Alternate Versions of Famous Songs That Sound Like a Glitch in the Matrix
If you’ve never heard an alternate version of a song, it’s probably not a very good song. No semi-successful covers? No acoustic rendition? What a failure. What you don’t often hear, though, are the songs of which a smash hit was an alternate version, so different from the original vision of the creators that hearing it makes you believe in the multiple worlds theory. Songs like…
“Heart of Glass” by Blondie
It’s easy to forget when you’re listening to their most famous song that Blondie was a punk band, and in the ‘70s, “going disco” was akin to eating an entire live chicken onstage (actually welcome at most punk shows). That’s why earlier versions of “Heart of Glass,” then called “Once I Had a Love” or just “The Disco Song,” sound much more like Blondie’s other work — more guitar-focused, less electronic, harder edged. Blondie singer Debbie Harry and producer Mike Chapman credit/blame each other for the disco makeover, which still had to be hidden on side two of the album, lest the fans think “think, ‘Oh, Jesus, they’ve become a disco band’” and chase them down with burning Pitchforks.
“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper
Cyndi Lauper’s celebration of women’s liberation was once a very different kind — a masculine one. It was written by Robert Hazard, a new wave singer who didn’t really have much success with anything else and sounded like Ric Ocasek and a glottal stop had a baby, about his appreciation of women who don’t want to settle down. In fact, Lauper hated it until a producer convinced her to “make it what (she) would sing about.”
“Chilly Down” by David Bowie
Of course, David Bowie wrote the songs he sings in Labyrinth, but he also wrote all the songs in Labyrinth, including the one sung by Elmo (among other muppets). As a result, he recorded a demo of “Chilly Down,” the song performed by the terrifying orange creatures who can dismember themselves at will, that was leaked to YouTube after his death in 2016, and you reeeeally have to listen closely to convince yourself it’s a human man. To be fair, that was always kind of tricky with Bowie.
“The Monkey Dance” by the Wiggles
If you’ve been a parent in the last 30 years, you could probably sing the Wiggles catalog in your sleep, but you might like them more in their original incarnation: an Australian bar band called the Cockroaches. Several Cockroaches songs were adapted for children (most egregiously, “It’s Another Saturday Night” became “Dorothy the Dinosaur”), but “The Monkey Dance,” originally called “Do the Monkey,” remained mostly intact, just a lot cleaner.
“I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys
“I Want It That Way” might be the most successful song in pop music history that makes zero sense. Nobody knows what it’s about, including the Backstreet Boys, because it was written by people who barely spoke English. No, seriously. That was the case for most of the hits of the late ‘90s, but this one was so bad that English speakers were called in to write an alternate version that makes sense. The label ultimately liked the sound of nonsense better, but there’s another reality where “I Want It That Way” isn’t a scary maze of linguistic nightmares, and that reality sounds much nicer.