10 Bizarre Metal Covers Of Classic Songs

There's only so many places you can really go with the metal genre. While metal has certainly stretched its meaning over the course of history, you can usually rely on a certain amount of heaviness to come from any band in the genre. Every now and again though, you find yourselves wanting to experiment with something different.

Along with people who just switched genres, these artists went way into left field and covered songs that they had no business covering. From the likes of classic rock to pop songs to old school R&B, these are songs that don't really sound like they warrant a metal rendition any day of the week. What's even crazier is when some of these actually work.

Make no mistake, there are a lot of songs on this list that are really strange for their time, especially when taken within the context of when they were released. As the years pass though, these actually are holding up surprisingly well, if only for the gimmick factor. Hell, in the rarest of occasions, these are the kind of songs that are up there with some of the greatest things these acts have ever done. On first listen though, you wouldn't fault all of us from scratching our heads and wondering what the hell we were even listening to.

And first off, let's just talk about the most fun that the nu metal genre could ever hope to get. Since most of the backyard party jams coming out of the '00s were reserved for bands like Sum 41, how the hell were the angry white boy crowd going to find themselves in the same arena? Well, Alien Ant Farm found a way by getting as far away from the genre as they dared.

While covering Smooth Criminal did firmly place them in one hit wonder territory for the foreseeable future, their letter perfect take on the King of Pop is still one of the best things to come out of the scene. Complete with one of the corniest videos of the time, every homage is note perfect, from the different 'hee-hees' going on in the background to the guitar riff absolutely crushing from the moment it starts.

That's not to say that starting off this good leads to a long career though, with most of Alien Ant Farm's later records falling by the wayside and quickly putting them back in the bargain bin of rock and roll. Then again, when you think of the surge of metal in the '00s, this still elicits all of the good memories from back in the day. In between all of the Staind singles out in the world, we could have used a lot more songs like this in our lives.