“That really legitimised us”: Debbie Harry on her proudest musical achievement
When disco threatened to take hold of the 1970s, Debbie Harry was presented with three options. She could conform to the superficial expectations placed on women in music, embrace her musical talents while inevitably appealing to the male gaze, or combine beauty and talent to challenge disco with a more timeless genre: punk. In the end, she chose the third option.
Discussing Harry’s appearance in relation to her legacy always feels somewhat reductive, not to mention slightly shallow and offensive, but to ignore how much she was ushered into the role of “sex symbol” while celebrated for her genuine talent also feels a little ignorant to both her impact and the significance of cultural context.
Harry didn’t gain success because she was beautiful—she challenged perceptions of femininity in the punk space by being a woman in a place that favoured men and ridiculed women who tried to infiltrate. “Rock and roll is a real masculine business and I think it’s time girls did something in it,” she told New York Rocker in 1976. Harry embraced her femininity and sexuality, and that made her feel empowered.
It also helped to know that the team around her had her back. While she led Blondie as the lead singer, she also led the band into a new realm where punk didn’t have to be inherently and overtly masculine to thrive. In fact, doing so would likely have caused the band to become very stale very quickly. “I was really determined,” Harry told Westchester. “It was something I felt very strong about doing.”
With hits like ‘Heart of Glass’, ‘One Way or Another’, ‘Call Me’, ‘Rapture’, ‘Rip Her to Shreds’, and countless others, it would be easy to spark a debate about which of the band’s many milestones and achievements Harry would likely regard as her proudest moment. From changing the face of rock ‘n’ roll to supercharging the feminist movement, her flagship moments are many.
However, Harry’s proudest moment is far more specific and much more career-defining than her broader impact, as she revealed during the same interview with Westchester. “That would be [Blondie’s induction into] the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” she said when asked to pick just one moment above them all. “That really legitimised us and made people say, ‘Okay, those guys really have something.’”
Of course, audiences were saying Blondie had “something” long before their induction in 2006. Culturally, it’s difficult to think of many other bands that emerged during the ’70s with as much musical and societal significance as the New York outfit, and not just because of the monumental shift Harry sparked in terms of women in rock music.
“We were part of the punk scene,” the musician explained. “What happened is that punk, later on, became identified with a certain style of music because of the Ramones and, originally, the punk scene was about a sensibility, about a point of view, about an attitude.”
Blondie might have become a central part of the punk movement, but their “anti-social” political stance meant that women could demand better, too, even if they had to borrow a traditionally male-dominated space to gain respect.
