Junk for Code

pop glamour

I managed to catch Blondie when they guested on the ABC's Rage last Saturday night. It was an attempt to get back to the forgotten years of popular music when I no longer listened to the radio or watched TV. Blondie are currently on tour in Australia.

It was very late before the Blondie segment came on and I was able to hear their catalogue of songs. Some of the finely crafted pop songs I knew, such as Heart of Glass from Parallel Lines album and Union City Blues. Suprisingly, I enjoyed the latter songs Maria and Shakedown. But I thought the solo work by Harry was musically flat. The music produced by the band was far more interesting.

From New York New Wave Punk to successful New York pop band. It was a move away from the 1960's rock and roll based on the blues and extended macho guitar solos to punchy, catchy tunes, thoughtful (and/or humorous) lyrics, good keyboards and ironic sensibility. A good 70's pop band with a postmodern style.

It was the visuals that I found to be more interesting with all the early gestures back to Marlene Dietrich and New York glam.

The visuals around the figure of Deborah Harry wrapped Blondie up in glamour, beauty and fashion a la the platinum Harlow and Marilyn Monroe. Lots of urban desire. Harry defined pop beauty and became a pop icon and a celebrity.

Blondie are also art pop that links back to pop art that opened up into popular culture.
With Andy Warhol's silkscreen painting of Marilyn Monroe we have a self-referentiality to the everyday imagery that is part of contemporary consumer culture. It leads to a mixing of culture with play that gave us this New York art scene and this awareness of a media saturated culture. Thus we have the cultural background to Blondie who were part of the New Wave mixing of music and visual culture.

Whilst listening to the songs and watchign the video-clips I was looking forward to seeing what the visual culture produced.

But it was the visuals that disappointed me the most with the Rage episode. The promise was there with the Heart of Glass video clip that built on David Bowie's video clip for Ashes to Ashes. But little was then done with the video as an art form. It was the usual rock/pop stuff of the band. The video clip from the new single Good Boys had a few ideas.

Was it the limits of Rage I was encountering?

No clips were shown from the films Deborah Harry was in. A pity because the loss, death, oppression and desire -- the darkness at the core of everyday life---was left untouched.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 9, 2003 10:00 AM | TrackBack