The Number Ones: Blondie’s “Heart Of Glass”

by

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.

***

Blondie – “Heart Of Glass”

HIT #1: April 28, 1979

STAYED AT #1: 1 week

It finally happened. Punk crossed over in America. It just had to become disco first.

All through the mid-to-late ’70s, the era of disco and soft rock, punk rock had been percolating in Manhattan clubs. But almost none of the acts that came out of that universe ever had much to do with the pop charts. Patti Smith was the outlier; she charted as high as #13 with 1978’s “Because The Night,” though she needed a Bruce Springsteen co-write to do it. The Ramones’ biggest hit, 1977’s “Rockaway Beach,” only made it to #66. Television, the Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell never charted. The Talking Heads managed one top-10 single over the entire course of their career — “Burning Down The House,” peaked at #9, a 9 — and it didn’t arrive until 1983. These were all acts signed to major labels, cranking out records. It’s not that they were trying to avoid the mainstream, exactly. It’s more that the mainstream was ignoring them.

In the ’70s, America, on the whole, did not have much of a taste for confrontational, bugged-out, intentionally weird rock music. It was different in the UK, where the music press had more power and where less geographical sprawl meant that new sounds and aesthetics could travel outward more quickly. There, punk quickly became pop music, and the New York bands sometimes competed with the homegrown groups on the charts. In America, this stuff simply did not resonate outside its concentrated urbanized cults. In retrospect, it’s probably not that shocking that the first punk band to cross over was also the first one to cover Donna Summer at CBGB.