Bowie songs of the year #7: “What’s Really Happening” (1999)

“Grown inside a plastic box; Micro thoughts and safety locks; Hearts become outdated clocks; Ticking in your mind…” These words are the product of the internet. Bowie, who established an ISP called Bowienet in 1998, launched an on-line contest that year in which contestants (there were 80,000) submitted potential lyrics for a new song. Bowie provided some of the music on his web site for inspiration, and ultimately recorded the complete song in view of an online audience for his album, hours…, which would become the first by a major artist made available by download. So, in addition to everything else, Bowie was an internet pioneer.

Bowie referred to “What’s Really Happening” as a “cyber song,” and it is at least in part actually about the internet (those winning lyrics, by a guy named Alex Grant, certainly are about the internet). It is also a product of the internet. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s not remembered as one of Bowie’s better works. From its early days, the internet was a sordid place, and many of its children turned out to be more than a little flawed.

Those flawed children were on full display in 2022. 2022 saw the launch of Truth Social, the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, and the rise and fall of the cryptocurrency industry among other dubious developments. It isn’t news that the internet is sketchy, but these types of developments seemed to pile up one after the other this year, and unlike Bowie’s innovative but largely mediocre song, they had significant ramifications on society.

Of these developments, what Musk is doing with Twitter reached most directly into my life. Although I was never a prolific Tweeter, I did come to use the service as a source for news. Shortly after Musk took over, though, my feed came to be populated by Tweets that were not only from right wingers, but revealed an anti-empiricist and pro-authoritarian bias. I followed some conservatives, but the types of Tweets I started getting with great frequency came from people I didn’t follow, and they seemed especially incendiary. Once Musk allowed Trump back on Twitter, I had enough and quit. But the teetering enterprise is still spreading disinformation and sewing disharmony to too much of the remaining world.

Musk attempted to use his internet-influence to tell Americans how to vote— he endorsed Republicans, and to try to get Ukraine to make “peace” by making concessions to Russia. I think of a line from another Bowie song, “The Supermen” (1970), “Where all were minds in uni-thought…”

But that song was not about the internet, “What’s Really Happening” is. The song’s refrain, “What’s really happening?; what tore us apart?” contemplated in context really seems like the right set of questions to ask about Twitter and the other, similar developments.

A clip was floating around (floating around the internet) of Bowie talking about the web’s potential impact on society back in 1999. Those comments these days have largely been viewed as prescient. But perhaps more so are some of Bowie’s dystopian songs, though maybe he hadn’t made the connection when he wrote them. Nonetheless, the questions he was asking more than two decades ago seem relevant today.