Bowie songs of the year # 4: “Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud” (1969)

As I write this, a world conference on biodiversity is underway in Montreal, with the stated goal of making peace with nature. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau opened the conference proclaiming that nature was under attack (by humans). That might be so, but in 2022 nature struct back, once again, repeatedly.

The biodiversity conference in itself is not a story of the year, but nature’s revenge certainly has been. In addition to threat of climate change (and the threat to biodiversity), the extreme weather events repeated at such a pace that they are treated somewhat like mass shootings— excited but short-term coverage, with limited of attempts by most media outlets to connect them together.

According the Yale Climate Connections, citing an insurance broker, “At least 29 billion-dollar weather disasters have rocked the planet so far in 2022…Heat waves in Europe killed more than 16,000 people and nearly 1,700 died as a result of flooding in Pakistan. The disasters included 14 severe weather events… six floods, five droughts, three tropical cyclones, and one European windstorm.” Notable internationally were European drought and Pakistan flooding, nationally notable was Hurricane Ian, and locally notable was the second 6+ foot snowstorm in Buffalo in less than a decade.

In addition to storms and floods, nature continued to deploy disease as means of counterattack in 2022. Though US society (and presumably much of the world) decided the covid pandemic is over— the covid pandemic disagreed. It was joined by the proliferation of monkey pox and the return of the flu, RSV and polio, of all things. As the world gets warmer and nature retreats, we can expect more disease in the future, while the less than halfhearted response to what we’re dealing with now is like Miracle Grow for mutations.

Humanity versus nature? I’m betting on nature.

I think the young Bowie meant for “The Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud” to be a kind of fairy-tail song. While a good vehicle for his voice at the time, the song has always struck me as juvenile and more akin to the less-well known songs he put out in prior years. That said, at its heart, the song is about nature getting revenge on humanity. Unlike many Bowie songs, this one actually tells a story, of a boy that has a magical relationship with a living mountain. About to be executed, the boy calls upon the mountain for help. The mountain responds with an avalanche that destroys the town but, in doing so, leaves the boy apparently with a noose around his neck because nobody was left to cut him down from the gallows.

As an interesting side note, the song doesn’t explicitly spell out why the boy was being executed. Presumably his unnatural relationship with the mountain made him an “other” in the eyes of the townspeople. Certainly, this would be a theme that would go on to attract fans to Bowie for years to come.

But more relevant with the theme I’m highlighting, the song shows that it doesn’t pay to mess with Mother Nature. Even the boy doesn’t grasp the consequences of trying to manipulate nature to his own ends. In that, the song provided an apt metaphor to our current predicament.

In the long run, this is the most important and consequential development not just of 2022, but of this phase of human existence. And as prominent aspects of it has been in the news this year, if anything, it’s been underplayed.