'Picture This': Introduction

 

 

The purpose of this web site is to demonstrate the influence and legacy of the pop/new wave rock band Blondie and its lead singer, Deborah Harry. 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 had been largely 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)....

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