Bowie Songs of the Year #1: “It’s No Game” (1980) Part 2: The Song.

“To be insulted by these fascists is so degrading…”

This is why I chose “It’s No Game” to represent the #1 issue/story of the year, which is the resistance to authoritarianism:

Different versions of “It’s No Game” begin and end my favorite album, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). The album as a whole is largely about the individual’s struggle against his environment— authority, addiction, conformity, societal pressures. The two versions of this song act as the album’s parameters, telling us that, while Scary Monsters is not a concept album, it also isn’t just a random collection of songs.

The first version, “It’s No Game (N0. 1” sounds to me like a song of defiance. Bowie screams the lyrics. Of his hundreds of songs, there is none other in which he does this. Here, he’s very angry and sounds, yes, defiant. Bowie is joined by a woman shouting Japanese versions of the same lyrics (yes, I had to look that up). While Bowie seems to have lost his temper, the female voice, while also angry, seems more controlled. In many respects, it’s all a set up for what’s to come.

As with many of Bowie’s best songs, “It’s No Game” doesn’t work as straight narrative. It’s hard to look at the lyrics by themselves and see that they tell a story. Rather, Bowie uses the words to enhance the feel of the song, and I think it only fully works in the context of the album as a whole.

Nonetheless, some lines stand out and have meaning to me, staring with the line about the fascists’ degrading insults. That line right there could easily stand in for the slogan of 2022. But there’s more there. Elements of this song date back to a piece Bowie was playing with as far back as the 60s called, “I’m Tired of My Life.” I’m not sure that what he retained, such as the line, “You throw a rock against the road and it breaks into pieces,” has any great meaning in itself, but that elements of the song had been sloshing around in Bowie’s head for the entire decade of the 70s suggests that there’s a whole lot of subtext here.

The song touches on Bowie’s past— not just the recycled elements of “I’m Tired of My Life,” but possible references to other songs. “Silhouettes and shadows watch the revolution.” Makes me think of another obscure Bowie song from the early days, “Shadow Man,” which Bowie eventually returned to with his Toy project. Shadows appear in other Bowie songs— in “Golden Years” he exhorts his audience to “run for the shadows.” In “Seven,” he claims to “listen to the shadows” while he “play[s] among their graves. The #4 song of the year, “How Does the Grass Grow,” borrows music from a song by a group called “The Shadows.”

As a side note, this is not the only time Bowie uses a word or phrase that is also a band name— think “The Pretty Things,” a term that appears in no less than three Bowie songs, and also the name of a band he covered on Pin Ups.

Anyway, “revolution,” is another concept that appears over and over in Bowie’s catalogue, either by specific reference (“We never got off on that revolution stuff”— “All the Young Dudes”) or by description (“Panic in Detroit”).

So here, in “It’s No Game,” these two concepts are married. The shadows watch the revolution. To me, the shadows are bystanders. They are witnesses to something happening around them but do nothing to influence the outcome. Bowie never treats revolution as a positive thing— “where’s the moral when people have their fingers broken”— Bowie’s revolution is a lot of meaningless violence. The outcome is dystopia.

And here, in “It’s No Game (No.1), Bowie’s narrator is just resisting it all.

But Bowie’s resistance is not a story of victory. “It’s No Game (No. 2) is a slower version of the same song, with the same lyrics, closing out Scary Monsters. In it, Bowie sounds redesigned. He’s lost the fighting spirit, if not the fight itself. Scary Monsters is not an album of hope, but it also isn’t definitive. Bowie is still around to sing the closing song. The song, and the overall album, is about struggle, not outcome.

And that’s what the resistance of 2022 was too, struggle, not outcome. To many fans, Scary Monsters was Bowie’s last greatest work (I disagree, though it is my favorite album). “It’s No Game (No. 2)” doesn’t just close out the album, but the strong of albums beginning with 1969’s Space Oddity. Next for Bowie was Let’s Dance, which was a radical departure. Is that what’s next for us as we head towards 2023? A radical departure? We’re about to find out.

“I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring” – David Bowie