Bowie and Politics Part 8: The Planet Earth Blues
I’m writing “Bowie and Politics” as a long-form piece and this week’s entry is, or I should say was particularly long. If I ever pull it all together this week’s blog entry and next week’s will be part of a single chapter, but I’m giving your eyes a break and posting some now and some next week. The primary focus of this chapter is the album Space Oddity. I only saw the attached video for the first time recently. It’s worth watching even if you don’t read what follows. Also, the bolded song names in the following text are hyperlinked to videos of the songs. But you should read what follows…
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David Bowie’s second album, which is today known as Space Oddity, is not generally thought of as especially political. But in so far as politics is about how groups (including society) organize and how people relate to each other, about societal norms, concepts of justice and governance, Space Oddity establishes the foundation of Bowie’s views on politics. He’d spend the next five decades expanding on ideas and feelings first expressed on this album. They are not happy feelings.
Space Oddity begins with a song about a man who flees the Earth and ends with aliens who come to Earth, if only to take one look around and leave again. Between “Space Oddity” and “Memory of a Free Festival” are songs in which lovers cannot relate, groups are self-delusional, outcasts live in fear of government repression and social conventions elicit reality-shattering madness. Bowie’s protagonists don’t know what to do, so they drift off into space, create art or simply try to stay alive.
There is no attempt on Space Oddity, to save the world or foment revolution. Instead, 1960s ideals are exposed as phony, especially in the songs, “Cygnet Committee” and “Memory of a Free Festival.” The title track itself turns the hope and wonder of space exploration—front page stuff in 1969– on its head—Major Tom escapes the banality of married life and celebrity culture where the papers want to know whose shirts he wears. Ground Control is under the impression that Tom is on their mission, but Tom has other plans. He leaves his capsule and simply disengages, presumably forever.
“Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.” “Blue” is a recurring color in Bowie songs, probably because it carries so many connotations. In her book about Bowie’s last works, Blackstar Theory, Leah Kardos does a Jungian-style run-through of all the significances associated with the color, which pops up again and again in Bowie songs, including one of his last, “Lazarus.” The list of associations is long. As with the entire song, Bowie uses the word in “Space Oddity” to suggest more than one meaning—yes, the planet looks, as Carl Sagan would later say like a pale blue dot, but from Major Tom’s perspective it is also sad. It is blue. There’s nothing left there for Tom, who can’t even bring himself to tell his wife directly that he loves her.
Ground Control is an early appearance of a hapless governmental entity. Ground Control is talking to Tom about taking his protein pills and expressing their excitement about his making the grade as a celebrity astronaut, clueless of his true intentions to just get away.
Tom is resigned that there’s nothing he can do about the state of the world, or the state of his life. The planet is blue, and he has no place in it. This is a maximal relationship between an individual and everyone else, but Bowie expresses a similar helplessness in a one-on-one situation in one of his most personal songs, later on the album, “Letter to Hermonie.” That song is a lament about a failed relationship, which Bowie’s narrator clearly thinks is unjust (in real life, Bowie just so happened to be recovering from a failed relationship with a woman named Hermonie).
Bowie does not use the word, “injustice” in the song, but that’s the situation he’s describing. He thinks that they should be together and he thinks she thinks that too. She has a new boyfriend, who makes her up “real fine,” and “They say [her] life is going very well; They say [she] sparkle[s] like a different girl” (emphasis added). But Bowie suspects that this is all a ruse, as she, like he, cries in the dark “when all the world is warm and tired.” Convention keeps them apart. Convention imposed by them.
The narrator of this song reaches a similar conclusion as Major Tom—“I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do,” similar to Tom’s conclusion that “there’s nothing I can do.” Bowie uses three variations of this shoulder shrug in the song—swapping out “we’re” for “I” and “say” for “do.” The song itself is a product of this state of indecision because, lacking a better alternative, “he writes some love.” This encapsulates Bowie’s entire approach to politics—he mostly doesn’t advocate for a solution, but he does create art.
“They” in “Hermoine” serve much the same function as “Ground Control.” “They” are faceless and misperceive what’s actually happening. “They” speak lies imposed upon Hermoine by her new boyfriend, who takes her out “in style.” Bowie would return to these themes later. In “Jump, They Say” (1993) he gets right to the point—“don’t listen to the crowd,” which is literally calling upon that song’s protagonist to commit suicide. In “Fashion” (1980), style is imposed by a goon-squad deploying fascist industry. Being “in style” is a form of role playing. There is no style without an audience to react to it. It’s a mechanism to get others to think something pre-baked about its wearer. Style and fashion are facades worn to convey insincere and unoriginal social messages.
“They,” “the crowd,” even “Ground Control” are all groups—but Hermoine is not the only individual girl Bowie’s protagonists can’t connect with on the album. Similarly remote objects of romantic interest appear in “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed” and “Janine.” The former song starts out in a fairly straightforward narrative style: Bowie’s “unwashed” protagonist is staring up at his love interest through the window of “her father’s house.” She looks back at him, but down her nose and won’t let him in. His appearance – a violation of the social norm and her father’s disapproval prevent her from opening up to what he could do for her. Once Bowie sets this stage, the song falls off a cliff into surreal, quasi-Dylanesque imagery and bizarre claims of identity. “I’m the cream of the great Utopia dream…I’m a phallus in pigtails…I’ve got eyes on my backside…”
What is Bowie talking about? Its not the last time Bowie would make a mysterious claim to be something in a song (what exactly did he mean by, “I’m a Blackstar?”) In part what he’s conveying is that everything he’s saying, the way he presents himself—his very essence comes off to the other person like something out of a Dali painting. It isn’t simply that these two can’t be together; it is impossible for them to understand one another.
Implicitly, Bowie’s protagonist is at least partially at fault. Again, he laments what he can do for the girl in the window. There’s no indication that the song’s narrator has ever so much as spoken to the girl, let alone know anything about her wants and needs. This kind of selfish would-be lover comes up again and again in Bowie’s future songs. “Be My Wife” (1977), for instance is possibly the most self-centered proposal in pop music. In that song, Bowie proposes marriage to an unidentified other because he’s lonely. He doesn’t even express attraction to his would-be wife. He’s been all over the world, he’s lonely and that’s it. This un-empathic approach to relationships is equally out of place in a democratic society that relies at least to some extent upon people with different interests having some agreed-upon sense of mutuality with their fellow citizens.
The point about lovers being unable to communicate is made again in “Janine.” In this case the girl, Janine, wants to get closer than the song’s narrator is willing to allow. She’s “too intense,” threatens to step on his toes and wants to “collocate” his mind. “Collocate:” means to place together in proper order. She wants to get him thinking straight. The threat foreshadows learning to be a part of socia-socia… in “Scream Like a Baby” (1980).
But Bowie’s narrator here can’t be understood. He has things inside his head that even he can’t face. In response to her intensity, he puts a veil on his face. She’d like to crash his walls, but if she takes an axe to him, she’ll kill another man, not him at all.
These three are the nearest things to love songs on Space Oddity. The overall message is that people can’t relate to one another, and the illusion of relations are characters playacting with one another according to roles established by the larger society. But those rules either keep apart those who should be together, or confuse those who already are together. The one character on the album who actually has a girl, Major Tom, leaves Earth in part to flee his wife. Contentment cannot be found in human relationships.
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Two of the songs on Space Oddity, “Wild-Eyed boy from Freecloud,” and “God Knows I’m Good” introduces Bowie’s tendency to look at fear of authority through the eyes of the fearful, rather than through those inducing the fear, or a detached third-party observer. Both are story songs that take place in worlds where society’s law-enforcement function is oppressive. The songs do not examine the laws, who enforces them, or how violations are adjhudicated. Instead, they tell the stories of two outcasts during moments of fear.
The “Wild-Eyed Boy” is about a boy who has a relationship with a magical, sentient mountain. For reasons that are not explicitly explained but apparently because he’s unusual, the boy is imprisoned and awaits execution. As villagers and ‘the hangman” settle down, not thinking about the boy and his pending execution, the boy cries out to the mountain, “It’s so hard for us to really be really you and really me.” In other words, by being true to himself, the boy has invited societal oppression. But the very thing that makes the boy different, his relationship with the magic mountain, spells doom for the villagers—the mountain lashes out with an avalanche. The story does not have a happy ending—the boy cries out to the mountain to stop, because with the entire village dead, nobody would be around to release him.
Nobody dies in “God Knows I’m Good,” but it similarly ends with failure for the protagonist. In this case, the central feature is a poor old woman who attempts to shoplift a can of food from some sort of megastore—a “national concern.” The woman is wracked with guilt and fear amidst a buzzing hive of commercial activity, with indifferent, oblivious people going about their own business, surrounded by machines performing indeterminant functions. It’s actually a scene similar to that of Ground Control in “Space Oddity”—clueless proper people and technology, a dangerous combination for Bowie.
As the old woman attempts to escape with her pilfered can of meat (yes, she’s so sad that she is stealing canned meat), an unidentified figure lays his hand on her shoulder, escorts her away and asks for her name. The song ends with her fainting, laying on the floor, as those previously oblivious people come to see what just happened.
Bowie’s ambiguity in identifying who exactly laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder, where that person was escorting her and what his (or her) intention was is repeated in Bowie’s future depiction of authority figures. Although Bowie didn’t write, The Man Who Fell to Earth, the character he plays is abducted by unidentified authorities, held against his will for unclear reasons, subjected to tests for unclear purposes, subdued with alcohol and eventually released (or more accurately, not stopped from leaving his house, which had served as his prison) without explanation. The sequence deliberately lacks coherence, but is in line with Bowie’s focus on person feeling the sense of fear on persecution. Much as with the old lady in “God Knows,” it isn’t entirely clear where his character’s perceptions are real and what’s a product of chemically altered paranoia.
Both “The Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud” and “God Knows I’m Good” paint bleak pictures of unjust societies. In the one case, a boy is sentenced to death for being different. In the other, the old woman is in such a state that she feels compelled to shoplift a single can of food. Nobody is there to help, and there’s no solution for either the boy or the old woman.
Bowie would return to these themes in future (and I’d say, better developed songs). There’s an echo of “The Wild Eyed Boy” in “Scream Like a Baby” (1980), where once again unspecified authorities round up the misfits. Bowie introduces another woman struggling with economic hardship in “Day In, Day Out” (1987). Those songs don’t end happily, either.
Panning back, Bowie paints the group—society—as organized and governed to stamp out its atypical members and ignore injustice. The mechanized world of “God Knows I’m Good” is arranged to catch the shoplifting hungry woman rather than feed her. In a way, that world was just as fantastic as the magical world of “The Wild Eyed Boy.” It mentions spitting “cash machines” well before ATMs existed – what were they supposed to be? Also, though poverty existed in England in the 1960s as today, welfare programs also existed such that its unlikely a true-life hungry old English women would get to the point that she was one can of food away from starvation. There are no Bowie songs about government programs that aren’t good enough—his concern is more fundamental—survival.
Bowie never acknowledges that society can come together to create norms and governing institutions for the public good—government, authorities and institutions always appear in his songs as oppressive. They create problems for the individual, and the individual is usually powerless in the face of those problems. Bowie, the mask-wearer, suggests that the only survival technique that has a chance is to suppress one’s true self, attempt to go unnoticed or appear to be an inauthentic construct and merely survive.
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Come back next week for the continuation of this chapter…