The Private Canon: The Fight Song of "Picture This"

As I've lately been tracing the borders of my newly acknowledged (but apparently long held) affection for electric-guitar-powered pop featuring female vocals, I realized there may be a missing link: a band I'd never really paid much attention to but whose retro-rock sound seemed to echo through the music I was attracted to, from Queen of Jeans to Soccer Mom, from Mysterons to Waxahatchee.

I'm talking about Blondie, the American New Wave band led by Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, whose "One Way or Another" has long been a favorite but whose vintage late '70s records I've only recently dipped into with relish. This music is not quite the soundtrack of my youth, but close enough that it provides a kind of nostalgia-adjacent glow, a chance for a bit of a do-over of my tween years, which is when Blondie was big—I distinctly remember "Heart of Glass" wafting over me, somewhat distantly, from a neighbor's yard as I lolled in yet another neighbor's pool one lazy Phoenix summer afternoon (it must have been 1979).

And while I can report few earth-shaking discoveries from my happy jaunt through their sturdily enjoyable catalogue (apart from the wonder of hearing the proto-"Heart of Glass," "Once I Had a Love," in which one of the rhymes for "it was a gas," amusingly, is "a pain in the ass"), I did stumble upon at least one tune that bowled me over with its matter-of-fact formal and lyrical daring. "Picture This," which charted in the U.K. but was never a single over here, is an odd, demanding love song—a fractured portrait of deep, lusty affection hitting the rocks—built on a simple I-IV progression, C and F, but with some wild, disorienting harmonic and lyrical turns that evoke a rich tangle of cross-purposes. 

Structured as a kind of list of demands, it's a plea from a woman who wants to lock down from her lover not a relationship commitment, exactly, but some kind of grounding in shared memories and pleasures. As she puts it:

All I want is a photo in my wallet

A small remembrance

Of something more solid

All I want is a picture of you

Is that so much to ask? (And how great is the unexpected, perfectly imperfect rhyme of "wallet" and "solid"?) In return for a list of things she wants from him, she has an offer of sorts, though it's really more like her thank-you for an enduring gift he inadvertently gave her:

I will give you my finest hour

The one I spent

Watching you shower

I will give you my finest hour

That was the lyric that grabbed me, but the musical gambit that caught my ear comes earlier in the song: It's in the guitar intro and in the first and last verse only, but it's a doozy:

It would be one thing to pass by that A-flat chord, a major sixth of the tonic, in passing, a bit of sonic spice that occasionally pops up in rockabilly. But to linger on it for six-plus beats—that's a big choice, and it's something of a harbinger of the big feelings to come. We don't hear that A-flat chord again until after Stein's crunchy guitar solo (in an entirely different key, by the way), and by that time we've already been introduced to the song's chorus: "Picture this: a day in December/Picture this: Freezing cold weather."

The desire of the verses acquires a new level of insistence and confrontation here, with that imperative voice ("Picture this") seizing the reins over a progression that avoids the tonic (like "A Crime," or "Walking on Sunshine") and eventually runs into the buzzsaw of the song's only minor chord. The lyrics that race into this A-minor pile-up get strangely specific, from that "freezing cold" December day to the complaint registered over this hectoring, tetchy melody:

Well, that took a turn, didn't it, into social realism or soap opera or who knows what. Is this guy a dreamboat or a deadbeat? That "If you could only oh whoa" may be a throwaway but it speaks volumes to me. And what to make of the song's extremely abrupt ending, also on that A-minor:

In 1978, when this song came out, a "pocket computer" would have been a calculator like this, and the internet was not a thing. So the lyric probably meant to suggest something about the way love can't be so easily measured or summed up. But I'll be damned if that line doesn't sound to 2021 ears more like a Lily Allen-worthy kiss-off, along the lines of: Just try to replace my affection with Pornhub and a wank; knock yourself out, big boy.

Either way, it's a discordantly confrontational end, complete with that sneering "Yeah," for a song that started out so wistfully. We get a strong sense that this relationship is neither rock-solid nor falling apart but in contention, in the balance. I may be reading too much into it—it was apparently a sort of Frankenstein of various song ideas, stitched together with the band's signature no-frills attitude—but I hear what I hear. To me "Picture This" is the sound of a classic early-mid-relationship fight, and the ending says: I may go to bed mad at you tonight, or we might be having some amazing make-up sex. Why don't you go take a shower...