Blondie was way before my time and I found them in high school the way teenage girls find half the shit that eventually rewires their taste – in some Gen Xer’s record collection and suddenly wondering why nobody bothered to tell me Debbie Harry was this fucking cool. ‘Heart of Glass’ got me through the door and then I started digging. When I finally reached ‘Maria,’ I understood why Harry spent decades making men look a little stupid. Blondie released the song in 1999 during their comeback with No Exit – a Jimmy Destri-penned pop-rock shrine to female hotness. The song is about a woman so gorgeous she turns grown men into fucking idiots and twenty-seven years later Belgian DJ Frank Mellemans and Tina Bride have decided Maria deserves another night out. Good call. That bitch was never staying home.
Frank’s version gives all that obsession a bigger after-dark pulse, with Tina stepping into the vocal like she already knows every guy in the room is staring. The electronic production gives the song a bigger after-dark pulse while Tina steps into the vocal with enough attitude to make all that male obsession feel completely justified. There is still something delicious about a song built around a woman doing very little beyond existing beautifully while some guy internally combusts over it. Put that fantasy over a dance beat and suddenly I can see her crossing the floor in a tiny dress while somebody’s boyfriend forgets what the fuck he was saying. Tina sells that woman beautifully. She sounds fully aware of the effect she is having, which is half the fun.
Destri has said the original came out of Catholic-school memories and fantasies about the ideal girl, which explains why Maria gets treated like somebody’s fucking patron saint of hotness. Maria floats just far enough out of reach to let his imagination get filthy on its own and Frank’s club setting finally gives that fantasy somewhere physical to go. With the bass underneath her and a room watching her move she seems like the girl a guy will spend three drinks convincing himself he has a shot with. Honestly, I support any woman whose entire romantic strategy appears to be showing up hot and letting the men sort out their own emotional emergency.
So let’s talk about the people giving Maria another night out. Frank Mellemans is a Belgian DJ and producer who also releases as DJFRANKM, and familiar songs have become a big part of his dance-floor vocabulary. He has played major Belgian events including Tomorrowland and clearly knows his way around a crowd that came to move. Tina Bride brings her own dance-pop history to the hookup. Born Kim Poelmans, she broke through in Belgium during the early 2000s with ‘Get To You’ and built a career in that glossy club-pop world. Frank and Tina already teamed up earlier this year on a remake of Pat Benatar’s ‘Love Is A Battlefield,’ so this Blondie detour feels like two people realizing they have a fun thing going and ordering another round.
Covers of Blondie can go sideways fast because Debbie Harry already occupies so much fucking real estate in pop culture. Everybody knows the attitude. Everybody remembers the face. Teenage me discovered all of that years after the fact and still got hit by it hard enough to go digging through the catalog like I personally uncovered buried treasure. Frank Mellemans and Tina Bride give ‘Maria’ another life without fucking with what made her irresistible in the first place. The speakers are louder now. Maria still gets the last look.
