X Offender
single
"X Offender" is the debut single by American band Blondie. Written by Gary Valentine and Debbie Harry for the band's self-titled debut album, Blondie, the song was released as the album's lead single on Private Stock in June 1976.
Song information
The title of the song was originally "Sex Offender". Bassist Gary Valentine originally wrote the song about an 18-year-old boy being arrested for having sex with his younger girlfriend. Debbie Harry changed the lyrics so that the song was about a prostitute being attracted to the police officer that had arrested her. The track was co-produced by Richard Gottehrer who had worked with 1960s girl group The Angels, and the song is reminiscent of that era in its style.
Private Stock insisted that the name of the single be changed to "X Offender" because they were nervous about the original title. It was released in mid-1976 with the B-side being "In the Sun". While the song did not chart, Chrysalis heard it along with the Blondie album and signed the band. "X Offender" later served as the B-side to "Rip Her to Shreds".
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “X Offender” as single. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as single. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q725835. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “X Offender” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.