A Bangs' Blondie: By Owen Gleiberman BLONDIE By Lester Bangs 96 Pages, $6.95, Simon and Schuster ACK IN 1978 or so, a lot of people gave New Wave rock an un- qualified thumbs-down because ey simply didn't "get it." Suddenly, here were all these bands singing about brain damage and de-evolution and No Future For You-and being pretty damn nasty about it. To the average poli-sci major, it must have looked like somebody'd unlocked the loony bins and issued every inmate a guitar. Of course, intellectual rock critics (leading a new breed of pop-culture, sophisticates) ate it up. The music had a special appeal to them, because in or- der to like it, you had to understand where it was coming from. Like Beat poetry, Rocky Horror, or whatever, punk's cultism was a chic turn-on; if some of the music was among the greatest rock and roll that's ever been played, it also represented a new hyper- awareness (on the part of musician and fan alike) of culture change and all the social goings-on behind it. These days, even some of the most passive schoolkids can spout out the cat- ch-phrases that drip off the rock- criticism pages of Rolling Stone and The Village Voice. Most of that criticism bears small relation to the modest record-reviewing of yesteryear. A typical crit is liable to analyze where any given group is "at" on one of their records, charting their spiritual crises and piecing together the "story" of their career. Forget Be-Bob-a-Lula. It's 1980: Portrait-of-the-artist time. Some groups, though, are harder to pin down than others. And I don't mean Pere Ubu and all those conceptual No Wave bands; they're so deliberately, self-consciously weird that no self- respecting pop academician would be without two ready theories to explain their significance (or at least explain why they can't be explained). But New Wave groups that venture into the great beyond of popular success are another ballgame, because when you've got a record on the charts it means you've struck a nerve with (gasp!) the mass BOOKS. audience. This sort of thing tends to blow cult battle-lines to smithereens. And it gets rock critics real confused. Blondie, Lester Bangs' glossy, pic-, ture-filled, paperback bio/critical analysis of the group, is written in a state of desperate, delirious confusion. Bangs is a rock-crit heavyweight who invented his own circusy, tough- minded, stream-of-consciousness school of rock journalism at Creem Magazine in the early Seventies. (He now writes primarily for The Village Voice and Musician.) For sheer kinetic wordplay, I can't think of another reviewer I'd rather read. Bangs also enjoys playing with attitudes,.and most of his pieces are animated by a Lenny Bruce-like mixture of high-brow sophistication and boho-hipster flights- of-fancy. At times, he can be nakedly honest; in Blondie, though, his honesty only reveals a batch of bitter, com- pulsive prejudices. B ANGS LAYS his venom ri on the table: He passional wants to hate the group. Te age Blondie fans who think they buying a typical big-print picture-bi their latest rock heroes probably w( know what to make of the way Ba piles up accusations. But even m probing readers may be taken aba because he never really puts his fin on what he resents. Bangs may not tirely understand that himself, bt think he half-realizes how Blond particular brand of popular suc (commercially, their association v New Wave could only have wor against them) blasts such a gaping Y through everything he's saying.' book is an iconoclastic revel; it's a f filled diatribe against not only Blon but its fans-against whole segment the rock audience with whom Ba has claimed a sense of commun Between the lines, he keeps cry "Why, why, why are they popular?"-as if the answer w anything else but that Blondie i great, punchy, slick, joyous rock'n band. The first half of the book (tabloi more like it, actually; the whole tl takes an hour-and-a-half to read devoted to a clunky, method chronology of Blondie's car Recounting the early history of band, including the clubdates and sonnel changes, may be a snc proposition, but Bangs seems prolong his Story of Blor deliberately; it's as if he's tryin show what an ordinary band we r here. The closer we get to the "Hea Glass" breakthrough, the more out seeps into Bangs' prose. He cleverly cast himself in the role Fan Betrayed, exempting himself f Abatch ght charges that he never gave the band a the band' tely chance. He even calls their first album Worse tha een- "an inspiring piece of American Now it' y're rock'n'roll." But, he writes, by the time arty to o of of Plastic Letters, the follow-up LP, "I and-yec on't began to 'wonder what was going conceit ngs through their heads." Parallel Lines, members ore their rocket-to-glory (and by far their band's. L ack, best album), is the coffin-sealer: with laye ger "The thing that makes Parallel associatio e- L ines assuredly avant-garde is single pa ie's precisely that it's so airtight and of what cess multiple-varnished, such a pristinely For exam with slick piece of product it's not even producer ked vapid like Barry Manilow, who at the Beat,i hole least can embarrass/make you throw studio wiz The up once in a while with an "At the like Bub bile- Copa. " Nope. This is it. The Bangs co die, masterpiece. Gotta be, because it's Blondiec ts of dimensions are so perfect; no bot- commer( ings tom, no top, no sides, no rides, no is that it ity.ng, new nows no how. Each song is a mthat ha so perfectly constructed concave die's succ vere system in which every single piece of Blondie, s a information offered up in the lyrics some vin 'roll cancels out another corresponding ceives a piece of information, kinda like a system b id is jigsaw puzzle except at the end in- Iing stead of a picture you get a perfect S ) is blank. And that blank is of course 0 ical nothing less than Deborah Harry's eve V face.eveOpm any face' trol-boar per- I don't want to mince metaphors, bring ou oozy but what does this mean? The master group's s to explains a little farther on: Because only hini ndie Blondie's members always pose un- euphori g to smiling on their album covers, he says, shellack have and because their typical interview is a tegrated. hodgepodge of jaded, post-modernist to the ov rt of cliches, they must consider themselves them rid rage forerunners of the avant-garde. producti has Therefore, unless you can locate some vivacity. of a super-unearthly hip-mysterioso But Le from statement beyond the musical facade, good-guy of venom s tunes are worthless. A blank. an Barry Manilow. s true that Blondie goes in for ouches, obscure quotes h! !-video cassettes. But the about their "avant-garde"r ship-cards is Bangs', not the Lester embellishes his theory Ors of insinuation and guilt-by- on-with everything, in fact, record themselves. (Not one ge is devoted to a description Blondie's music sounds like.) .ple, because Mike Chapman, of Parallel Lines and Eat to is a slick, commercial-minded zard (it's true; his credits read bblegum's Greatest Hits), oncludes that his work with can't be anything but venal cial product. The key giveaway never even occurs to Bangs pman's sterling musicianship ve something to do with Blon- vess. Bangs isn't writing about about a bunch of songs on nyl, but about what he per- s the corrupt, soulless value ehind their music. IT HAPPENS, the group's ollaboration with Chapman was absolutely crucial to their -ent. Chapman's a slick con- d operator, but he was able to t a rich, airy density in the sound that the first two albums .ed at (most notably in their c cover of "Denis"). He ed the cymbal tracks, in- Jimmy Destri's keyboards in- erall texture instead of letting e on top, and gave the entire on a bright, sun-spangled ester Bangs is locked into his y/bad guy vision of the Pop Dream. And he's projected his worst image of himself onto Blondie's fans. The book contains some very legitimate. criticism of the way the band has ex- ploited Debby Harry's cheesecake. image. However, when Bangs writes that "if most guys in America could somehow get their faverave poster girl in bed and have total license to do whatever they wanted with this legen- dary body for one afternoon, at least 75 percent of the guys in the country would elect to beat her up," is he really talking about mass-market resentment (where did he get 75 percent anyhow?) or his own? Bangs limits his analysis of what's actually on Blondie's four albums almost entirely to a discussion of their lyrics. This, incidentally, is the bane of current rock criticism; reading literary analyses of rock and roll is about as rewarding as listening to your high school English teacher explicate "The Sounds of Silence." And the conclusion is that Blondie's songs aren't "about" anything. They may sound good, says Bangs, but what do they mean? 6 I'm not crazy about a lot of Blondie's lyrics myself, but this is the last question anyone should be asking about .a rock band. What's so heartening about the success of a great pop group like Blondie is that a bunch of kids can get off on their albums without worrying about the content. For some reason, Lester Bangs wants to assign meanings to the most intangible sorts of joy and energy and to music that, above all, celebrates physical release. This book is a testament to how far rock writing has strayed from its true sub- ject. Owen Gleiberman Daily Arts editor. is a former S UNDAY Sunday, October 19, 1980 I t Page 6 By Kevin Tottis OLLOWING HIS third presi- dential debate with Vice Presi- dent Richard Nixon, then- assachusetts Sen. John Kennedy arrived at the Michigan Union, where he was to spend the night before begin- ning a nine-city campaign tour of Michigan. Kennedy arrived more than an hour late-at 1:40 a.m.-yet more than 10,000 people were waiting outside the Union to hear him speak. The future president, tired ,from his debate and flight, spoke briefly to the crowd and asked if the people in the crowd would be willing to volunteer their time to work in Third World nations. Shortly thereafter, the senator ended his talk. "I came here to sleep," he said. Whether Kennedy intended for the University to be the starting block for his foreign service organization, or whether he suggested it merely to coun- ter accusations Nixon made earlier that night, the as yet unnamed idea caught on. Despite the brevity of his speech, in- terest grew on campus. In a letter to the Daily a few days later, two graduate students said they advocated Ken- nedy's proposal and started a letter- writing campaign to the senator in favor of his plan. Nationwide, initial in- terest in the Peace Corps was similar to that shown by the 10,000 people who waited outside the Union to hear Ken- nedy speak, said Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps. When Kennedy first proposed the corps "we had 30,000 people apply-before we even had applications printed," he said. But while that initial interest was there, it was, after all, an initial in- terest, so "some aspects (of the Peace Corps' formation) were a little nerve wracking." Shriver described a chart he kept "behind my door." The chart outlined the increase in the number of people interested in the organization from December of 1960 to February of 1961. On March 1, 1961, the Peace Corps officially opened its doors; by June of that year, the drawing on Shriver's chart plummeted. "I never let anyone see (the chart)," Shriver, who is also the late president's brother-in-law, said. "I was always afraid we wouldn't have enough volun- teers." But they managed to maintain enough volunteers. On Aug. 30, 1961, the first Peace Corps volunteers left for Ghana. And on Sept. 22, Congress passed the Peace Corps Act which states the organization's purpose: "Help people of developing countries meet their manpower needs; "Help promote better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans; "Promote a better understanding of other people on the part of Americans." By the end of 1961, 900 volunteers ser- ved in 16 different countries. " OW MANY of you are willing to spend 10 years in Africa or Latin America or Asia work- ing or the U.S. and working for free- dom? How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians and engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the foreign service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that . . . will depend the answer to whether we as a free society can compete," Kennedy had told the crowd in front of the Union, 20 years ago. These remakrs may have been made to help "make the world safe for democracy," but the Peace Corps itself was never political, Shriver insisted. "People didn't join the Peace Corps for political purposes from the very beginning," he said. "They didn't join it to combat communism. But they thought they would increase the chan- ces for peaceful changes." Domestically, the program was not a political front, either, Shriver added. Volunteers were both Democrats and Republicans. Following Kennedy's death in 1963, however, the influence of subsequent presidential administrations began to show in the Peace Corps. During the Johnson years interest in the Peace Corps increased. In 1967, the Corps boasted its biggest volunteer force ever-with 14,968 volunteers in 50 coun- tries. But in the following year, during the Nixon administration, the Peace Corps suffered some of its biggest blows. "In the early seventies the Peace Corps went into a decline," Richard Celeste, the current Peace Corps director said. "For five or six years it didn't have any public relations." "Nixon tried to submerge it," Shriver declared. In March of 1971, Nixon combined the Peace Corps with VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and seven other service organizations and called them ACTION. The total ACTION budget was $176.3 million plus $20 million for "in- novation." Both Celeste and Shriver agreed that during this time, the Peace Corps was swallowed up by the larger organization. "These programs were no longer in the forefront of people's minds," Shriver said. "During that TION budget of $173.6 million in 1971, this was a positive move, but con- sidering the 1964 budget was $113 million, the increase could be higher. "Money isn't everything," he said, "but $100 million today isn't what it was in 1964." More and more, people are becoming aware of the program, Celeste said. "There's a lively interest in the Peace Corps once people are aware that it is alive and well." T HE PEACE CORPS also has changed internally during the past 20 years. Volunteers now are much older than when the program began. At that time many of the volun- teers were just out of college. But now, Celeste said, the average age is 27, although many volunteers are in their "early 20s." He added that today it "sometimes takes a year of two" after college graduation, before someone volunteers. But Shriver cited the reasons for this as being "the same as the changes in college students" themselves. "I don't think there's anyone alive who could get 10,000 college students to wait for him until two in the morning"' as they did for Kennedy, he said. "I don't think they'd come to see the second coming of the Lord. I think the Vietnam War, and Watergate, and the pressure to earn a living which has come about due to in- flation have all combined to make people like this," he said. But despite this, both Shriver and Celeste feel attitudes today are positive. "People are now concerned about themselves as part of a group-the people who say we've moved from the 'me' generation to the we' generation are right," Celeste said. "The new generation of Americans has a much more practical approach." The Peace Corps focus has changed over the past 20 years also, Celeste said. "We've moved away from the very large focus on education-par- Sargent Shriver: At the 20th anniversary celebration last week (left), and in 1960, as the first Peace Corps director ticularly on teaching English as a second language," he said. "Basic human needs are now stressed." For example, programs in food production and health care are now considered essential. And today, even more than in the early sixties, the political aspects of the Peace Corps are deemphasized. In fact, according to Celeste, Peace Corps volunteers are barred from any political involvement. "Peace Corps volunteers are not (working) on a government-to-gover- nment basis-they're on a person-to- person basis," he said. Last July, for example, the Peace Corps announced its return to Nicaragua after a 17-month absence from the.Central American nation. The country's leftist junta rquested volun- teers to help in special education, agriculture, forestry, and environment tal protection. Bill Reese, acting deputy director of the agency's Latin American region, said last summer that the Peace Corps' work in Nicaragua, as well as Honduras and Costa Rica, will be non-political. "We're there to help the country work on its development problem and to fur- See PEACE, Page 7 Kevin Tottis covers Academics for the Daily. 0 ,r UV ~ ~ .