Occasionally, in retrospectives of product and industrial design held at big art galleries, you’ll see objects that look positively at odds with our current conception of design because they’re so ubiquitous that it seems like they’ve always simply existed. The Model 500 telephone is a good example—someone had to come up with the look and functionality of the thing, and they were so successful that now we see that shape and immediately think “telephone.” Not “the Model 500 telephone” or “a Western Electric telephone” or “the telephone Henry Dreyfuss Associates designed”—just “telephone.” Because its shape is so universally known, the Model 500 doesn’t feel like the product of someone’s ingenuity; it’s like Athena springing fully formed from the head of Zeus, as if it was always meant to be.

By virtue of its success, Blondie can claim similar stature. Their influence is ubiquitous; however strange they may have appeared back in the 70s, now everyone acknowledges Blondie’s contributions to pop music, and their musical DNA has been absorbed into the cultural aesthetic. This is both a blessing and a curse; on the one hand, Blondie is assured of its place in music history, and no one will forget Deborah Harry any time soon. On the other hand, it also means that I’m already sick of “One Way Or Another,” even though I’ve only heard it a couple of times in a Swiffer commercial. I had no idea it was a Blondie song, nor even an inkling that it wasn’t composed specifically for the commercial. Blessing and curse: when your music is so popular that it becomes nearly universal, it also runs the risk of becoming commonplace and uninteresting as a result. There may come a time in the future when most laypeople won’t be able to say what makes Blondie Blondie, just like today most people can’t really say what specific characteristics of Bach’s music are his own.

And so the strange mindfuck that is Blondie’s cover of “Out In The Streets.” As a direct response to the original from a decade earlier, this demo is practically an antithesis. Bereft of all the instrumental and vocal dramatics, “Out In The Streets” is an entirely different song. In place of the anguish and heartbreak, there’s an odd resignation, as though a world-weary Harry can barely conjure up the strength of emotion the original demanded. “So I gotta set him free” loses its melodramatic edge, just becomes yet another episode in a long line of relationships. Blondie expresses a weariness where the Shangri-Las acted as if their lives hung in the balance. All this makes sense, considering the number of times Blondie’s been labelled “60s girl group meets 70s ironic punk” or some similar combination.

But there’s another take on the song, informed by the three decades since Blondie cut this demo: it sounds like Deborah Harry singing in a karaoke lounge at last call. However transgressive this track might’ve been in the 70s—and I’ll honestly never know, seeing as how I wasn’t even born then—it sounds a bit amateurish today in its apparent lack of gusto. Maybe it’s that we’ve become immune to Blondie’s charms, or maybe it’s just a demo and it didn’t sound amazing back then either. I prefer the first take on the song but can’t get the second take out of my mind. Blessing and curse.