Soul Love

It's about being alone and unloved when the rest of the world has a love of some sort. All Ziggy has is his romantism (love of love) and he knows that he's missing out, but he's unwilling to do anything, since he's afraid of getting hurt, but he'd do anything to be in love for just one second.

Well, I disagree with what most people here think of this song. To me, it always seemed that this was about how the occidental culture always puts its idea of "love" everywhere. Love is just another built concept that we use to interpretate our world. Seen with the eyes of an outsider, love is everywhere and its everything but at the same time it is many thing and nothing. I hope i can make myself clear... anyway, that's the way i like to see it.

This is one of my favorite Bowie songs, especially since I love Ziggy Stardust so much. I believe that the song is just about different kinds of love, like the love of a mother to her dead son or the love between a boy and girl, a priest and God, etc. It's a beautiful song, really. I like how Bowie can write a love song that isn't just about a girl or something, but just about love in general. Pretty awesome.

"Inspirations have I none, just to touch the flaming dove"

That line kills me with its awesomeness.

so much loneliness in this song! i love the first verse. the son probably went to war for a politician's cause ("slogan" or maybe a pun on slow gun?) and now this "slogan" cause is the gun that's separating a mother and her son.

This is a great song. I think Child of music has the meaning nailed down pretty good

"Love is careless in its choosing...Love decends on those defenseless..."

How true and tragic. And then comes to those in need not at all.

"stone love" = phsyical love...a love you can see and feel..."soul love" = something that you can not see...but you know in your heart that it's there

Gore Vidal once said “The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.”

Love is innate, irrepressible and takes many forms. The opening verse of a mother sitting a grave reminds me of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Septimus Smith left for “France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in the square.”

Or as Bowie succintly puts it "to save the slogans".

Love is not loving but love is insatiable. It is built into the fabric of every one of us. Call it a soul, call it an evolutional benefit. Whatever it is, we need it. For country, for the opposite or same sex, for our parents, for our siblings. It cannot be escaped and is hard wired into our response to the world.

Bowie dismisses the possibility of his own self being capable of love, but equally recognises the potency of love being a powerful force of inspiration in others.

He starts by depicting the bond of love between mother and son, the child being a military recruitment killed in action for the honour 'to save the slogan' which hovers 'between the headstone and her eyes".

There then follows the juxtaposition of this 'dead love' with the fresh romance of 'a boy and girl' and the innuendo's of "new words that only they can share in" that only such a pair would understand.

Bowie views love as a spirit/metaphysical force which descends indiscriminately, presenting this inspirational power upon the unprepared, "sparking the fusion" between one person and another. "Love is careless in its choosing, sweeping over cross a baby." And Bowie, aware of his inability to feel love, professes his empathy to the word and the beneficial effect it has upon others. "All I have is my love of love, and love is not loving."

The final verse develops a thought of cynicism to the love of god. It is not that Bowie's projected affection for the Christian deity is unrequited, moreover he cannot receive mutual feelings from those around, even when he lifts himself to the possibility of Gnostic beliefs, he finds no reward. The inner desire of the soul, as related by "the priest who tastes the word", and the prospect of a "God on high" being "all love" are dissolved, because his isolation and loneliness is a result of not lacking a god, but the oblivion such a god displays "though by reaching up my loneliness evolves by the blindness that surrounds him".

Consequently, the chaos of the initial song expands to encompass a religious aspects mankind does have the ability and capability to love on a superficial level with the air of doom hanging above, but the love which god is believed to possess, apparently the greatest love of all —"Soul Love", breeds discontent because of its inaccessibility, akin to unrequited love (i.e "All I have is my love of love, and love is not loving.").

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