Crash Course, No. 36: Blondie, Definitely Important, but Also Better than I Thought

Not the inspiration, btw.

The format I used for the posts on Black Sabbath and Blitzen Trapper doesn’t feel like a good fit for this. It probably wasn’t a good fit for either of those, but there’s just…something about Blondie’s history that makes more sense of telling it all at once.

“Q: What do you think it is that makes your songs so appealing to so many generations?"

"[Chris Stein]: They’re cheerful. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don't know. We tap into a lot of things from musical history when making the songs. They’re based on a lot of stuff that’s come before us so maybe that’s… You know, we got one review recently from one of those Canadian festivals. It [was] a really great glowing review, and she said that the band almost sounds psychedelic in its presentation, which I thought was great because I always think that, but I never really see it in print. There’s a lot of influences from the ’60s, ’70s, [and] later music in there, so I think maybe that clicks with people.”
- Time Magazineinterview with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein (2014)

A number of sources I read while researching this post praised Blondie’s genre-bending progress throughout the band’s short, original career. This comes from Wikipedia's section on their “style and legacy,” but something much like it topped several interviews:

“The band is known not only for the striking stage persona and vocal performances of Harry but also for incorporating elements in their work from numerous subgenres of music, reaching from their punk roots to embrace new wave, disco, pop, rap, and reggae.”

I get that and I don’t. The bulk of their eponymous debut listens like a throwbacks to an early-60s sound, if with a “bad girl” twist, and they did more or less leave that behind for the follow-up album, Plastic Letters, only to call it back now and again. There’s no question their music expanded and evolved - the distance between Plastic Letters and Autoamerican is wider than I knew going in - but it all sounds more like...Blondie than any one of the genres they dabbled in. To hit that from the other direction, it feels more natural to say someone else’s song sounds like Blondie than the other way around, even as it’s fair to acknowledge that most Blondie songs sound like something else.

Crash Course, No. 13: Ezra Furman, You've Already Missed Too Much

Is there a trailer for Transangelic Exodus?

Believe it or not, this post will be the first time I’ve had to publicly manage gender pronouns (yes, I probably need to get out more). So, to both address it early and explain an editorial choice, Ezra Furman is a gender-fluid musician, and someone who has taken a very thoughtful approach to the entire question of how to identify. Based on what I’ve read, it was only this year (2019) that Furman started identifying as transgender.

As for the pronoun choice, I’ve read one interview from this year that used “he,” and another interview that used “she.” Next, there’s Furman’s twitter bio: “my pronouns: he/she/him/her.” More than anything else, however, I to take my marching orders from this direct quote (from “one interview” above; good one, too):

“Sometimes I wonder what there is to say about it. Or maybe I feel tired of obsessing about it, caring about how I said it, worrying about people’s reaction and such. My dream has always been that it could be a non-issue, or at least, as much of an issue as any cherished part of who I am.”

The Independent went with “he/his,” and I will as well for the remainder of this post. If Furman ever puts his foot down one way or the other, I’ll honor his choice. More than anything else, I find Furman’s specific gender identity the least interesting about him. Because I think he/she kicks 20 asses, dammit. And I think the world of his/her music…and, yes, I’d struggle with “him/her,” because, clunky, but I would still respect the choice.

OK, on with the rest of it.

Personal

As much as I shit on Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, I owe them for a lot of my new crushes. They fed me Furman’s “Tell Em All to Go to Hell,” a screed of a song that layers garage-rock production on a classic 50s tune (as the garage-rock originals did). The vibe borrows from punk – a culture that’s very much part of Furman’s work – but, as he often does, he drops in a blast from a saxophone that gives the track another dimension. I loved it the first time I heard it, and tagged him as someone to go deep on in the future. The future arrived the day after Spotify passed on “Evening Prayer aka Justice” (great, yet challenging protest pop) and the lacerating, “Thermometer.” Both of those came off his latest, Twelve Nudes, by the way.

Crash-Course No. 11: UltraVoxyCars, From the '70s Into the '80s

Behind the scenes, Sirens.

Another week, more tweaks to the format; the benefits of having a tiny platform never stops giving, really. Moving past that tiny pile of rubble...

Background
Learning a bunch of cool shit about Hall & Oates triggered a very specific and personal childhood memory. When that coincided with the recent passing of Ric Ocasek, the lead singer and public face of 1980s legends, The Cars, I decided to make this The Cars Week. Like most people, I comfortably karaoke at least a half dozen Cars songs, maybe even more, but I didn’t know much about them. There was the thing how googling “Ric Ocasek” reliably extends to “Ric Ocasek’s wife,” something that wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows anything about either Mr. Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova. (What so many failed to recognize: Ocasek had talent.) As for that memory…

Throughout my childhood, other kids, my older sisters, just society kept telling me that this band (e.g., Simple Minds for reasons I can neither recall nor explain) or that band (Split Enz?) started as a “punk band.” The angularity of The Cars’ sound (I borrowed that adjective, btw) made me wonder they fit that bill. The Cars arrived into the music world more or less fully-formed, as it turns out. Ocasek, along with the earlier departed Benjamin Orr, hit the ground running; some of their biggest hits – e.g., “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Good Times Roll” – appeared on their debut album. While I’m sure they have more ins, outs and points of interest than my cursory dip into them turned up, the only ones that feel worth mentioning are, 1) Orr and Ocasek starting in a Midwest-based folk act called Milkwood; and, 2) does anyone still represent for the band’s third album, Panorama. (For the record, I didn’t, but I also only gave it one, semi-distracted listen.)

So, ruined as I was by that Hall & Oates experience, I shifted to thinking about other bands. The time spent on The Cars wasn’t a total waste: I kept “Bye Bye Love” from their debut for the playlist plus the title track and “Let’s Go” from the follow-up, Candy-O. And The Cars are one of those bands that no one else really sounds like, and that’s admirable. Just not what I was after...

On Finding What I Wanted Across the Pond
Because I watched MTV from the get-go, I associate The Cars with a bunch of bands from the same time that got lumped under the label, “new wave,” most of them English. As happens with genre labeling, the filing gets complicated from the get-go, but I stumbled across a nice key-word definition in the Wikipedia entry on “new wave” that lays out a good, broad outline: