Blondie and the 1976 song that kickstarted new wave

Music journalists have certainly tried their best to categorise and simplify the timeline of rock ‘n’ roll, for example, to create specific, useful touchstones of reference, like The Beatles launching the British invasion in 1964, the Ramones inventing punk 12 years later, or Nirvana literally rolling out a map and putting Seattle on it in 1991.

Most of those narratives are written and added to the canon long after they happened, however, as we all collectively try to contextualise various musical causes and effects with the benefit of hindsight. If you actually look back at what was being written about pop music in 1964, or 1976, or 1991, by the people trying to make sense of it all in real time, the observations rarely fit the ones we’ve retro-fitted into the chronology for our convenience. This brings us around to the subject at hand, and one of the most vague and indefinable rock subgenres of them all: new wave.

When you hear that phrase now, you probably picture an early 1980s shopping mall, decorated in various polka dots and triangles, well stocked with the latest hit records from Blondie, Devo, Talking Heads, and The Cars, with radio-friendly and poppy songs that were a little more intellectual and darker around the edges than the usual Top 40 fluff. Elvis Costello and Tom Petty are equally celebrated songwriting heroes within this universe, showcasing its cross-Atlantic reach, but how do you actually define such fluidity?

Well, if you asked someone in 1977, they’d likely tell you it was just another name for punk rock. Case in point, in an article published in the Miami Herald in September ‘77, staff writer Christine Brown provided readers with a ‘New Wave Record Sampler’ to help them understand the up-and-coming bands within the genre, and throughout the piece, she uses the terms “punk” and “new wave” interchangeably, citing the Sex Pistols and Ramones as leaders of the trend right alongside Television, The Stranglers, and The Jam.

She also mentions a 1977 compilation album called New Wave, which was released by Vertigo Records and helped introduce a lot of the CBGB bands to the international market, including the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, The Runaways, and The Dead Boys.

The legend around the emergence of the term new wave is that Sire Records boss Seymour Stein, who had signed the Ramones and Talking Heads, among others, didn’t like the prominent use of the word “punk” to describe his acts, finding it insulting or degrading. To push back against it, he instructed Sire’s marketing team to start using the term ‘new wave’ instead, plucking it from the similarly game-changing movement in 1960s French cinema.

By the end of the 1970s, as worried parents continued to complain about the noise, lawlessness, and anti-social influence of the few remaining self-identified punk bands, new wave successfully funnelled the rest of the weird and noisy artists of the time into a safer side-passage to mainstream stardom. Even so, when the Trouser Press published its first Guide to New Wave Records in 1983, its editors were still very much operating under the idea that punk, rather than existing as a separate, earlier form of counterculture rock, was very much inside the new wave tent, as the Pistols, The Damned, the Ramones, The Clash, and all your other punk staples were included in the book.

In the introduction to that same 1983 record guide, editor Ira Robbins freely admits that new wave had already become a “pretty meaningless term” and “an archaic description of something long gone”, suggesting that whatever music was being released under that tag in the early 1980s was already arriving at the end of the phenomenon, such as it was.

It sounds confusing, but it’s actually a common pattern in the music world. By the time a certain type of terminology becomes mainstream enough for shopping mall record shops to start creating placards for it, any band that was once associated with the term will now want nothing to do with it. And so, by the standards of the insider New York City underground, new wave was born in the mid ‘70s and was largely dead by the dawn of the ‘80s. From the perspective of suburbia, though, it really kicked off with MTV in the early ‘80s, sputtering out by the middle of that decade.

So, with all these confusing semantic contradictions in mind, how should we go about nominating one song as the true jumping-off point for new wave? Do we just treat it as an equivalent entity to punk, as the people of the mid ‘70s did, or do we focus on its later, tweaked definition, as a poppier branch of the post-punk tree? Well, the most logical course of action seems to be a splitting of the difference: selecting a song that felt, in its own time, like it had grown out of the punk scene, but that now, from a 21st-century perspective, feels more like a preview of things to come.

Crunching the numbers and running everything through our custom-built new wave analysis machine, the song that best meets this picky criteria is ‘X Offender’ by Blondie.

Released as a single in June 1976, just a few months after the Ramones’ ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ and a full year before the debut albums of the Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, and Talking Heads, ‘X Offender’ did not immediately catapult Blondie from the CBGB stage to stardom. For lack of a better explanation, the world just wasn’t quite ready for it yet, as everything about this single predicts the upbeat, keyboard-heavy melodies, driving rhythms, and cool, detached vocal deliveries of what would become the quintessential new wave (the same could be said, it should be noted, of ‘Roadrunner’ by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, which came out a little bit later in 1976).

One important thing working against ‘X Offender was that its lyrics were, shall we say, not primed for AM radio. Bass player Gary Valentine wrote the song about his experience, aged 17, getting his teen girlfriend pregnant and going on the run to avoid statutory rape charges. Debbie Harry, thankfully, rewrote the words, but she didn’t necessarily clean it up, instead changing the perspective to that of a prostitute who gets picked up by a cop and tries to seduce him: “Public defender / You had to admit / You wanted the love of a sex offender”.

Maybe Blondie’s button-up look, playful spirit, and subtle ‘60s girl group sensibilities didn’t seem as revolutionary in the moment, especially when matched up against the more aggressive punk vine growing out from what The Stooges and New York Dolls had established. Then again, America had only just been introduced to the Ramones, and the majority of music on the radio at the time was somewhere between the easy-going vibes of the Eagles and the Bee Gees. Blondie was desperately needed, and everyone would eventually agree about it, as the band’s third album, 1978’s Parallel Lines, finally shot them to mainstream fame as one of the leaders of new wave.

By that point, drummer Clem Burke, speaking to Melody Maker, credited Blondie’s success, and that of new wave in general, to the British market, as the Americans had been oddly resistant to ‘X Offender’ and pretty much everything else Blondie did for its first two years as a recording band.

“In Britain, people may have recognised what was soon to become the new face of rock, but as far as America was concerned, they just didn’t want to know, and to get any kind of record deal was utopia,” Burke said, “Nobody heavy over here encouraged bands like us, just the people on the scene. And I’m certain that if it had not been for Britain, in all probability bands like the Ramones, Talking Heads, and possibly Blondie would not have survived.”

In 1980, at the height of Blondie’s power, Deborah Harry was asked by US radio countdown host Casey Kasem to explain, once and for all, if her band was truly punk or New Wave.

“I don’t call it either of those,” she said, kind of ruining our conceit here, “We don’t usually try to label ourselves. The only thing we’ve ever called ourselves is rock ‘n’ roll, or pop, or modern music”.

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