The Blondie track inspired by Debbie Harry’s dark encounter with a stalker
When pop music first began, it was all hand-holding, rainbows and songs of spawned lovers. However, by the time that Blondie and the punk revolution had arrived, the notion of hidden meaning and deploying literary techniques had woven their way into popular songwriting adding fresh colours to the palette. Sometimes, they were crafted so seamlessly, however, that the point was actually missed. That is certainly the case with this classic.
An ‘Unreliable Narrator’ is defined by the Purdue University College of Liberal Arts as: “A narrator that is not trustworthy, whose rendition of events must be taken with a grain of salt. We tend to see such narrators especially in first-person narration, since that form of narration tends to underline the motives behind the transmission of a given story.” In other words, when a lunatic gets behind the pen the perspective can be skewed.
This technique was deployed exquisitely on the epic Blondie anthem ‘One Way or Another’, but sadly for Debbie Harry, the inspiration was all too real. You see, the psychologist Albert Ellis once said, “the art of love is largely the art of persistence.” There is a truth to that, but the dark flipside comes when that persistence is misguided and reprehensibly one-sided.
Debbie Harry actually wrote the lyrics from the perspective of an ex-boyfriend who stalked her. Thus, the poppy turn that Blondie twisted it with is almost a postmodern technique to capture the warped mind of an unreliable narrator. In the warped eyes of this possessive ex-boyfriend, his stalking was all part of a glossy-eyed pursuit.
As Harry once commented: “I was actually stalked by a nutjob, so it came out of a not-so-friendly personal event. I tried to inject a little levity into it to make it more lighthearted. It was a survival mechanism.” That humour might have sugar-coated the cataclysm with enough sweetness to craft a pop classic, however, like a reverse humbug, once you strip away the syrup, there is a dark truth in the centre.
Sadly, such tales are indicative of the tragically fractured New York society at the time that Harry was living in. Many other dark incidents like this befell the star during the early days of punk, including an alleged lucky escape from Ted Bundy, a robbery and various other nefarious run-ins. It is a mark of the music’s cathartic release that she was able to transfigure this into a cracking tune with a serious point lingering beneath it all.
