This book offers both a contemporary and retrospective look at
the pop/new wave rock band Blondie and its lead singer, Deborah Harry, through
text and the medium of photography. Although the band's height of international
fame was in the late 1970s to the early 1980s when the group broke up
acrimoniously, its influence continues to this day. "But though Blondie had
split, there was already an influx of new wave/post-punk bands capitalizing on
the group's power pop sound, carrying the band's influence into the next decade"
(Gaar, 261). Prior to that: "Among the bands of the 'punk' or 'new wave' genre
trying to put the primal energy back into rock 'n' roll in the 1970s and the
early 1980's, the one that first crossed over to a mass audience and maintained
hegemony there was Blondie..." ("Harry, Debbie," Current Biography Yearbook,
191). While punk in its origins largely had been perceived as a British
phenomenon, the other side of the Atlantic witnessed "subversive bubblegum.
Blondie set the trend Stateside for cute harmonic pop songs with a blistering
edge, a sound that echoed later through muscular pop outfits like The
Go-Go's...with a power pop barbed by punk mores" (O'Brien, Lucy, 137). And "the
woman who was probably most identified with [the] rise of punk and new wave in
America was undoubtedly Debbie Harry,...who simultaneously updated and poked fun
at the conventions of '60s pop and the girl group persona" (Gaar,
258)....