The Blondie lyric that offended the audience: “We got banned in a few places”
If you could magically access the statistics of your entire music listening life, which songs do you think you’ve heard the most times involuntarily?
In other words, if you think back on the tracks you’ve consistently encountered when out shopping, or in a taxi, or sitting at the pub, year after year, what lyric or artist springs to mind?
One of my under-the-radar nominees for a top ten entry on that list would be Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’; certainly not an obscure single by any measure, but one that’s rarely identified as an untouchable, lionised radio classic along the lines of a ‘Rocketman’ or ‘Wonderwall’. The stealth ubiquity of Blondie’s 1978 tune is really a credit to its unique crossover appeal; as ‘Heart of Glass’ managed to find that happy medium that could hook disco fans, classic rock listeners, and punks alike. Today, you’re just as likely to hear it at a kid’s birthday party as you are at a club night.
Before it became a great unifier, though, this song was ironically and cheekily written for the opposite reason, as singer Debbie Harry explained to Salon in 2017. “[Guitarist} Chris [Stein] liked a lot of disco songs, and so did I,” Harry said. “We really did like covering those songs, like ‘Love to Love You Baby’ and ‘Disco Inferno’, but it was also really funny to play that stuff because we were in the middle of this whole ‘I hate disco’ scene. It was fun to provoke people.”
The CBGB crowd in New York, circa 1974, recognised ‘Heart of Glass’—then known in its early incarnation as ‘The Disco Song’—as a bit of a joke. Within a few years, however, as the song evolved, the winky provocation was replaced with a nod to a different music movement coming out of Europe.
“The early version of ‘Heart of Glass’, that arrangement had a more standard disco beat, with doubles on the hi-hats and so on,” Stein told Salon. “But [keyboardist] Jimmy [Destri] had just bought a Roland drum machine and we were all really into Kraftwerk by the time we recorded it for Parallel Lines. The final version, to us, wasn’t really disco. We were thinking more along the lines of European electronic pop.”
Another part of the transformation of ‘The Disco Song’ into ‘Heart of Glass’ involved Debbie Harry’s lyrical tweaks. “Back when it was called ‘The Disco Song’, pretty much all I said was, ‘Once I had a love, it was a gas, soon turned out, it was a pain in the ass,’” Harry recalled. “It didn’t quite work well, so that’s when we came up with the line, ‘Soon turned out, had a heart of glass.’”
That bit of good judgment, deleting the mini-expletive, set up ‘Heart of Glass’ for a monsoon of radio play, as the single went straight to number one in both the US and the UK. Harry couldn’t bring herself to remove the word “ass” from the entire song, though, and its brief cameo toward the end of the track, according to Debbie, did still surprisingly ruffle some feathers in Jimmy Carter’s America.
“People got upset because I sang ‘ass’,” Harry remembered. “Maybe because it’s a three-letter word and not a four-letter word? I think we got banned in a few places because of that.” A couple of generations later, when songs like Cardi B’s ‘WAP’ are now getting played on mainstream radio, not too many people are blushing over the “A” word, be it in three-letter or four-letter “arse” form.
