On January 12, 1981 Blondie released the US#1/UK#5 hit "Rapture", the first number one song in the United States to feature rap vocals. You'd be forgiven for cringing while Debbie Harry raps about meeting a man from Mars, but at the time rapping was much more playful than it would become.
And you try to run but he's got a gun
And he shoots you dead and he eats your head
And then you're in the man from Mars
You go out at night eatin' cars
You eat Cadillacs, Lincolns too
Mercurys and Subaru
And you don't stop, you keep on eatin' cars
The music video is a work of its art on its own. There's a nod to its disco sound when Harry dances with each member of Blondie. There's also a one-take scene where she raps in a street scene featuring cameos by Fab Five Freddy, graffiti artists Lee Quinones and Jean-Michel Basquiat, choreographer William Barnes ( as the Man from Mars) and a goat. Why was there a goat on the set?
I asked Chris Stein on Twitter. No response. But I'm told the goat's name is Mona and belonged to the woman seen walking her.
In November of 1980 Blondie released Autoamerican, a nearly universally panned loose concept album that contained two #1 hits, "The Tide Is High" and "Rapture". "The record for me was about America, hence the title," Chris Stein recently told American Songwriter in an article that suggests the album deserves to be reevaluated. "Originally, the concept that we had was to call the record Coca-Cola. Because we thought that was very American. We went to Coca-Cola and we asked them and they said no."
After the album's release the band seemed to go into hiding, rather than touring it.“After we recorded that album, we didn’t work for basically two years," Burke says in the same article. "It was like the height of Blondie’s success. We never toured it. In some ways, it was like our Sgt Pepper’s. I don’t think that any of us though that we were going to be able to play this record live anyway.”
Blondie sounds like a different band on each track, but never finds the power pop energy that attracted me to Parallel Lines and Eat To The Beat.
Tom Carson of Rolling Stone famously panned the album, writing:
Blondie's Autoamerican is a terrible album, but it's bad in such an arcane, high-toned way that listening to it is perversely fascinating.
Sounds' Dave McCullough wrote
"'Rapture is over six minutes long. I only survived four. Can't somebody stop these people?'
From Robert Christgau, who always grades on a curve for New York City bands, a B-:
It's odd at best that the two hits and the two high points are the two songs predicated on black sources--the resourceful reggae cover "The Tide Is High" and the genius rap rip "Rapture" (which stands, let me assure my fellow Flash fans, as the funniest, fondest joke she ever told on herself). Elsewhere power pop turns power cabaret and Sgt. Pepper turns white album, only without Lennon-McCartney, or even McCartney. Debbie sings better all the time, but a better singer than she'll ever be couldn't save "T-Birds," or "Faces." They got what they wanted and now what?
Reevaluated 40 years ago, Autoamerican reveals Blondie was always a pop band, not a power pop band, that felt it had earned the right to expand its sound even at the cost of disappointing most of its (male) fans. It's a brave move. The opener, "Europa", suggests an epic adventure awaits listeners but it's just not that enthralling. The cover of "Follow Me" from Camelot just punctuates the whole effort. When bands make albums just for themselves why should they expects fans to follow them.
On November 15, 1980 Blondie topped the UK charts for the third time that year with their cover of The Paragons' virtually unknown 1967 single "The Tide Is High". It would also be the third Blondie single ( following 1979's "Heart of Glass" and 1980's "Call Me" ) to also top the US charts.
Brilliantly produced by Mike Chapman and sung by Deborah Harry, the song does have its fans. But there were already some people wondering why America's most successful power pop band was playing reggae and what did this mean for the forthcoming album Autoamerican.
Here's the original version.
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The flip side, "Suzy and Jeffrey", was written about a real life incident where a couple who were coming to the studio to deliver something wound up crashing their car into the building. I can imagine fans who pogo'd to the power pop sounds of Blondie taking some solace from this one.
