illusionofjoy | OTR: Blondie - The Best of Blondie

Released in 1981, The Best of Blondie is not a definitive singles compilation, but it is the perfect set for those who need a Blondie grab bag of the biggest hits and a couple of album cuts. Although classified as a new wave band, Blondie were really genre-bending hitmakers. In just the first three tracks, they start off with a disco song ("Heart of Glass") move on the pop-punk ("Dreaming" - which seems to have laid the groundwork for The Go-Gos) and reggae (their cover of John Holt's "The Tide is High," which, a little research reveals is actually a soca song, because of its origins in Trinidad, not Jamaica).

Consuming it all at once, as I am right now, I realise just how - sweet - this collection is. Blondie may have started out as a CBGB punk band, but they didn't stick with that genre for very long (unlike contemporaries The Ramones). Who can blame a band though - there's no money in punk (once again, see The Ramones).

"In The Flesh" (unlike the Pink Floyd song of the same title) sounds like something from a 1950's prom movie, while "Sunday Girl" too cute for words, I swear. Their cover of The Nerves' "Hanging On The Telephone" is another exhibit of who The Go-Gos' main influence was. "Rapture" is a dance-club masterpiece; it also holds the honour of being the only "rap" song ever played on VH1. And, let's face it, Deborah Harry MCs with the best of them - she didn't even have a bunch of guests rapping on the track, like many modern rappers do. The single edit of the song is five and half minutes long, but I recommend the nine-minute LP cut on the reissue of Autoamerican (the original LP version is six and a half minutes long, but you have the stamina to dance for nine minutes, don't you).

The two best songs on this disc are "Call Me" and "Atomic." "Call Me" is an energetic romp that I first heard as a kid - I couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old...the song was playing on the radio and I was infected! It was so exciting and cool-sounding to me at that point...and I guess it says something (either about me or Blondie) that I still think the song sounds awesome well over twenty years later. The single edit on this compilation cuts what was an eight-minute song down to three and a half minutes. The original dance club stamina test (you can dance for eight minutes, right) can be found on the soundtrack to American Gigolo.

"Atomic" is Blondie indulging in their disco fetish again, but it also sounds like it would be at home in a James Bond film, what with four note guitar hook which keeps popping up between the verses. Though lyrically weak (as with most of the lyrics to Blondie's songs, admittedly), the music is gloriously produced, synths and guitars and Deborah Harry's voiced multi-tracked (or are those backup singers?) as she reaches the stratosphere right before dropping the bomb and tartly saying the title: "Atomic."

It's a shame "Atomic" isn't the closing track on the compilation.