It's a rare treat when an author busts out a tightly researched agenda that totally flips your perspective on a record, a band, a scene, a genre, and an entire artistic era. Kembrew McLeod provides such a treat with this gloriously revisionist history, positing that Blondie and the core of the New York punk scene's early bands and aesthetics were ... Read morea product of a wildly vital gay underground theater scene that flourished from the late 1960s to the early 1970s.
MTV News
A neat snapshot of a time of revolution, reinvention and experimentation ... [This book is] every bit as appetising as the album itself, and an astute, erudite examination of one of the greatest albums of all time.
Record Collector
An interesting thesis well made in this enjoyable addition to the 33 1/3 series.
International Times
There's a little book I've been devouring on the subway this past week or two: Blondie's Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod. It has had me tracing and re-tracing connections all over the place, re-examining my own assumptions about my own evolving musical tastes and cultural assumptions from the time of my first transistor radio ... Refreshing.
One Flew East
Nothing beats a great argument that makes you think of the album in question in a whole new light, then - of course - sends you right back to the music to love it all over again ... Parallel Lines - the book - is worth reading if you're a devotee of Blondie or the 33 1/3 series (and of course for fans of both already) but if, somehow, you've never experienced this record in your lifetime and haven't yet read any of the other entries into this set of snapshots of classic albums, McLeod's book might instantly, easily, make you a fan of both.
Off The Tracks
The publisher Bloomsbury cannot be praised highly enough for the 33 1/3 series ... This volume houses countless surprising details ... [and] McLeod writes so informatively and with such inspiration that one cannot dismiss Parallel Lines or any of the other similar music covered in the book.
CulturMag (Bloomsbury translation)
[Blondie's] Parallel Lines ... gives a good critical insight into how record labels have worked up until the present day ... the whole thing reads very well.
OX Fanzine (Bloomsbury translation)
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