One Way Or Another Rapture Blondie

One Way Or Another Album: Parallel Lines (1978)
Rapture Album: Autoamerican (1980)
by Blondie

One Way Or Another is about a stalker. The lyrics are very dark and go into detail about a guy with evil intentions, but the music is very light and catchy, which masked the meaning of the song. According to Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry, it was inspired by real events. She told Entertainment Weekly: "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."

Harry says that the title and the idea for the song popped into her head during a rehearsal, and most of the song was hashed out on the spot.

Lead singer Debbie Harry wrote this song with the group's bass player, Nigel Harrison. Harry wrote the lyrics to Blondie's songs, but composer credit for the music was generally given solely to whoever made the biggest contribution. This was often guitarist Chris Stein, who co-wrote "Rapture" and "Heart Of Glass."

This song has appeared in a number of movies and TV shows, often to imply dogged determination, not stalking. Here's a partial list:

Movies:
Little Darlings (1980)
Donnie Brasco (1997)
Beverly Hills Ninja (1997)
The Rugrats Movie (1998)
Coyote Ugly (2000 - Piper Perabo sings it to quell a riot in the bar)
The Guru (2002 - performed by Sophie Ellis-Bextor)
Mean Girls (2004)
New York Minute (2004)
Seed of Chucky (2004)
Aquamarine (2006 - performed by Mandy Moore)
Ready Player One (2018)

TV Shows:
The A-Team (1985)
Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (1998)
Queer as Folk (1999)
Dawson's Creek (2002)
The Simpsons (2004)
Veronica Mars (2005)
ER (2007)
Psych (2008)
Supernatural (2011)

One Way Or Another was featured on a 2011 episode of the TV show Glee in a mashup with "Hit Me With Your Best Shot." The medley by the Glee Cast was released as a single and went to #86 in the US.

With radio-friendly songs like One Way Or Another, Blondie was one of the first Punk bands to have Pop success. They played clubs like CBGB's (stands for Country, BlueGrass, Blues) with bands like The Ramones and Television, but their songs were much lighter and led to mainstream acceptance. The Police and Talking Heads are other groups that came out of that scene.

In 2013 the UK boyband One Direction recorded a new version of this song, mashing it up with The Undertones' "Teenage Kicks." It was recorded to mark the 25th anniversary of the fundraising event Red Nose Day and was a hit in both the UK where it topped the chart and the US where it peaked at #13.

Kristen Bell sings this (quite well) at karaoke in the 2005 Veronica Mars episode "Clash Of The Tritons," where she uses the song to alert a gang of her intentions.

Debbie Harry (Blondie's Lead Vocalist) did a memorable version of this song when she was the guest star on The Muppet Show in 1981.

This was the first #1 hit song with a rap. Artists like Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and Kurtis Blow had been rapping since the mid-'70s, and The Sugarhill Gang cracked the Hot 100 in 1979 with "Rapper's Delight," but until "Rapture," rap had never been incorporated into a hit pop song.

Debbie Harry did the rap, and it was really ridiculous, with lyrics about the "man from Mars eating cars," but the novelty helped the song become a hit.

Harry's rap is so goofy that it sounds like she could be mocking the genre, but this was very early in the evolution of hip-hop, and many of the rhymes that came out of the New York block parties were just as silly. Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie championed rap and got involved in the community, often attending these block parties - they even took Nile Rodgers to one, which is where he learned that his song "Good Times" was a DJ favorite. Blondie brought rap to a far larger audience with this song; Debbie Harry says that a lot of rappers - including members of Mobb Deep and Wu-Tang Clan - told her it was the first rap song they ever heard, since the genre wasn't welcome on the radio then.

Until this came out, rappers typically used existing songs as the basis for the music they would rap over; they usually took disco or soul records and looped the beats to extend the breaks. Debbie Harry's rap in this was nothing special, but it was the first rap in a song that had its own original music.

In certain Christian theology, The Rapture is an event where believers are transported to heaven while others must endure the beginning of the end times on Earth. The lyrics of this song are a bit apocalyptic, as the "Man from Mars" starts destroying the planet with his insatiable appetite. The word "Rapture" is also a play on the rap aspect of the song.

As the age of disco ended, so did Blondie's success. This was their last US hit until 1999, when they had a comeback song called "Maria." They did have another UK hit in 1982 called "Island Of Lost Souls."

If you listen carefully to the lyrics, you might hear something naughty. Shortly before the rap, there is a line that sounds a lot like "Finger F--king." Most lyric sheets list this line as "Finger Popping."

Hip-pop promoter and future host of Yo! MTV Raps Fab 5 Freddy is in the video and is mentioned in the song. He was part of the early rap scene and is credited with helping bring it into the mainstream. Blondie originally met Fab 5 Freddy and his crew at a club. They all became friends, and one day Freddy jokingly suggested that Debbie Harry should write a song about them. She did, and the result was the rap that is the second half of the song. She sent it to Freddy, he and his crew loved it and she ended up recording it.

The video for this features a cameo appearance by New York artist/Andy Warhol disciple Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose life was portrayed in the 1996 film Basquiat.
The lyrics, "Flash is fast, flash is cool" are a reference to pioneering hip-hop DJ Grandmaster Flash.

KRS-One interpolated this song on his 1997 single "Step Into A World (Rapture's Delight)," which made #70 in the US. Singing with KRS-One on the track is Keva Holman. The song can be heard in the 2013 movie This Is the End, where it fits with the rapture theme.

A few months after this song was released, Tom Tom Club issued their first single, "Wordy Rappinghood." The Tom Tom Club song wasn't issued in America, but became a big hit in Europe and Latin America. Like "Rapture," it featured a white female vocalist doing a rap (Tina Weymouth).

Like Blondie, Tom Tom Club was immersed in the New York music scene and influenced by hip-hop. Neither act knew the other was working on a rap song - Blondie was recording in New York while Tom Tom Club was working in the Bahamas.

This was used in a 2015 commercial for the Acura RDX where a woman sings along to the song while driving.