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New York's premiere New Wave punks Blondie have always been all about mixing up the ugly and the beautiful. Typical of their CBGB's contemporaries The Ramones, The Talking Heads, Television, etc. Blondie represented just one facet of New York's electric anything-goes downtown 70's rock scene. The band often gets lumped together as "punk," but anyone with a passing familiarity with their recordings knows that few musical acts could sound less similar. And if Downtown were a high school, Blondie would have been voted prom queen. The strikingly gorgeous singer Deborah Harry and the talented guitarist Chris Stein were both sucked into the manic energy of downtown, playing in several underground bands before meeting each other and starting up a musical partnership that would last the rest of their lives. After a couple name changes, the band settled on Blondie and scored their first gig at the legendary dive CBGB's. Their first albums relegated them to underground success and included early singles "X-Offender" and "In the Flesh." Debbie Harry could really sing?coming across as breathy and seductive one minute, snarling and dangerous the next?and she owned the stage. Their third LP, 1978's Parallel Lines, brought them inevitable mainstream success with classic new wave singles "Heart of Glass," "Hanging On the Telephone," "Sunday Girl" and the viciously fun "One Way Or Another." Blondie proved themselves artistically ambitious as well, scoring #1's with the Reggae cover "The Tide Is High" and then "Rapture," often cited as the first rap song ever to top the charts. The attention the media paid to frontwoman Debbie proved too divisive and the band split in 1982. But their songs only grew more popular and Blondie reformed in 1998, releasing their #1 single "Maria" off of the LP No Exit and touring the world to rave reviews.

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