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The True Godfathers Of Punk
Part 3 - Blondie
One of the phrases repeated in articles about Punk-New Wave in the late seventies was that the genre had given women more opportunities in the music business. That was true to a certain extent, but mainly because the previous top tier of '60s Rock, Psychedelic and the British Invasion was dominated by young males who definitely had a "Dude Culture."
As far as "opportunities" there was always plenty in every genre. If you looked at the lower tiers of artists in the '60s and seventies, there were always plenty of women.
The problem wasn't a lack of entry level opportunities for women but the glass ceiling blocking the upper levels of success. If one looks at old issues of the Rolling Stone and other music magazines, there generally was ample coverage of women artists. An album by a major female artist like Joni Mitchell or Laura Nyro was always given a full review and discussed in a reasonably serious manner.
One thing you can say about the first wave of Punk was that there did seem to be a wider range of female participation. I remember at the Mabuhay Gardens in '77 that many of the main headliners all either had a female fronting the group or working as instrumentalists.
That diversity changed later on, for example in the hardcore genre, which became Dude Music like Heavy Metal.
One notable thing about the First Wave women is that very few of them played music like The Ramones or similar hard driving sound; Most did material rooted in older rock and pop traditions of songwriting, or leaned on their sex appeal.
Punk really wasn't a movement in the classic sense. Certain groups and artists may have started using the term, which was amplified by the music media at the time, and many groups simply latched on to the trend in their press releases (or dressed the part). The word quickly became a marketing tag.
The question of whether Punk created more opportunities for women is something that can be determined by serious music historians not directly connected to the music industry. Punk certainly increased women's visibility, and they experienced less of a glass ceiling than previous genres of Rock, which had been notoriously sexist.
Of course, once successful Punk rock females entered the mainstream, then they definitely experienced more of the usual Dude Culture (where the real money and power resided).
Blondie: Blondie
Blondie, the group, fronted by Deborah Harry wasn't really a punk act in the sense we know it now. They were a very talented and eclectic group and their first album had a fantastic and often totally funny comic book or Camp mentality. Their commercial breakthrough was the later Parallel Lines album with the hit "Heart Of Glass," and at that point they were probably no longer a punk group except perhaps in their fashion sense. By then they were simply "Blondie" with their own style and range of sounds.
The first album was stripped down Pop and Rock set that opens with "X Offender," which kicks off like an old Girl Group song with a drum and voice intro, then into a fast, harder edged version of 60s Farfisa Organ style Pop-Punk. Another cut, "Rip Her To Shreds," a medium tempo rocker that could have been in T.Rex's Electric Warrior album, got a lot of airplay on the Mabuhay sound systems between band sets.
One personal favorite, "In The Sun," was the kind of Surf-Punk that the Barracudas would champion in the early '80s to become legendary cult artists. The sparer sound of their first album had the effect of eliciting a wide range of opinion that ranged from intellectual to a simple primal enjoyment of best music.
Blondie went on to become a legendary band, but this record is the one that put them on the Punk map.
Al Handa
2024
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