083 Kembrew McLeod on Blondie and the Downtown Pop Underground

On this episode, Marc talks with Kembrew McLeod, the author of two closely related books: "Parallel Lines," an entry on Blondie's 1978 album for the 33.3 series published in 2016, and "The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, DIY Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock 'N' Roll Glitter Queens Who Revolutionized Culture," published in 2018. 

Both books cover all the amazing counterculture music and art made in the 60s and 70s in New York, and how it bubbled up into the mainstream. "Parallel Lines" of course focuses on Blondie, but also on the context within which the group operated, particularly as punk was crossing with disco. "The Downtown Pop Underground" extends to many other musicians as well as poets, playwrights, actors, venues, organizers, and much more.

As McLeod writes in Parallel Lines, "Blondie was part of a social network of artists, musicians, intellectuals, and freaks who remade popular culture...Parallel Lines  was the multiplatinum punctuation point on a slow-building subcultural explosion, a fuse that was lit in the early 1960s by a handful of outsiders living in the margins of New York City. Today, we inhabit a world that was conjured into existence by these downtown denizens."

We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Kembrew McLeod!