Bowie cover of the week: Fan of Bowie performs “Rock ‘N Roll Suicide”

Update, October 21, 2023: the video link to the song broke, but I didn’t want to delete the writing, which is more about the song itself than the cover version, so at least for now I’m simply illustrating the post with a few pictures of Bowie.

October 9, 2023
OK, this actually isn’t the best cover of the week. By my usual standards, the best cover posted this week was “I’m Deranged,” which is a real video, by someone calling himself ZehnorTV. This is odd since I recently chose another cover of the same song, which is a fairly obscure and seldom-covered Bowie song. But this week, I’m choosing this amateurish audio recording (with some nice pictures of Bowie thrown in to make it a video) because I wanted to use it as an excuse to reflect more on the lyrics of “Rock N’ Roll Suicide.”

Yesterday I mentioned that the song begins with “somewhat oblique and disjointed lyrics.” While I stand by that, as usual, Bowie might have had some meaning buried within the seeming nonsense. So here I’m going to do some rank speculation:

Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth
You pull on your finger
Then another finger, then cigarette

The opening lines have always confused me, especially the part about the finger pulling. The only thing I associate with the pulling of fingers is the old fart routine— “pull my finger.” Seems like this is not what Bowie is singing about. What I think he’s getting at is the slow passage of time. I can imagine him bored at some point, counting with his fingers— counting what? Minutes maybe? Nothing at all. Like he had nothing else to play with, so he’s pulling his fingers.

The hint is the opening word, time. “Time” pops up again and again in Bowie songs. As I have observed before, time is death. Here, “time” might actually literally mean “death.” Like, “Death takes a cigarette and puts it in your mouth.” That would have been overly dramatic, so Bowie blurred his meaning a bit by using “time.” But “time” doesn’t need to mean “death,” it could just mean time, which tracks with the finger pulling.

There are a number of time related phrases and words in the song. Just a few lines later is, “And the clock waits so patiently on your song,” at which point in the live version from Ziggy Stardust: the Motion Picture, the band sings, “tick-tock, tick-tock.” So, yes, time is moving slowly. The song’s protagonist is going down the drain, but whatever is happening is happening in slow motion. I think of the opening lines of, “Stay,” which gets to the same idea— “This week has passed me so slowly; the days fall on their knees.” I think too of, “Sound and Vision,” in which Bowie sits by himself in a room waiting for inspiration. Bowie can’t imagine a condition worse than stasis, so he opens his song about suicidally self destructive behavior and the abandonment of will with a situation where nothing is happening.

The wall-to-wall is calling
It lingers, then you forget

These lines finish the thought. The only thing I associate with the term, “wall to wall” is a carpet. I think Bowie is describing the temptation of lying down and collapsing into a personal form of entropy. Again, he fleshed this idea out later in “Sound and Vision”:

I will sit right down
Waiting for the gift of sound and vision
And I will sing
Waiting for the gift of sound and vision
Drifting into my solitude
Over my head

More obliquely, he might even be evoking a kind of drug-induced retreat. The floor calls to him maybe not just because he’s tired, but because that’s where he’d be in a narcotic stupor. The song’s most obvious drug reference comes at the end, when Bowie explores his audience to “turn on with me.” But, as far as I know, “turning on” is smoking pot, whereas some of these other, more hidden drug references hint at something harder and more dangerous.

A few lines later comes:

You walk past the café, but you don’t eat
When you’ve lived too long

Again, Bowie is describing a state of state of ennui. His subject is not actually old, but feels tired of life (as I mentioned yesterday, Bowie wrote a song called, “I’m Tired of My Life” as a teenager. If nothing else, Bowie returns to the same themes). Again, he’s connecting a distorted sense of the movement of time with this sense of listlessness. Whoever he’s singing to is done. The state Bowie is describing shows how sloth is one of the seven deadly sins.

This stanza opens with the line, “You’re too old to lose it, too young to choose it,” which is the first moment in the song that calls back to earlier songs on the album. Here I’m going out on a limb because I don’t know when this song was written compared to the others, or when Bowie arrived at his final song order. If The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was simply a concept album about Ziggy, it could have ended with “Ziggy Stardust.” At the end of that song, the kids had killed the man and neither Ziggy nor the Spiders are mentioned again. “Suffragette City” comes next, but that song has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the album. It sounds so natural where it is probably because most of us have been listening to the album for years and can’t imagine it not being there. “Rock ‘N Roll Suicide” is often interpreted as the end of the Ziggy story, but I really don’t think it is. Ziggy contains a few songs that you’d really have to twist into knots in order to fit them into any kind of narrative about the character, Ziggy Stardust. But “Rock ‘N Roll Suicide” ties together the album’s sub rosa themes.

So about being too old to lose it and too young to choose it— it seems awfully similar to the lines from “Starman,” which appears earlier on the album, “Let the children lose it; let the children use it.” In addition to both sequences involving losing it, rhymed with another verb applied to “it,” both sequences mention stages in life. The subject of the latter song is at once too old and too young, whereas the subjects of the earlier song are children. At no point is “it” defined in either song. Seems to me like none of this is a coincidence.

So what’s the connection between “Starman” and “Suicide,” aside from “it” and the fact that they are both on the same album? I’m not exactly sure. At the highest level, the “Starman” of the song possesses mind-blowing advice for people, who, if the songs truly are connected, are living on a planet with five years left to live. The narrator of “Suicide” is imparting life-saving advice. I’m not saying that two songs are describing the same events from different perspectives, but Bowie seems to have had a thought and was trying to express it in different ways.

A couple of the more confusing lines from “Suicide” might make sense in the context of calling back to earlier songs on the album. To my recollection, Ziggy is the only Bowie album that mentions dairy products, so is it a coincidence that two songs do that? There’s the whole sequence in “Five Years” about the narrator seeing someone in an ice cream parlor obliviously drinking milkshakes while news is breaking that the world is coming to an end. “Suicide” contains the seemingly nonsensical line, “don’t let the milk float ride your mind.” If it’s a coincidence that both songs mention a derivative of milk, that’s a pretty strange coincidence.

I have two possible explanations. The first is that the main function of the milk float line is to draw that connection to “Five Years.” Again, this hints at a shift of perspective. The message of “Five Years” seems to be global— the actual world is ending. The perspective of “Suicide” is intensely personal— someone’s personal world is collapsing. Could Bowie be suggesting that the whole fantastic scenario of the album is simply dramatically playing out in someone’s head? There might be more to, “milk” in this reading, like its symbolic of innocence? Lost innocence? Distracting nostalgia? Maybe.

The second possible explanation involves contemplating the meaning of “milk float.” A milk float is a type of electric vehicle used to deliver milk. Since the milk float of the song “rides,” Bowie’s usage suggests that whatever it is that makes an appearance in the song is in fact a vehicle. Less likely but not impossible is that it’s referring to a float, you know, like ice cream in a soda, like a root beer float. This would suggest a stronger tie to the milkshakes of the earlier song.

But why milk at all? I’ve seen reports that in the depth of his drug addiction, the worst of which would come a few years after he recorded this song, Bowie had a “diet of milk, red peppers and cocaine.” I’ve read that some people who use a lot of drugs drink milk to try to avoid getting ulcers, or some such thing. In any case, Bowie might have associated milk with drugs, and even at this point (1972) he would have recognized excessive drug use as self-destructive. So, he could be saying, don’t take so much cocaine that you need a milk float’s worth of milk.

Elsewhere, Bowie would use euphemisms to mean cocaine. In, “The Jean Genie,” he sings about, “walking on Snow White,” and in “Sweet Thing” he asks, “Is it nice in your snow storm, freezing your brain?” Again, for Bowie, drugs were an escape rather than a social activity or otherwise fun vice.

The same stanza that has the milk floats has a seemingly even more impenetrable sequence of lines:

Chev’s brakes are snarling
As you stumble across the road
But the day breaks instead, so you hurry home
Don’t let the sun blast your shadow

What are Chev breaks? Actually, I don’t think this one is too much of a mystery, taken in context. The brakes are snarling while “you stumble across the road.” What’s on the road that has breaks? Cars. “Chev” is Chevrolet. The picture is of this stumbling, distracted person walking around in the dark, obviously to oncoming cars. Maybe its a little more of a mystery as to why this person wants to get out of the light, but overall, the whole setup is describing the despair of the person the song is directed at. She’s so depressed that she’s tempted to just ay down on the floor, maybe curl up into a ball. She counting down the minutes while smoking and possibly using cocaine. She’s walking around all night, not paying attention to cafes and cars.

It’s only after this bleak setup —-the first three stanzas of the song, that the narrator comes out for the first, but not last time, with, “you’re not alone.” It actually all makes sense. Bowie describes the problem first, then the solution.

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I know this is long, but I’m not quite done. Another slightly less strange sequence of lines comes near the end:

you’re not alone
No matter what or who you’ve been
No matter when or where you’ve seen

Again, I think these lines evoke earlier songs from the album. Much of the album is about identity— from “Lady Stardust,” which switches between the masculine and feminine, to “Moonage Daydream,” in which Bowie articles that he is an alligator and a mama/papa. Bowie fantasizes about being a “Star” in “Star.” In that song and “Five Years” he describes types of people. Taken together, there’s a universality about the album and an overt appeal to listeners who might think of themselves as different.

Odder is the line about when and where you’ve seen. I almost wonder if the word is, “you’re” rather than “you’ve,” which would make more sense (it would then be a line about status). But the song that fits worst on the album, the good but seemingly out of context cover, “It Ain’t Easy,” has this sequence:

When you climb to the top of the mountain
Look out over the sea
Think about the places, perhaps, where a young man could be
Then you jump back down to the rooftops
Look out over the town
Think about all of the strange things circulating ’round

Here, the solitary subject of the song is seeing, thinking about strange things. The refrain of the song is, of course, “it ain’t easy to get to Heaven when you’re going down.”

This song makes zero sense in the rough story of Ziggy Stardust, which is basically wrapped up by the third-to-last song on the album. But if there is also a parallel story about the listener, not the alien rock star, falling, we’re left not with a rise, but with an admonition to “gimme your hands.” In this context, Bowie wanted us thinking about the whole album at its end.
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Part of Bowie’s process was to change words that didn’t sound right to him as part of the music, even if changing the word makes it nonsensical. He also sometimes describes feelings, sensations or emotions without totally establishing the context. Also, the way he pronounces some words makes them tougher to make out— sometimes I think that was on purpose. The end result is often more mysterious than it would have been had he just written out, “A car nearly hit you when you crossed the street without looking” (which becomes the line about the snarling Chev brakes).

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OK, that’s enough. About Fan of Bowie? I know nothing. I didn’t chose this song this week for the quality of the cover. But if you made it this far you probably picked up on that.