| David Bowie – Life on Mars? Lyrics | 10 months ago |
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@[CapNemo:53107] A worthy try. All your ideas seem to fit, but let’s look at that recurrent mouse. Bowie was a voracious reader, and he didn’t always read junk. Faulkner wrote a very short and accessible novel called “Of Mice and Men.” I’m sure that story was on his mind when he wrote the song. Mickey Mouse was certainly a Disney character who never really resembled a mouse, but the other times he refers to mice are more ambiguous, nuanced. Bowie wrote literary songs, there are likely many, many meanings behind the song. We were meant to get the primary meaning, that movies and television have blurred too much with reality, so that we can’t always escape the mundane there (a commentary on Hollywood, whose creativity was just beginning to wane. Like a modern-day prophet, he anticipates what will ultimately happen if they don’t do better, we will end up seeing the same movies with slight variations on a shallow theme. TV was already jumping that shark in the early 1970’s. The officer beating up the wrong man was a trope even then, but it’s still happening on every cop show. It’s also happpening in real life. Could that be another prophecy? Or was it just a coincidence? Now we’ve watched live coverage on TV, real cops beating up the wrong men. Do you suppose Bowie saw that coming, too? My god, he was a genius in so many ways. |
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| David Bowie – Life on Mars? Lyrics | 10 months ago |
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Not a bad analysis, but you overlook a critical point in the song, one that Bowie would have meant to be acknowledged. In the first chorus he writes, “ But the film is a saddening bore For she's lived it ten times or more” It’s the same the second time, but the third time he writes, “But the film is a saddening bore 'Cause I wrote it ten times or more” Something changed. Perhaps it was simply time in his mind, but I doubt it. I think he’s singing either to or about somebody whose life he had some influence over. I’d guess his child, but the song predates the birth of his daughter’s birth by many years. That leaves us with another ambiguity. Who is she? His mother? A girlfriend? A pet? I doubt the girlfriend thought if only because of his gender-bender phase that would follow, though I was young and so not aware of him until almost a decade later. Not looking to refute any thing you said, because I concur with it, but only to add an extra piece to the puzzle Bowie wrote. No lyric lasts quite as well as those that leave us guessing and/or allows us to fill in the blank with what means something to us personally. |
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