Some thoughts on Blondie’s Heart of Glass
Monday, January 23rd, 2012 - 10:34 am - article
Found myself listening to Heart of Glass today and it caught my ear in a way it had never had before. I don’t claim to be an expert – just thought I’d share my thoughts.
So, I asked her, ‘Debbie, what kind of music that’s happening right now really turns you on?’ She said, ‘Donna Summer.’ I said, ‘OK, then how about us treating this song like it was meant for Donna Summer?’ Thay all looked at me as if to say, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s disco, right?’ ‘Yeah, it’s disco,’ they mumbled, but when Debbie then said, ‘I like disco,’ the others basically went along with it.
– Sound on Sound on Heart of Glass
- The key is slightly ambiguous. It’s in E but the verse goes Emaj / C#min / C#min / Emaj – both perfectly valid chords for Emaj but those long stretches of minor pull my ear towards hearing the verse in a minor key. This gives the song a sense of longing and heartbreak not normally associated with major key songs.
- What is the chorus and what is the verse? The “Once I had a love and it was a gas, Soon turned out; I had a heart of glass” is one of the vocal hooks of the song (the other two being the nah nah nah bit and the ooh ooh, woah oh bit) but structurally you’d expect it to be the verse. Either the song starts on the chrous or the song has a catchier verse than chrous – again more ambiguity.
- What I’m calling the chorus – the lyrically forgettable “In between, what I find is pleasing, and I’m feeling fine” – sounds like a keychange to A major. The bass walks to it and the melody explodes in major key goodness. Yet is it a key change? The chords are still all found in E Major. Really really quite a clever song.
- Starts with a drum machine – the oomph-less rattle of the Roland CR-78 (available as the iPhone app Funkbox should you wish to have a play) – before live drums come in. I hear this as a battle between rock (humans) and disco (machines). Who wins? Well, rock wins on power – that bass drum would pin anyone to the floor – but disco wins by setting the tempo as tightly as any click track.
- The component parts that make up the song:
- Guitar – probably the one element of this song that’s not obviously disco and says “this is Blondie”.
- Sequenced 16ths bassy bit – straight out of I Feel Love. The phased duh-duh-duh throughout the whole song.
- Live Drums – Bass, snare, bass, snare – the listener isn’t going to lose this beat.
- Drum machine – rattly but on 16ths to remind us this is spacey disco.
- Spacey keyboard wash – straight out of I Feel Love
- Bass – not very funky except when doing octaves to introduce chorus.
- I’m reminded about what Guy Pratt said about disco basslines. Basically black ones are funky and white ones aren’t. Watch the below video from about 1min 20.
- If this track was solely made for the dance floor it would have dumped the chorus – but the “nah nah nahs” are good for radio. But the whole rhythm of it is just too sashaying to dance to without looking uncool. Bill Drummond said it best in The Manual, “Serious groove merchants hate it when a song has a dynamite bass line for the verse and then when the chorus comes the chords change, dragging the bass away from its ‘bad self’ into having to follow those limp wristed chords. For them the whole movement of the song is destroyed for the sake of some nursery rhyme element they would rather see dumped.” Read the entire Manual here.
- If you want more 16ths spacey disco obviously the starting point is Donna Summers I Feel Love. But it can also be found in other rockist tracks like Duran Duran’s Planet Earth and Japan’s Life in Tokyo.
- This is the sounds of a rock band playing disco. Other bands that did this successfully include Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall and arguably I Was Made for Loving You by Kiss.
- This is a record made in the studio. Lovingly made. The demos suggest a band that simply couldn’t play.
- Final thought: Debbie was 34 in the year this record came out. In a world where pop music fronted by the young dominates – would this happen now?
Further reading:
Wikipedia: Heart of Glass Sound on Sound
Quick thoughts on your thoughts:
3) Calling heart of glass “clever” harmonically is like calling heating frozen pizzas sophisticated cooking. Catchy? Yes. Clever? Not really.
11) Gwen Stefani was 35 when launching her solo career in 2004. Just saying.
Love the song though, and that Guy Pratt video.
I recall seeing a documentary about what a technical challenge this song was to make, in part because drum machines were new , because it was a huge difference for the band in terms of style, and because the whole band had to sync their performance to the drum machine, which was apparently very difficult.
A lot of apparently simple pop songs are more complicated than you first think, which is part of what makes them appealing, because they have slight differences at odds with your expectations. “My Sharona” by the Knack, sounds very repetitive, but pulls it off because it actually subtly changes every verse.
There is a good book by Steve Levitin, a musician, producer and neuroscientist, called “This is Your Brain on Music.” He talks about how Stevie Wonder make subtle changes on drums throughout “Superstitious,” and how Led Zeppelin often tuned to each other so they are off key.
Levitin wondered how emotion tended to be expressed through music, and discovered that changes in tempo seems to be what does it, by comparing different performances of the same recording.
http://blogs.psychcentral.com/channeln/2011/03/expressing-emotion-through-music/
This is a problem for drum machines, since they can make things dull.
Interesting. I recall reading a book that called Heart of Glass the most important single of the 1970s because it successfully blended rock and dance music. What replaced disco as the 80s emerged was dance rock, which this song is a very significant example of. If you look up Billboard magazine from that period and specifically the articles by Roman Kozak they discuss the emergence of rock discos like Hurrahs and Danceteria. Dance rock becomes the pop music of the early 80s; think of Borderline by Madonna with its guitar intro. What makes the song specially is waht your article notes: the song was a hybrid, whether its described as bringing new wave to disco or disco to new wave.
I wouldn’t put too much stock in that SOS article. Inconveniently for Chapman’s recollection, Blondie was already talking about Moroder, Kraftwerk and eurodisco before they ever met Chapman and even had covered I Feel Love before then. Chapman and Eno were the two great producers of the 70s. Yet Chapman had less impact on Blondie than Eno had on the Talking Heads.
The 75 demo is just that. They recorded the demo in someone’s basement under the most primitive conditions before they even had a keyboardist. (Destri joined in Nov. 75). By 78 they had already recorded synth heavy songs like Cautious Lip (this came out especially in live versions) so the suggestion that they would have recored anything that resembled the 75 demo is far-fetched. And it was the members of Blondie itself that discovered the CR-78, so they deserve quite a bit of credit for the final product.
Rolling Stone, which always underrates Blondie, cited this song as one of the top 500 of all time. Its ironic that while often denounced by the Disco-sucks crowd, if you could point to a single song that signalled the genre’s demise it would probably be this one. They turned it into something different.