I Would Have Loved Living In New York In The 1970s Because I Love Blondie, And I Assume That Is All Anyone Talked About Back Then
Do you ever get the feeling that you were just born in the wrong era? Don’t get me wrong: I love living in New York now, but sometimes I can’t help but feel like I would have loved living there more in the 1970s because I am obsessed with Blondie, and I assume Blondie is the only thing people talked about back then.
Man, it just would have been so much more fun to be in New York back when the city still had more of an edge to it and Blondie was still putting out new albums once every few years. Can’t you just imagine waking up on a beautiful summer day and walking out of your new luxury condo building in one of Brooklyn’s many gentrifying neighborhoods to talk about the latest Blondie single with your friends over a nice iced coffee from Starbucks? It sounds heavenly.
The city was just a more exciting place back then, what with the release of Blondie’s self-titled debut album in 1976, the release of both “Plastic Letters” and “Parallel Lines” in 1978, and the release of “Eat to the Beat” in 1979. I guess I’m not exactly sure what New Yorkers did in between those releases, but I imagine it involved a lot of sitting silently while waiting for the next Blondie album to come out and debating the band’s past albums online with strangers. And since those are both two of my favorite things to do, I would have fit right in.
And look, I’m not totally naïve, OK? I know there were other things going on in 1970s New York as well. Once in a while, people would probably want to talk about The Ramones or Television or the Talking Heads, and I would be OK with that, or at least listen respectfully to them before seizing the first opening I saw to tilt the conversation back to Blondie. And I’m very good at seizing those opportunities, so I probably wouldn’t have to talk about those lesser bands for too long, which would work out better for everyone involved.
It would also have been a ton of fun to see how the band impacted politics at the time. Can’t you just picture Mayor Ed Koch getting on television and starting to talk to a crew of reporters about the city’s skyrocketing real estate values and plummeting crime rate before quickly getting sidetracked along with the rest of them to have a spirited debate over whether “One Way or Another” would have been a better opening track on “Parallel Lines” than “Hanging On the Telephone?”
It totally would have been, by the way, and I am very frustrated that Deborah Harry has not replied to any of my letters about this. She’s probably just in denial.
Just think about how amazing a typical day would have been back then. You would wake up, think about Blondie, take an Uber to your job at either a music website writing about Blondie or a club promoting that night’s Blondie show, go watch Blondie perform that evening, go home and watch a video of their performance on your phone, and then go to bed and do it all again the next morning. What could be better than that?
I guess you would presumably have to eat at some point, too, but it wouldn’t be that hard to talk about Blondie in between bites.
But alas, time only moves in one direction, so I know this is ultimately just a fantasy, and I’m destined to be stuck in the New York of the 2010s forever, or at least until the 2020s finally get here. And hey, at least it’s not all bad. For instance, I heard the subway used to break down all the time back in the 70s. And that just sounds terrible.
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