Blondie’s American chart run will shock casual listeners who know “One Way or Another” and “Dreaming” from commercials: four #1s, four more than Springsteen and CCR earned, and a disgraceful sprinkle of his in the lower reaches of the top forty.
Consider: “Atomic” stopped at Number Thirty-Fucking-Nine. Perhaps the sequencer pulse alienated programmers looking to The Knack to save listeners from this faggy disco garbage; perhaps the bald need of the line “Your hair is beautiful” put off men accustomed to women pledging their troth to idealized versions of masculinity. Often I consider that line the most beautiful lyric in pop, suggestive of its power to lend a spiritual gloss to banal obsessions.
Blondie’s stylistic train jumping failed them when they recorded “The Tide is High,” a massive recurrent hit that a good friend will explain to me someday. And the speed at which their spritz abandoned them after 1981 still surprises me. “Island of Lost Souls,” as ignominious a flop as Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes” followups, is yogurt sold as fresh with a new label.
Speaking of banal obsessions, I kill my karaoke version of Harry’s “I Want That Man.”
The Hague
Meh
Good Boys
French Kissin’
Island of Lost Souls
War Child
Backfired (Debbie Harry)
Sound, Solid Entertaiments
Sunday Girl
(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear
I Want That Man (Debbie Harry)
Denis
Maria
Rapture
One Way or Another
Nothing is Real But the Girl
I Can See Clearly (Debbie Harry)
Good to Great
Atomic
Dreaming
Picture This
Call Me
Heart of Glass
Union City Blue
Hanging by the Telephone
Humanizing The Vacuum 
To me Blondie had 5 types of hit sigles very identifiable:
1) The *Hi NRG*power- pop/New Wave. My favorite singles came out of this: DREAMING, DENIS, (too low for a girl group cover which redefined a decade; it’s the type of cover that brings the 60s to the 70s with their synth.pads and punk pathos the same way the Clash did it with the military band snares in “I Fought the Law”!!) and especially, the single that might have invented the genre and the 80s 4 years in advance: X OFFENDER. Not top 40, no problem, MARIA, their comeback, belongs in this group. It felt like 1979 instead of 99.
2) The disco/punk *MUTANTS*: Putting disco’s redoubtable 4/4 at risk with a more syncopating percussion pattern and nervy guitar in HEART OF GLASS or directly brimming with synths and delirious snare drums on ATOMIC, they re.invented disco for a rocking audience. At least on mainstream terms. The Gang of Four were inventing the LCD Soundsystem entire discography with “Entertainment!” as well a “House of Jealous Lovers” and much of the early 2000s. Call this cocaine-fueled disco.
3) Straight up New Wave: They helped inventing this broad term, a more rock-ish approach to pop songs, sometimes known also a post-punk: UNION CITY BLUE and PICTURE THIS land here. While I say ONE WAY OR ANOTHER is blueprint for punk-pop AND ONE OF MY LEAST FAVORITES SONGS FROM THE BAND. For some people this is just straight-up punk. Perhaps having only two notes, neither of them much engaging to me, helps their cases. SUNDAY GIRL belongs here, too.
4) The WTF mash-ups: CALL ME and RAPTURE. The former is a mix of Eurodisco, HI NRG new wave, punkish delivery. In a POP package you can dance to. RAPTURE’s 12 inch single, the Special Disco Mix with Stain’s tympani in full glory in its extended intro deserves a “great”. Of course, the lazy hip.hop and slowed funky rythm makes this difficult to pigeonhole or love. I love it anyway, since without RAPTURE there would be no “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” and most probably, Madonna.
5) THE TIDE IS HIGH. I don’t hate it like you. I didn’t lsten to the original either. It’s perfect for a lazy afternoon or juts being… lazy. The mariachi-like horns is what makes this land in perilous self-parody territory. Or is it?
Now I found your “Best of” list where DENIS landed much higher. What happened?
I find no fault with this taxonomy. In America we made a hash of them.
I understand. Now that I’m walking along the late 70s path of US_UK charts, as you made have done for your lists, one thing pops out clearly: Garbash and great songs in both, bur the Brits clearly discovered punk/new wave in real time. “Pop Muzik” and “My Sharona” seem like curios more than ever. You started with “Tired of Toeing the Line” or Brian Seztzer. And Captain and Tenille were STILL in the charts in the early 80s. Reggae WAS Blondie! That’s unfashionably late.
You deserved Armaggedon which came in the person of certain former actor turned president.
The insularity of your DJs back then never cease to amaze me.
John Peel did a lot in the UK for them. You never had a John Peele there. At least not one so popular. Peele was able to look beyond mainstrean on a BBC radio show,
Casey Kasem was so conservative… in hidsight there’s no surprising his success. Conservatism often won. He refused to call “I Want Your Sex” in 87. I remember that!! What a pandemia.
I am now incapable of playing “Union City Blue” without first looping that godlike, breathtaking, widescreen intro for at least five full minutes.
Clem Burke sounds marvelous on this album, doesn’t he?
It tears me up how they just use machines on the [very spotty] new Blondie material. I was at a panel hearing Giorgio Moroder speak a few years back and when he was recording “Call Me” he said that he had to fight with Burke, who wanted fills every four bars! Moroder said that usually drum fills happened every 16 bars but he ended up compromising with Burke and letting him add fills every eight bars. He laughed at the memory.