Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [52]
Blondie has, it seems, embraced this aesthetic more or less wholeheartedly. But when you’re always taking out instead of putting in… well, it's just like a bank account, isn’t it? Pretty soon there's gonna be nothing left. And that kinda would seem to make you a musical vampire, of sorts.
Patti Smith, for all her pretensions, her wrongheadedness, her narcissism, her addled crusades, is still singing from her however mottled heart. She contributes something to the environment when she's on, she stands for something too no matter how etc., but she's real, flesh and blood comes through those grooves, which I think is one reason why she has so many fans. Or Lou Reed, for all his monotonal mutterings, there's so much pain suffused just under the monotone, so much despair and desire and human regret, that even at his most cynical you can feel him struggling with himself, fighting his demons. But Blondie … do they have that kind of courage?
Like Bryan Ferry in Roxy Music, they’re trying to create a sort of deliberately rococo, overstuffed art rock that hides what the artist is truly feeling by dropping well-turned ironies all over the place, by coming up with synthetic soul-searchings that purport to be even more interesting than the real thing. Or they just camp it up. But Bryan Ferry was in the grips of real romantic lobster claws, and no matter how many times he transposed what he was going through before putting it out in song you always knew he was going through something. There was a grand passion, a vitality and even kind of poignancy about his music even at its archest and most exasperatingly evasive.
Whereas with Blondie you get no such vibe, 90 percent of the time at least. What you get instead is a pervasive coldness, and even that's not so bad, since they don’t just write pop love songs. What are they driving at in most of their lyrics? Are they telling you to leave them alone? Are they kvetching about their career? Are they concocting little sagas based on everyday events that never become compelling? Or are they being deliberately mundane to the point of madness? … What, if anything, do these people actually care about?
Or if all they want to do is entertain, then why do they act so serious about what they’re doing? Maybe they think they’re Dorothy Parker, commenting lightly and wittily on the passing mobs without ever getting in too deep. Which is okay, too, except… It's impenetrable. Talk about walls of sound, THEIR MUSIC IS A WALL. It's designed that way, most likely from self-protective instincts that’re not necessarily unjustified or misguided but… they’re dealing in media that ostensibly communicate … then eventually the audience begins to receive an impression of some hermetic body of people, a little cabal, who’ve locked themselves in and are nursing a siege mentality when nobody really is out to get them.
The press ain’t nice, don’t play fair, you get burned once and you’re more careful the next time. But you don’t walk around in these giant suits of armor and exoskeletons steeling yourselves against new attacks every corner you turn. Sooner or later, you would have to say something you really mean. “Shayla” and “Union City Blue” come closest, but they’re both third-person songs. When are Blondie gonna write a first-person song—aside from “Living in the Real World,” which is just an awfully early case