| David Bowie – All the Young Dudes Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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JUst to clue in some American posters to the lyric Marks and Sparks - a retail shop ( its actually called Marks and Spencer ) and is a little like a department store. Boat race - Rythming slang for 'face' I was in the same crowd as Ian Hunter from this period ( and Bowie for that matter ) its really a pastiche of street life. Billy talking all night about suicide while being on 'speed'. They dont need TV because they have T-Rex - I'm never sure if thats ironic or fandom there. Jimmy looks sweet because he's probably male prostitute or effiminate gay but he can fight hard - not all gays have limp wrists and I used to know a few like that in London in the 70s. The late 70s turned their backs on stuff like Lennon and the Beatles and talk of revolution and settled down to get stoned and just have fun being weird. Concrete all around - its a townpersons view of England in the 70s when there were vast construction projects turning our inner cities into concrete blocks - or it in in my head - because it was ghastly it was hard to believe it was real. |
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| David Bowie – Life on Mars? Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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Life on Mars ? - the clue is in the question mark of the title. For hundreds of years humans have wondered if there is life on Mars - in this song the answer is yes and they are looking at us. Possibly through our radio and TV transmissions. Thats the meaning of the chorus line 'look at those cavemen go' - thats how we appear to a superior intelligence. Life on Mars is aliens watching us as a kind of reality TV show like Big brither and its spin-offs and all of our culture is exposed as the primitive and amusing. To explore some of the lyrics further we have a young girl being forced to watch the show and finding it boring in the way that young people are seldom interested in the pursuits of their parents ( so the aliens arent actually THAT different to us it seems ) - to the aliens it is 'The best selling show' complete reality TV and Bowie foresaw this years before stuff like Big Brother and 'The Truman Show' - although the concept was there in Philip K Dicks 'Time out of Joint' I cant explain all of the lyrics because Bowie always writes in a poetic and allusion style - sometimes using cards with words on to shuffle around until they make some kind of sense. The opening verse sets the scene - the girl watching the best selling show of primitive life forms fighting, playing at civilisation and sees how we seem like cavemen. The second verse is tougher - I think the line 'Its on Americas tortured brow, Mickey Mouse has grow up a cow' refers to the way that the ideal of America such as freedom have been ( and would continue to be ) eroded and that a kind of imperialism would set in and create a mutated culture. A lot of people here have got stuck on the lines 'The workers have struck for fame, cos lennons on sale again' To undertand this I suspect you'd have had to live in the Britain of this songs period where the trade unions had become so powerful that virtual anarchy ruled, constant strikes as union leaders jockeyed for power ( fame ) . We had strikes over every cause imaginable that almost destroyed the economy. The workers were quite literally striking for 'fame' in placing their needs above all else leading to power cuts, dead bodies being piled up outside mortuaries and piles of uncollected garbage 15 feet high outside peoples houses. Bowie is probably being cynical about unions stroking over the release of a record - because thats how petty some ofthese strikes were in fact. The 'Mice in their million hordes' are us - the people on the planet - seen by the aliens as not much more than vermin - although amusing the way your pet hamster is. Bowie might have been inlfuenced here by Kubricks 2001 - not just in the contruct of aliens observing us but also by the structure of the film whose final reel rather than TELLING us anything asks us to look into ourselvs and find our own meanings. I hope you all do look inside and find YOUR truths in this wonderful song - although I personally prefer 'Drive in Saturday' which is so abstract theres no meanings to be derived from it at all. |
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