamerican, finds the New Wave hitmakers at their most radio-dominant—and at their absolute strangest. Autoamerican would yield two chart-topping singles (actually, three chart-topping singles, if you count the career-defining non-LP track “Call Me,” which first appeared on the American Gigolo soundtrack, and was later appended to the Autoamerican reissue). But for all the album’s mainstream success, Autoamerican is the sound of the band stretching their legs into weird and wild places—as evidenced by its two biggest hits: the irresistible Caribbean-pop of “The Tide Is High” and the landmark hip-hop homage “Rapture.” To record Autoamerican, producer Mike Chapman relocated the band to Los Angeles, where he rang up his session-musician pals. As a result, Autoamerican has the lushest arrangements of any Blondie album, swooning with strings and horns, and featuring appearances from such pop royalty as Motown guitarist Wah Wah Watson (“Live It Up”) and Flo & Eddie of The Turtles (“T-Birds”). The storied Weather Report percussionist Alex Acuña shows up on “The Tide Is High”—the album's first single, and a cover of a 1967 rocksteady single by The Paragons. But Autoamerican isn’t an album obsessed with the past: Its most consequential track, “Rapture,” would become the first Billboard chart-topper to incorporate rap—a style that had yet to enter the mainstream (Blondie guitarist Chris Stein would later say that members of Wu-Tang Clan and Mobb Deep had credited “Rapture” as the first rap song they ever heard). Beyond its two iconic hits, Autoamerican is the sound of a band spinning in all directions, unafraid to follow any whim or idea. The album's opening credits sequence, “Europa,” features a 30-piece orchestra playing Stein’s majestic score. “Live It Up,” meanwhile, is absolutely luxurious post-disco that sounds like Chic on a Star Wars-sized budget. Elsewhere on the album, “Here's Looking At You” takes a spin through 1940s-era vocal jazz, “Faces” recasts Harry into a singer belting sad tales of the Bowery at a noir piano bar, and “Go Through It” is highway-worn country rock. Autoamerican would turn out to be Blondie’s third and final platinum-selling album; the group dissolved two years after its release, succumbing to a cocktail of drugs, interband tension, and the failure of The Hunter, Blondie's last album of the 1980s. But Autoamerican captures the band members at the top of the world, and at the top of their craft, unafraid to let little things like pop success stunt their creativity and ambition.

  • Eat To the Beat
    Eat To the Beat
    Eat To the Beat

    Blondie's fourth album, 1979’s Eat To the Beat, followed the runaway success of the gleaming pop gambit Parallel Lines. After scoring a chart-topping smash with the disco experiment “Heart of Glass,” the members of Blondie reunited with producer Mike Chapman for a record that fearlessly ping-pongs between genres, attempting to mine power-pop gold from musical playthings both familiar (punk, girl groups, Motown, disco) and new (reggae, funk, Ennio Morricone). The end result would be Blondie’s second platinum album. Eat To the Beat opens with what would become the album’s biggest hit: “Dreaming,” a luminous rocker inspired by ABBA's “Dancing Queen,” and anchored by the deliberately overplaying of Clem Burke, who provides some of the busiest, most unhinged drumming ever to appear on a pop single. The mid-tempo New Wave soar of Eat To the Beat’s second single, "Union City Blue," pulsates with yearning and melancholy; it's the type of Blondie song that Radiohead could cover, which the British group did in 1995. And the album’s third single, “The Hardest Part,” is a greasy funk-rock stomper about performing a heist on an armored car—as good a metaphor as any for a bunch of punk rockers infiltrating the major-label system. Then there's the album’s final single, the glittery, drum machine space-western party “Atomic”: Intended as the band's “last disco song,” it twangs along on a series of chords that band member Jimmy Destri intended as an ode to spaghetti western soundtracks. Beyond the singles, there’s plenty of pop brilliance on Eat To the Beat, which finds the group playing around with as many sounds as possible: “Die Young Stay Pretty” is the band's attempt at a reggae song, one that successfully paves the way for the group's Caribbean-tinged monster hit “The Tide Is High.” The ballad "Sound-A-Sleep," meanwhile, twinkles like a lullaby, and “Slow Motion” is a Motown throwback. Not long after the release of Eat To the Beat, Blondie would find smash success by taking stabs at Eurodisco (“Call Me”), reggae-rock (“The Tide Is High”), and hip-hop (“Rapture”). But it was the restless genre experimentation on Eat To the Beat that made it clear Blondie was capable of anything.

  • Parallel Lines
    Parallel Lines
    Parallel Lines

    In 1975, Blondie graced the stage nearly every weekend at Manhattan’s grimy CBGB club, trading sets with the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Patti Smith. Uptown, swanky nightclubs like Studio 54 pumped out flashy and flamboyant disco grooves 24/7. By 1978, Blondie brought these two disparate worlds together, landing at the top of the charts for the first time the following year with their euphoric disco romp “Heart of Glass.” While this was the single that established the band’s prowess as pristine pop architects, it only offered a taste of the edgy, playful sounds stretched across their third full-length album, Parallel Lines. During the recording process, Australian producer Mike Chapman’s perfectionist drive reportedly left Debbie Harry in tears and the rest of the members at each other’s throats, but it ultimately tightened up their loose and lively retro-pop and made it forward-thinking—all the way down to their choice covers. Lead track “Hanging on the Telephone” reinterprets LA band The Nerves’ jittery rock song as a sleek, fiery come-on, while Buddy Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too” becomes a cheeky bubblegum-pop gem spliced with jagged bass and punk attitude. Their originals are just as sharp, even doomy art-rock cut “Fade Away and Radiate,” which comes gently shaped by King Crimson founder Robert Fripp’s serpentine guitar lines. Every step of the way, the band’s versatility underscores Harry’s multidimensional appeal—as a woman who hunts (“One Way or Another”) as hard as she hurts (“Picture This”)—and she delivers it all with the same intimidating air she holds on the album’s now-iconic cover.

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About Blondie

Blondie achieved massive success in the late ’70s and early ’80s, doing as much to take New Wave into the mainstream as anybody, while enabling hip-hop and reggae to reach the top of the U.S. charts. But they started out as an underground phenomenon, forming in New York City in 1974 and quickly becoming a fixture of the burgeoning punk scene centered at CBGB. In their early years, Blondie’s passion for kitsch made them something of a northern B-52’s, as they incorporated B-movie imagery, pulp themes, ’60s pop, and Jimmy Destri’s gloriously trashy combo organ into their postmodern smorgasbord. Though they scored big in England with 1978’s “Denis,” Blondie made little stateside impact with their first two albums. Their big American breakthrough came later that year with the more streamlined Parallel Lines and the disco-styled smash “Heart of Glass,” followed by the more New Wave-tinged hit “One Way or Another.” As soon as the spotlight found Blondie, singer Debbie Harry’s glamorous, photogenic presence got all the media attention, causing a rift between her and her bandmates that would soon widen. In the meantime, they soared to the top of the charts with the Giorgio Moroder-produced Eurodisco of “Call Me,” a cover of The Paragons’ ’60s reggae tune “The Tide Is High,” and “Rapture,” the first song with rapping to reach No. 1 in the U.S. By the time they released their wildly eclectic album The Hunter in 1982, the interpersonal dynamics were close to implosion, and the band split soon after. They reformed in 1997 and released No Exit two years later, scoring an international hit with “Maria.” The revivified Blondie, with cofounders Harry, guitarist Chris Stein, and drummer Clem Burke all remaining on board, continued touring and recording for decades.

FROM
New York, NY, United States
FORMED
1974
GENRE
Rock

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