10 Obscure references in Bowie songs

In a recent post I went down the rabbit hole contemplating Bowie’s reference to “Reet Petite” in the song “Red Money.” It’s an obscure reference both because the song “Reet Petite” is not necessarily well known and, on the surface, would seem to be unrelated to Bowie’s song. It’s also obscure because it’s hard to hear Bowie actually articulate the words. I was thinking about this when I heard someone on a podcast mention that Bowie’s frequent obscure references served to spark interest in the referenced topics. I think it was Arsalan Mohammad who said this while talking with Carlos Alomar on his excellent Album To Album podcast.

Anyway, this thought prompted me to start cataloging some of the obscure references I’ve mentioned in recent blog posts, which turned into the following list. Of course the most obscure references are ones I (or we) haven’t picked up on yet!

Anyway, I’ll add some caveats about the list after #10, but here are ten obscure Bowie references:

1. “I’m sitting in the Chestnut Tree…” (“Girl Loves Me,” 2016). The Chestnut Tree Café is the setting of the close of 1984, where the broken protagonist, Winston Smith, sits drinking gin and reflecting on how he now loves Big Brother. I recently noted—an observation I’ve never seen anywhere else—that this scene is remarkably similar to the closing scene of The Man Who Fell to Earth, at least in the film version starring Bowie as Thomas Newton. Others, including Chris O’Leary and Leah Kardos, have raised the possibility that the line is also a reference to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and given that it’s Bowie, it is entirely possible that he meant to evoke both. But since the same song also alludes to another dystopian novel from Bowie’s younger days, A Clockwork Orange, and given Bowie’s self-awareness that, like Winston and Newton, he too was nearing the end of his story, I tend to think this is primarily an 1984 reference.

2. “Hey man, droogie don’t crash here” (“Suffragette City,” 1972). The Clockwork Orange reference in “Girl Loves Me” comes from Bowie’s use of the book’s fictional language, Nadsat. But that wasn’t the first time Bowie used a term from that made-up cant. “Droogie” is the term used by the book’s lead character, Alex, to refer to his friends and fellow hoodlums. Bowie was obviously a fan of dystopian fiction, but he also took inspiration from the costumes used in the movie version of A Clockwork Orange and even played selections from the film’s soundtrack before some of his early concerts. Alex is an eccentric but highly threatening character, so an evocation of him comes with an edge. I listened to “Suffragette City” for years without quite making out what word Bowie was using, so this is another example of a reference with a less-than-obvious meaning that is also tough to pick up from casual listening.

3. “They’ll never clone ya” (“Boys Keep Swinging,” 1979). I have long wondered whether Bowie, in 1979, could have known that it is impossible to clone a male. I recently mentioned this to Leah Kardos in a yet-to-be-posted interview. Well, it turns out that I was wrong—it is possible—but the idea was, at least in the late seventies, somewhat widely believed, in part for scientific reasons. That said, a more intriguing possibility is that Bowie was making yet another reference to dystopian fiction, this time Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. A plausible link is that in Huxley’s novel, human reproduction is an industrial process built entirely around the manipulation of female eggs, creating a cultural shorthand in which cloning is imagined as a female-only enterprise. Huxley’s egg-based reproduction system isn’t scientifically possible because an embryo created solely from female chromosomes could only be female, yet his novel depicts both sexes being produced this way. Meanwhile, the real scientific misunderstanding of the era—that cloning was inherently a female-only process—came from the fact that early cloning research relied entirely on female eggs and produced only XX embryos. I continued to hold this belief up until a very, very short time ago, so, Leah, if you are reading this, sorry! (But Bowie’s reference was probably more than a throwaway line anyway.)

4. “Nabokov is sun-licked now upon the beach at Grunewald,” (“I’d Rather Be High,” 2013). Sticking with literature, but moving away from dystopian literature, this line either refers to Nabokov’s novel The Gift, specifically a scene set in Berlin’s Grunewald, or the possibility that Bowie encountered the passage by way of reference in Otto Friedrich’s Before the Deluge rather than in the novel itself. I didn’t know this off the top of my head but heard it on an episode of The Bowie Book Club, which in turn referenced a Chris O’Leary post about the song.

5. “Well he laughed insane and quipped ‘KAHLIL GIBRAN’” (“The Width of a Circle,” 1970) Still staying in the world of literature, this is another line I simply couldn’t make out for years. Kahlil Gibran was a Lebanese-American poet, artist, and writer best known for The Prophet, a collection of spiritual essays written in a poetic, philosophical style. His message of individual freedom, love, inner truth, and rebellion against conformity resonated strongly with young people in the early 1970s, who embraced the book as a countercultural guide to personal meaning.

6. “…One magical movement from Kether to Malkuth” (“Station to Station,” 1976). This one is possibly the best-known obscure reference to Bowie fans. I’m sure most of us have heard the line, but I’m not sure how many of us know what it means (and by the way try to say “Kether” and “Malkuth”). Anyway, Kether and Malkuth are the highest and lowest spheres on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, representing pure divine unity at the top and the material world at the bottom. Bowie can be seen drawing the Tree of Life in the promotional art for Station to Station, an album that addresses spiritual searching.

7. “If I don’t explain what you ought to know you can tell me all about it on the next bardo” (“Quicksand,” 1971) Now, sticking with the spiritual, for years I assumed that this line was somehow about Brigitte Bardot, even though there is no context in which that would make sense. Eventually I learned that in Buddhism, “bardo” refers to an intermediate state of existence between death and rebirth, marked by shifting visions and opportunities for liberation. That’s what Bowie was referring to.

8. “Someone scrawled on the wall ‘I smell the blood of les tricoteuses’” (“Candidate,” 1974) And keeping with the embarrassing misheard lyric theme, for a long time I thought Bowie was saying “tree cutters,” like he was working a reference to lumberjacks into his song for some reason fathomable only to him. Les tricoteuses were the knitting women often depicted as sitting near the guillotines during the French revolution, splattered with the blood of royals getting their heads chopped off. So “the blood” here might not have originated from les tricoteuses themselves. The term has over the years taken on a life of its own, coming to mean a kind of sadistic woman (for instance, Ian Fleming applied the term to the villainous Bond villain Rosa Klebb in the novel From Russia with Love). I see a bit more nuance in the allusion, as les tricoteuses may have originally been the women who organized the bread riots that sparked the revolution. While their initial protests were well-founded, the movement they began was later co-opted by warring political factions, offering the spectacle of public executions instead of bread. This seems in line with the song’s larger themes of failure at self-governance.

9. “Feel like Dan Dare lies down” (“D.J.,” 1979). Here’s another line that’s hard to make out and might be confusing to those who can discern the words. Dan Dare was and is a British comic book character that’s almost kinda like an optimistic version of Major Tom. Although I’ve never read an Eagle comic, which features the character, I take him to be an adventurer along the lines of Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Dan’s space is one of adventure, action and endless possibility, very much unlike Bowie’s space of cold, death-like stasis. Bowie might have meant for discerning audiences to focus as much on the “lies down” part of the line as the “Dan Dare” part, especially in a song that opens with its narrator lamenting, “I’m home, lost my job, and incurably ill.”

10. “Time, in Quaaludes and red wine, demanding Billy Dolls, and other friends of mine” (“Time,” 1973). Billy Dolls is Billy Murcia, late of the New York Dolls. Murcia died in 1972 after, reportedly, taking quaaludes and drinking red wine. Though the Dolls continued as a band well into the 21st Century, the “Billy Dolls” reference has to have become less obvious over time. You know, time…

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OK, here are the caveats: First, this is not even close to a comprehensive list. Obscure references was kinda Bowie’s thing, so there’s plenty more. Second, this is a list of ten because, ya know, ten, but it isn’t a “top ten.” That would be arbitrary and someone would doubtlessly object. Third, some of what I’m calling obscure might not be obscure to you. I get it. Finally, this list is heavy on references that are obscure because listeners might not understand what the words mean, but can hear them just fine.