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Originally Posted by cliffdweller
I've often felt this way about Blondie. Their sound was never consistantly punk or new wave...I mean, Heart of Glass and Rapture? That is straight up disco! "The Tide is High" is just a hybrid of reggae and pop. I don't know. I love Blondie, and I don't mean to focus so heavily on them, but I don't know if it's fair to lump them in with punk as people so often do, new wave, yes, punk no.
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I remember my first exposure to Blondie quite vividly, actually, because of an assessment like this. I first heard of Blondie when they were advertising one of those compilation cds to order from television, and they showed a clip from Heart of Glass -- the close-up of Deborah singing the first two lines. I thought it was rather comical and extremely pop/disco looking and sounding. THEN, I come to find that Blondie is supposedly a "punk" band, and I simply could not understand why they were labelled as punk. Upon further exposure, I still don't understand.
My beef really isn't that Fleetwood Mac is a softer rock band. In comparison, yes, they are. Like Jyqm mentioned, most of their hits are on the lighter side, as well as other non-hits/non-singles. The problem I have is that seemingly anything that isn't raucous jibberish is today labelled as "soft rock." I prefer to make a distinction between "soft rock," "hard rock," and
"rock." Today "rock" is simply short for "hard rock," so anything not "hard rock" is "soft rock," which doesn't make sense. Like I said, I cringe when a "soft rock" station plays GYOW, The Chain, Rhiannon, etc, and lumps it in with Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey songs, as well as I cringe when soft rock stations will play something like Smooth by Santana/Rob Thomas. It's a rock song, it's NOT soft rock, although not necessarily hard rock. There has to be that middle distinction, because soft rock just doesn't fit the bill of a lot of the bands labelled as such.