Tonight’s selections from Blondie’s 1979 album, Eat to the Beat
“Eat to the Beat was our fourth album, though it was the first one the American public had been waiting for”. — Debbie Harry (Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie, 1982)
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Blondie has always been a band less concerned with weaving dreams than with critiquing them in order to emphasize the distance between desire and fulfillment. They pioneered a reverse-twist musical archivism that’s antiromantic rather than escapist: instead of digging for intact nuggets of nostalgia, Blondie went at pop tradition with a ball peen hammer, splintering and rearranging shards of the past according to an up-to-date aesthetic. Familiar fragments conjured up classic fantasies — a series of teen dreams and B movies, all of them starring Deborah Harry — while the pared-down context underscored their irrelevance. Singing like either a petulant baby doll or a Thorazined waif, Harry modeled pop images, then ripped them to shreds.
Blondie’s obsession here is with dreams and distance — the band’s usual themes, now suddenly personalized by its own success. Like a comedian who outlasts and outclasses the subjects of his impressions, the group itself has become a pop image as powerful as any it can invoke. Blondie has invariably recognized the resonances that stardom has from without: Jimmy Destri’s “Fan Mail” on Plastic Letters captures perfectly the lightheaded devotion of hero-worship. Now they’re comparing perspectives. Without ever approaching a music-biz cliché, Eat to the Beat explores the nagging paradoxes of success — like the way it imposes distance between you and your surroundings, your memories and your dreams. Or the contrast between internal and external transformation, means and ends, recognition and risk taking. — Rolling Stone
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Dreaming [1979]
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“Dreaming” makes the keynote statement. [Clem] Burke’s drums roll in and out like the inexorable pounding of breakers on the beach, nearly drowning out [Chris] Stein’s twangy, Beatles-style guitar riff and the keening, insistent reiteration of the six-note refrain. Harry’s voice emerges in smooth peals, as if she’s found a place for herself beyond the waves:
Reel to reel is living rarity
People stop and stare at me
We just walk on by
We just keep on dreaming.
Holding private thought so dear raises the ante on fantasies: the dreams played out on Eat to the Beat are all high-stakes dramas. The throbbing, witty “The Hardest Part” weds — not for the first time — sexual and financial fantasy (“No short heist/No overnight/Big money/Take it to Brazil”), while “Union City Blue” evokes life-or-death romance. Mixed with the intertwined-guitars-and-keyboards density of “Dreaming,” “Union City Blue” has the force of an incantation. Key words — power, passion — slip out with a resonant urgency. Harry’s finally using her sweet tones to create real emotional intensity. — RS
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Union City Blue [1979]
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At some point in the early 1980s – after this, but not long after – I realised we were all going to die, rather horribly and rather soon. I acquired the conviction before I picked up the geopolitical knowledge to put names to it – Reagan, Afghanistan, Cruise. Maybe I picked up the information at school, or watched the wrong five minutes of the news. Once I became aware of the imminent nuclear doomsday, I avoided fresh information on it, but when some did break through my filter it was like overproof liquor for the imagination. How bad would it be? Infinitely. How would we know the hour of its coming? You wouldn’t. What on Earth would you do when they dropped the bomb?
But all that came later. I didn’t register “Atomic” at the time, and didn’t return to it until years later, when nuclear war had slipped down my list of concerns. It still seemed exciting, but inscrutable too: in “Atomic” the bomb is in the background, something for Debbie Harry to pose against on the sleeve like a pin-up girl from the dawn of the nuclear age. And that’s the song all over: striking a pose against the end.
Blondie, of course, were a group, and never more so than here. The sound of “Atomic” is unbeatable – those surf guitars, the surges of synth under Harry’s verses, Clem Burke’s rocket-fuel drum fills; all interweaving to make the single sound as vast and modern and hot as it does. And as lean: nothing is wasted, nothing is overdone. In the end, “Atomic”’s abstraction is what makes it one of the greatest Number Ones. You could hear the song as making love one last time as doomsday comes, but I prefer a more metaphysical reading: that wanting to come up with something that would match the absolute of nuclear war, Harry simply reached for the perfect gesture of glamour. “Oh, your hair is beautiful. Oh, oh, oh tonight.” Sex beats death. — Freaky Trigger
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Atomic [1979]
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Ringo Starr, Shaun White
Jimmy Fallon: Pre-empted
Stephen Colbert: Pete Buttigieg, Adam Scott
Seth Meyers: Pre-empted
James Corden: Ike Barinholtz, Chloe Kim, Parcels
Trevor Noah: Janicza Bravo
SPOILER WARNING
A late night gathering for non serious palaver that does not speak of that night’s show. Posting a spoiler will get you brollywhacked. You don’t want that to happen to you. It's a fate worse than a fate worse than death.
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Iggy Pop :: Lust For Life [1977]
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LAST WEEK’S POLL: WHO WILL WIN THE SUPER BOWL?
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