Blondie - Eat to the Beat

1979's Eat to the Beat was Blondie's fourth album, and the first to follow the enormous commercial breakthrough of 1978's Parallel Lines. Though its singles, the brilliant "Dreaming" and the disco-influenced "Atomic," were lesser hits than Eat to the Beat' "Heart of Glass" and "One Way or Another," Eat to the Beat 's success cemented Blondie's status as by far the most commercially viable of the first wave of New York punk bands. By this time, the band's always-tenuous connection to punk was barely noticeable; the artsy "Victor," the Springsteen-ish "Union City Blue," written for the soundtrack of Debbie Harry's first film, Steeltown, and the reggae-tinged "Die Young Stay Pretty" are early evidence of the sort of casual genre-hopping which defined the band's next album, AUTOAMERICAN. The ripping title track, "Accidents Never Happen" and the dreamy "Living in the Real World," however, are more typical Blondie fare.(RS)