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The song becomes the screen, its pre-chorus is an extended trailer-soaring strings, thunderous piano, ascending chords-for the refrain, one of the most shameless, gorgeous melodies he ever wrote.Īnd the song also captures a teenager’s ability to suddenly and completely lose themselves in art, to a degree we can never quite do again.
Bowie quicksand youtube movie#
The movie screen flickers to life, showers the girl with images. In a few lines, Bowie captures a teenager’s life, its slights, its cosmic sense of injustice, its losing war against tedium, its restlessness (he starts nearly every line with a conjunction), its uneasy cynicism. She’s the subject of the song, not the typical rock ‘n’ roll object of beauty or lust or distraction. Bowie was nettled by the snub though, and a few years later he rewrote the song as “Life On Mars?”-brazen enough in his theft that he wrote “Inspired by Frankie” on the LP cover.Ī sullen teenage girl goes to the movies, gets stood up by her friend and dejectedly takes her seat. It (quite literally) is Bowie’s own version of “My Way”-longtime readers may recall Bowie’s chrisom child “Even a Fool Learns to Love,” his attempt to write English lyrics for Claude François’ “Comme d’Habitude.” Bowie’s translation was trumped by Paul Anka’s, which turned François’ stoic Gallic lyric into a grandiose self-assessment, perfect for Frank Sinatra’s late imperial phase. Popular television shows have been named after it, people have gotten married to it. “Life on Mars?,” as fits its cinematic lyric, has become the Citizen Kane of Bowie songs-the youthful masterpiece, the epic, the best thing he ever did. I started working it out on the piano and had the whole lyric and melody finished by late afternoon. Workspace was a big empty room with a chaise lounge a bargain-price art nouveau screen (‘William Morris,’ so I told anyone who asked) a huge overflowing freestanding ashtray and a grand piano.
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Jumped off two stops into the ride and more or less loped back to the house up on Southend Road. I took a walk to Beckenham High Street to catch a bus to Lewisham to buy shoes and shirts but couldn’t get the riff out of my head. ‘Sailors bap-bap-bap-bap-baaa-bap.’ An anomic (not a ‘gnomic’) heroine. A really beautiful day in the park, sitting on the steps of the bandstand. Originally posted on 23 March 2010, it’s “Life On Mars?”
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If you want to see the warts-and-all version, it’s back here. I’ve swapped in the book’s paragraphs on the chords, etc., as the original entry was clunky. Just a touch more concise, I suppose, and a few new quotes and such.
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It was one of the book revisions that took seemingly forever to finish, and then it wound up being not that different from the blog entry. Given Lorde’s tribute to Bowie at the BRIT Awards, it feels like the right time to revive this grand dame.