Debbie Harry: glory and life to the new flesh! – Daniele Cassandro

The cover of Koo KooDebbie Harry’s first solo album, frontwoman by the pop-wave band Blondie, he created so many problems that he overshadowed the courage and experimentalism of his music. He had created the Swiss artist HR Giger (1940-2014), among other things the inventor of the biomechanical aesthetics of the film Alien di Ridley Scott (1979).

Harry appears in the foreground, perfect cheekbones and unmistakable thin lips, but he is no longer the bleached and sulky pop icon of the Blondie: he is a disturbing queen of darkness, a corpse bride just awakened from a long sleep, on the forehead a tiara that seems to come from an ancient civilization lost in space. Her head, from temples to throat, is pierced by four pins. Behind her a gray sky is streaked with lightning. The new wave pop pin-up has turned into “a mixture of punk, acupuncture and science fiction” as Giger describes it. Although Harry did not identify herself or her music of hers as punk, she was delighted with her new image of her shaped by the feverish and morbid imagination of the Swiss artist. An image that would have cost her the withdrawal of the cover from various distribution chains and the censorship of advertising posters in several cities, including London.

A pioneer
Her typical bleached hair with the dark regrowth in sight, she explains herself in an interview conducted by the BBC in HR Giger’s Zurich studio, were part of her “being a pop product”. Stopping being the blonde of Blondie and turning into a biomechanical hybrid, a posthuman performer, was for her a way to make people forget the past. Today we are used to pop stars who change their appearance between one album and another, between one video and another, between one frame and another of the same video; in 1981 Debbie Harry was a pioneer. Above all, thanks to the influence of the New York scene and her friendship with Andy Warhol, Harry was perfectly aware of her being, with her clothes, her hair and her commercial but also angular music, a pop artifact, a product of consumption. In 1981 Louise Veronica Ciccone was not yet Madonna, she was on the edge of that scene where Harry dominated, but she was there and watched everything carefully.

Harry and his partner Chris Stein had brought Blondie to the pinnacle of success in the late seventies. In 1980, their fifth album, American carcontained the lucky single The rapture, the first hybrid between new wave and hip hop, then an absolute novelty experienced by the white public as the quintessence of the New York of those years: dirty, dangerous and always on the verge of a racial revolt. After Call meanother very successful single written and produced by Giorgio Moroder and linked to the soundtrack of the film American gigolo, the Blondie decide, surprisingly, to stop. Harry and Stein meet HR Giger at the opening of an exhibition of him and collaborate with him. Once again Harry decides, as he had already done and will do again later with Warhol and then with the stylist Stephen Sprouse, to put himself in the hands of an artist to have a new image shaped. And this will bring it, right during the making of Koo Kooto be chosen by Canadian director David Cronenberg for the role of Nicki Brand in Videodromethe horror film defined by Andy Warhol theClockwork Orange of the eighties. “Glory and life to the new flesh!” is the tragic closing line of the film and a new flesh was what pop star Deborah Harry was looking for to reincarnate in the new decade.

A new science fiction and posthuman flesh also corresponds to a new sound, even the hybrid and innovative one. To produce their record, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein call Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, or Chic, the most successful disco group of the previous decade. The record did not enjoy a good reputation in the early eighties. It was considered a weakened, overexposed and commercially abused genre. Just two years earlier, in 1979, the infamous was held in Chicago Disco demolition night (the night of the demolition of the record) in which, during the intermission of a baseball league game, a horde of fans (all white) had blown up a pile of records and cassettes of disco music. The episode, fundamentally an act of vandalism and racial hatred disguised as a sporting student spirit, marks the decline of disco music as it was known, but also marks its ability to resist, renew itself and hybridize with other types of music.

Debbie Harry and Chris Stein had already sensed the potential of grafting the record with other genres and decided to call Chic on the wave of the success of an album they recently produced: diana by Diana Ross. A not painless success: the sound of that work was considered too “disco” – therefore too black – by Diana Ross’ record label, who wanted a more transversal success for her star (black), so she forced Rodgers and Edwards to remix all over again, penalizing bass and percussion. The original mix of dianathe one wanted by Nile Rodgers, fortunately was recovered in a 2003 reissue and sounds much more funky and muscular than the “bleached” version sold to the public in 1980. Paradoxically, in 1981, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards can afford to be more funky and more black with a white artist full of post punk and new wave. Koo Koo by Debbie Harry becomes the sound and language laboratory from which Nile Rodgers will emerge as the most important pop producer of the eighties with Let’s dance diDavid Bowie, Like a virgin by Madonna e Notorious by Duran Duran.

The first single chosen to launch the album is Backfired: an absurd chimera, a bit new wave (the choirs are the Devo), a bit hip hop (Harry mentions rap several times when he sings) and with a decidedly disco-funk tempo. The video reveals the new “Gigerian” Debbie Harry, a sort of disco sylph coming out of the imagination of Alien. Harry emerges in a tight lurex jumpsuit from a Nuremberg sarcophagus-virgin while a figure, the same Giger with an Andy Warhol-style wig, pierces her with four long swords. The second single on the album is an ethereal ballad, Now I know you know, and once again HR Giger imagines Debbie Harry as a fairy with very long black hair dancing in a humid, throbbing cavern-like world where Alien hatches her evil eggs. The song is pure Nile Rodgers: a long, virtuosic ballad that is very reminiscent At last I am free by Chic, a song sung over time by people completely unrelated to the record, from Robert Wyatt to Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins.

Se Backfired e Now I know you know are the radio singles, the pieces of the album considered more attractive by the record label, imagine the rest: Under arrest it’s the closest thing to a Blondie piece, but Surrender has such a funky bassline that it reminds us of certain Herbie Hancock disco albums. Inner city spillover it’s a reggae without anything tropical, and indeed leaves a metallic smog aftertaste in the mouth. The closing piece of the album, Oasisis the triumph of that tendency to Middle Eastern exoticism of so much international new wave of that period, from Franco Battiato di Arabian song to the Cure of Fire in Cairo. The piece starts with a synth imitating the sound of a flute to launch into an intricate percussive carpet that around minute 2:40 seems like a self-quotation of the attack of Heart of glass of Blondie

In the midst of so much variety of sounds and experimental solutions, Debbie Harry’s harsh and not always in tune voice acts as a common thread and connective tissue. Of the post punk that remains that attitude of challenge and of coolnessof the best pop of the eighties there is the research and the contempt of radio conventions. Koo Koo hardly anyone liked it: Blondie fans felt betrayed and for those who followed funk, electro and hip hop Debbie Harry was a sly girl who took possession of a sound that was not protected by her whiteness and her Hollywood fame. Koo Koo however, it was an important experiment in reinvention, in the radical questioning of a pop character. Before any other pop star, Debbie Harry realized that to survive the fashions one must have the courage to destroy what one was in order to be reborn “with a new flesh”.

Debbie Harry
Koo Koo
Chrysalis, 1981