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Blondie ‘Parallel Lines’ the finest punk/pop album ever?

flatpopely

flatpopely

Prog Rock/Moderator
Picture this
Fade away and radiate

Two songs that are at the top of their game, perhaps beyond.

Listen to the album........be amazed.
 
Indeed a great punk/pop album, but the best?

What about.....

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.sjb
 
Punk/Pop or Pop/punk.

I would say that Parallel Lines is more the latter.

Fabulous album non the less.

This is an example of the former.

 
This is why genres are silly. Who cares what genre it is, it’s a bloody great album. As is Plastic Letters and the eponymous debut.
 
Great album for sure, I also have Plastic Letters which is also very good and of course has Denis on it.

To me they are a new wave pop group, not punk, punk is the Pistols and Dammed et all.
 
One could argue the first self-titled album, Rip Her To Shreds single etc had a punk element to them, and the band came out of the CGBGs scene with Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads etc so certainly had punk credibility, but they swiftly embarked on a pure pop trajectory with the Plastic Letters album being a transition-stage to the pure pop perfection of the Mike Chapman-produced Parallel Lines. Very few bands “sell-out” and get away with it, Blondie are one of those exceptions. Even so I think Plastic Letters is my favourite.
 
Tony L said:
One could argue the first self-titled album, Rip Her To Shreds single etc had a punk element to them, and the band came out of the CGBGs scene with Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads etc so certainly had punk credibility, but they swiftly embarked on a pure pop trajectory with the Plastic Letters album being a transition-stage to the pure pop perfection of the Mike Chapman-produced Parallel Lines. Very few bands “sell-out” and get away with it, Blondie are one of those exceptions. Even so I think Plastic Letters is my favourite.
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I suspect Blondie, like Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson, used punk as a means to an end because that was the then fashionable genre. (The idea of Joe Jackson as an angry young man was amusing even back then; he never seemed more than mildly peeved).
 
The Clash too! Most of them weren't ‘punk’ in any real musicological sense if one takes the pure ‘here are three chords, now go form a band’ line. Almost all of them were time-served pub-rockers or whatever. Really only The Buzcocks, Slits, Wire, Banshees, Joy Division etc stand that test. Even The Sex Pistols were a highly skilled power-trio with a punk vocalist. I’d make a case for the more abstract or industrial stuff like Alternative TV, Throbbing Gristle etc being punk too as they approached it from that same ‘non-musician’ perspective.
 
This Punk debate is a whole new thread meanwhile Parallel Lines is a stonking album , not a dud on it , Picture This and Hanging on the Telephone my two favs.
 
I like Parallel Lines, but punk it ain't. Punk/pop sounds a bit like Wagner/pop. (Hmmm, maybe that's what John Williams is about.)
PL is a great album.
 
Parallel Lines is a great album.
I can hear Blondie's punk aspects quite clearly.
 
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