Consider the landscape of American pop music in 1976. At the top of the Billboard Hot 100 were Wings’ easy “Silly Love Songs”. Rounding out the top ten, “A Fifth of Beethoven”, a disco-funk revamp of the composer’s most famous symphony. As for the rest of the list, it’s peppered with dancefloor mainstays such as Donna Summer, the Bee Gees and KC and the Sunshine Band. It’s filled with a healthy dose of middle-of-the-road ballads, novelty songs, and hit wonders associated with the decade.

If the end-of-year charts were representative of American tastes in the mid-1970s, what can we think of Blondie’s debut album, released in December 1976? In addition to records from underground New York bands such as the Ramones, New York Dolls and Patti Smith, blonde hair Couldn’t have been further from the mainstream.

Or could he?

More than any of their downtown contemporaries, Blondie absorbed a wide range of influences and synthesized multiple genres including surf pop, ’60s girl groups, mod rock, and even disco. Their self-titled debut LP reflected these motivations in a rowdy collection of punk-flavored power pop, defining the sound that would ultimately propel them to stardom.

In the early 1970s, Blondie went through various incarnations and name changes before settling on the five-piece lineup of Debbie Harry (vocals), Chris Stein (guitar), Gary Valentine (bass), Jimmy Destri (keyboards) and Clem Burke (drums). Destri was the last to join in the fall of 1975. After playing regularly at CBGB for much of the year, the band began work on their introductory album in August 1976. They had signed with a production company called Instant Records, co-owned by Richard Gottehrer (who will produce the LP and its 1977 sequel, Plastic letters).

First, however, Instant decided to test the waters with a single, so Blondie recorded “Sex Offender” (a song originally written by Valentine, with lyrics added by Harry). By this time, Valentine, born Gary Lachman, had been accused with statutory rape by his girlfriend’s mother. He and she were minors at the time, but the vengeful mother waited until Valentine / Lachman was 18 to file a complaint. As Harry writes in his memoir, Face it: “He was playing the music, and as soon as I heard it, I wrote the lyrics on the spot. The lyrics commented in part on how ridiculous Gary’s rape situation was and in part on how absurd it was to criminalize prostitutes. I brought down a cop and a prostitute for each other.

The song’s first spoken line is an obvious nod to 1960s teenage tragedy songs like Shangri-Las’s “Leader of the Pack.” Still, the protagonist is an HIV-positive adult, not a troubled teenager in this updated story. Destri’s swirling organ in the center of the room, paired with Burke’s heavy backbeat and kitsch boy’s backing vocals, forms a cheerful throwback with modern sensibility.

Instant Records sold the single to various labels, and it ended up in a small independent called Private Stock. The label agreed to release “Sex Offender” as long as the band changed the title. Even so, “X Offender” – as it was called now – didn’t have much of an impact. That said, there was enough buzz to continue with an entire album (but not until Frankie Valli, of all of them, signed on as he had a controlling stake in Private Stock). Harry tells the story of Valli who comes to the CBGB to watch the band play while his limo idles outside among the bums and winos on the street. They never met the Four Seasons singer, but now Blondie has signed on his label.

blonde hair was recorded at Plaza Sound, a large studio built in the 1930s in the same building as Radio City Music Hall. With Gottehrer at the helm, the group recorded the songs they had been polishing for two years on stage. Legendary Brill Building veteran Ellie Greenwich visited the session one day. Greenwich wrote “Out in the Streets,” a song popularized by the Shangi-Las in 1965 and later recorded by Blondie as a demo. She had also written hits such as “Be My Baby” and “River Deep – Mountain High”, so the band were thrilled when her trio sang back-up on “In the Flesh”. With the tight harmonies of the women and the chimes ringing in the bridge, the composition emulates the sound of the girl group so well that it could have been a Shingdig Choice of the week (if it weren’t for the sexual double meaning).

“In the Flesh” would also prove to be the group’s debut number one single – in Australia anyway – after being played on Molly Meldrum’s countdown, a popular music television show. As for the original demo of “Out in the Streets” by Blondie, it was finally released in 2001. blonde hair CD reissue.

In Face itHarry writes of the subversiveness of Blondie’s music: “We felt like gypsies and performance artists, avant-garde. And when you add that very New York DIY street-rock attitude that we had into the mix, you get punk. blonde hair hardly sounds like a punk record, however. The album is full of melodies and catchy mid-tempo hooks, but the band’s pop sensibility is undermined by their lyrics. The ironic innuendos of “X Offender”, “In the Flesh” and “Look Good in Blue” were undoubtedly in part fueled by adolescent itching, but they can also be read as an attempt to subvert gender norms.

Harry’s presence and personality on stage is part of the ploy. Fully aware that sex sells, she nevertheless tried to defy double standards by “being a cartoon fantasy on stage,” as she puts it. “The character of Blondie that I created was sort of androgynous. Even when I was singing songs written from a man’s perspective… I had to be a little neutral, so it felt like I wanted (the girl) ”. On songs like “Kung Fu Girls”, this neutrality is convincing, as Harry sings: “Kung Fu, Cindy Sue / Oh, I want to get close to you / You’re my Kung Fu girl.

Sadly, much of Harry’s cultural commentary is lost on the listener. “Rip Her to Shreds,” for example, is meant to be about gossip columnists and their harsh criticism of women in the public eye. Harry’s don’t sing “tear it to shreds”; she says that’s what media Is it that. But the nuance is erased by the jubilant refrain which only seems to encourage the misogyny of the crowd mentality. Still, it’s one of the LP’s flagships, with a catchy beat, a scorching organ, and Harry’s campy delivery.

Before 1976 – and speaking of camp – disco was still mostly played in underground clubs frequented by gays and minorities. In just a few short years, however, he began to infiltrate the establishment, with mainstream rock bands incorporating disco elements into their music. In fact, “Silly Love Songs” is an early example (just listen to McCartney’s bassline). Yet a backlash came quickly, and in 1979 anti-disco sentiment peaked with the infamous Comiskey Park “Sayco Night of the demolition” show.

The conventional narrative is that punk came and saved music from the miserable pablum of disco. But, this interpretation is rooted in misogyny and homophobia. The raw energy of punk was seen as serious and masculine, while disco was seen as frivolous, prefabricated music enjoyed primarily by women and gays. However, the gap between disco and punk was not as wide as it seems, and Blondie managed to embrace both. Each shape, in its first iteration anyway, goes against convention and promotes inclusion.

Some fans screamed scandal when Blondie “went to a nightclub” in 1978 with “Glass heart“(From their third album, Parallel lines). They hadn’t realized that the song was actually released from the band’s first recording session in 1975 (the same one that produced some of the songs on blonde hair). The band simply called it “The Disco Song”, and the original 1975 demo can be found on the 2001 remastered CD by Plastic letters. “Heart of glass” would be catapulted into the top 20 at the end of the year in 1979. A year later, “Call Me”, co-written by disco mogul Giorgio Moroder, would claim his place at the top.

Blondie has never shied away from their pop leanings, nor are they ashamed to name disco as one of their influences. By opening up to various influences, the group – which at one point may have seemed miles from the mainstream of American pop – came to dominate it.