Your favourite albums by decade: the 80s

[dissention]

Originally Posted by vermicious knid

Ryan and Dissention both say Autoamerican by Blondie is good? This is interesting to me. I have never heard it, (aside from the two singles) but the allmusic.com review says it is "memorable only for its hits", and Rolling Stone called it "a terrible album" and gave it one star. I was never planning on getting it, but you say otherwise, so things could change.

It gets derided because it was their most experimental and diverse album at that time, so most critics labeled it "pretentious." The thing that actually surprises me about it being labeled such is that Blondie was never a serious band, it was always about fun and their songs were, for the most part, tongue-in-cheek, kitschy, and some even came across as the musical equivalents of stories from Weekly World News. It's as if the critics forgot that. The fact that they can write songs about armed robberies, the bermuda triangle, boom booming in the zoom zoom room, or being a spy for the CIA and make it work, all while giving the listener a wink of the eye, is a testament to how great a band they are. Critics made the same sort of "pretentious" remarks about latter-day Emmylou Harris albums, so I take their opinions with a grain of salt.

It's a real grower of an album and you have to warm up to it, but it's a good showcase for how ahead of their time they were as a band. It works as a map for what would essentially become popular music over the next 20 years, and to me, it's rather unfortunate that it isn't treated as such. Yeah, their output is now regarded as being innovative and pioneering, but it's Autoamerican that did it moreso than any other. It goes from Europop to rap to dance to jazz to saloon-style crooning to reggae to urban, and the end result is something that you would never believe was released in 1980. Not to mention that the production is fantastic and the band sounds incredibly good.