It was too pop-driven, its ambitions were too on-the-nose, it's an album that's been done a hundred times since. It's too successful to be the considered the best of the year. As the weeks of compiling mp3 mixes and trading cd's wore on, the joke turned into a reality, and the text messages we sent each other took on an air of finality: there wasn't anything else like Parallel Lines, was there? That couldn't be right. When the idea for doing a countdown of 1978 first came up, the joke between Martin and I was that we'd spend the entire time trying to find albums we liked as much as This Year's Model, Van Halen, and Parallel Lines. We had anger, yes, we had sadness, sure, and if it was fucking you were looking for? There was a mountain of skinny, sexual boys decrying their broken hearts, androgynous nerds playing at instrumental epics, there were a thousand Van Halen cocks thrusting their way into pumping fists, and Bon Scott was somewhere in the back of it all, drinking himself to death and yelling at everybody about how much it hurt to get dumped. It couldn't have come at a better time-disco had its queens and kings, that's for sure-but what it didn't have was the sort of back-and-forth between masculine and feminine that Blondie exuded. A somewhat cruel perfectionist, Chapman helped-or possibly, forcibily took-the sound of New York's punk new wave and sanded it down to the tightest definition of the term, mixing in a poppy, disco sensibility that spoke to a global audience looking for something with the edge that rock brought while still possessing the innate "let's go and fuck somewhere" that disco was playfully hinting at. Jettisoning Richard Gottehrer in exchange for up-and-coming producer Mike Chapman, a man Deborah Harry would eventually call "dictator", the album went on to become the best-selling album of Blondie's career, a non-stop success in the late 70's that spawned six hit singles out of its twelve available tracks, an album that they were never to surpass. In 1977, the shift began-first in the pages of Rolling Stone, and then in Australia-but it was Parallel Lines that changed their name forever. The place that bore Blondie forth-the New York art scene, back when it crossed over into music with a seamlessness now almost completely lost-wasn't one that had enough women like Deborah Harry, and while her persona would go on to contribute to the 80's shattering of the band, it did, for a time, do the trick of getting people to look again at a band that was little more than another underground punk trick at the time.
Elvis Costello & the Attractions - This Year's Model Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music For Airportsĥ. Lee Perry - Roast Fish Collie Weed & Corn BreadĦ. Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of TownĨ. Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!ġ2. Talking Heads - Mo re Songs About Buildings and Foodġ8. Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)Ģ0. Eno Moebius Roedelius - After the HeatĢ3.
Buzzard's Original Savannah Band Meets King PenettĢ4. Martin Brown and Tucker Stone's list of the best albums & songs of 1978 is now complete.
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