Bowie cover of the week: Danzig performs “Cat People”

I usually like to select a new video by a lesser known performer for the cover of the week, but this appears to be an older cover by an established band. Nonetheless, it was recently posted to YouTube, so that gives me an excuse. Several of the other recently posted covers this week are faithful renditions of songs such as “Starman” and “The Man Who Sold the World,” but Danzig, here, takes a Bowie song and adapts it to their heavy metal style, which, though not superior to the original, I like because the artist does more than just pay homage to Bowie.

I don’t know of this video is an official release from the band. There seem to be several videos of songs by Danzig set to scenes from movies. Perhaps that’s the band’s thing, or perhaps it’s a fan project. In this particular case, the song is set to the climactic scene from the Tarantino movie, Inglorious Basterds. The movie, in fact, uses Bowie’s version of the song in its actual soundtrack, which is funny because the song was not only recorded for an entirely different movie, but it is named for that movie, Cat People. So this is a video of a cover of a song set to a scene in a movie that borrowed the original song from another movie. But hey, it’s a great song and is worth being recycled.

I’m not overly familiar with Danzig, but this cover reminds me that Bowie was actually at the forefront of heavy metal. The Man Who Sold the World is largely a metal album. Bowie released the album in 1970, only a couple of years after bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath pioneered the genre. Between that album and Hunky Dory, and to a much lesser extent, Bowie’s forgettable eponymous debut album (the latter two of which are decidedly not metal albums) Bowie seemed like he was linking himself thematically to the occult and mysticism, which are common heavy metal themes. I think all that was overshadowed by the alien imagery of Ziggy Stardust (see yesterday’s entry), so other than an oft-reproduced image of Bowie dressed as Aleister Crowley, which I’m guessing most people think is Bowie as a sphinx, this period of Bowie’s formation as an artist is largely forgotten. Well, it’s not forgotten so much as hiding in plain sight because, surely, The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory are not lost albums. Perhaps Danzig chose “Cat People” in recognition of a point of common musical heritage with Bowie. In any case, it all comes together, and regardless of whoever thought to use it against the scene from Inglorious Basterds, that works too.