Bowie’s places
When recently writing about Lodger, it occurred to me that Bowie frequently mentions places in his songs. These places can be as specific as streets or even buildings and as general as “space” or “Earth” or “Mars.” I was thinking about identifying every place mentioned in a Bowie song, but discarded that idea. There are too many songs that mention too many places. That type of post would have degenerated into a nearly-meaningless catalogue, whereas Bowie’s use of places are usually infused with meaning.
So this is a top-ten of sorts, though what follows mentions more than ten songs and ten places. My goal here is to survey how Bowie used place-names to pack in more meaning than space (and the ability to rhyme) would otherwise accommodate:
1. London. London mostly appears in Bowie’s very early songs from the 1960s. But Bowie’s London is not Swinging London, it’s a dreary and seamy place that he wants to escape. “London By Ta Ta” (1968) is more or less about exactly that— the desire to get out of London. “The London Boys” (1966) is about falling in with a bad crowd there, while “The Maid of Bond Street” (1966) is either about a prostitute or an all-purpose criminal navigating London’s underbelly. On the whole, I take Bowie’s attitude toward the biggest city he knew firsthand at the time was that the grass is greener on the other side.
2. New York. Well, this is where the grass was greener, at least for a while. Bowie mentions in, “The Jean Genie” (1973) that “New York’s a go-go;” and the city takes on an excited persona in “New York’s in Love” (1987). Bowie’s views toward New York seemed to become more grounded once he started living there, or at least after 9/11. Bowie seems to reference the attack in “New Killer Star” (2003), with the line, “See the great white scar over Battery Park.” In, “She’ll Drive the Big Car” (2003), Bowie’s character is driving that big car amidst a state of drudgery. Bowie repeatedly mentions the Hudson River and Riverside (presumably, Riverside Drive) and at one point mentions the specific intersection of Ludlow and Grand Street— at which are located historically significant but superficially unspectacular federal style row houses built by John Jacob Astor. The protagonist’s husband bursts her bubble of whatever she dreamt of regarding that location, which happens to be within walking distance of where Bowie lived at the time. Its a little tough to tell if Bowie felt like the 9/11 attacks transformed New York for the worse, or if he came full circle and felt the same way he did about London when he lived there (see above).
3. Detroit. Bowie set his “panic” in Detroit (1973) presumably because of the city’s raucous, unstable reputation. Iggy Pop came out of Detroit, so Bowie probably assumed that the city was populated by chaos agents.
4. Berlin. In yet another example of Bowie writing about a place he lived, Berlin pops up in at least three songs. “Heroes” (1977) mentions, “the wall,” which we all know to be the Berlin Wall. The instrumental “Neukolln” (1977) is named for and inspired by a Berlin neighborhood. Later, Bowie mentions Berlin locations in “Where Are We Now?” (2013). In all these cases, Berlin establishes an atmosphere somewhere between melancholy and desperation.
5. Amlapura. “Amlapura” (1991) uses this Indonesian town as a setting to establish a dreamy atmosphere in a song that blurs history with myth. I don’t think most fans were expected to have so much as heard of the place, so anyone interested in looking it up, and comparing the lyrics to its history would find that there’s meaning to be discovered. This is at least the second Bowie song inspired by Indonesia, the other being “Tumble and Twirl” (1984), which is about Borneo. In both cases, Bowie doesn’t want the location to be too familiar to the presumed audience. He paints both as being appealing but with a vague sense of menace.
6. Bowie’s fake places. Bowie mentioned “Hunger City” in the “Future Legend” (1974) that opens Diamond Dogs. The name alone does half the work of establishing a post-apocalyptic hellscape. “Crack City” does the same for the Tin Machine song of that name (1989). “Freecloud” is the fictional, sentient mountain on which the Wild Eyed Boy lives (1969). The name obviously (perhaps too obviously) evokes both freedom and stature, not to mention a kind of dreamy haziness. The “Zi Duang province” of “Glass Spider” (1987) is also supposed to conjure up an exotic-sounding, far off place in which it just might be the plausible habitat of a giant spider. “Oxford Town” sounds like a real place but isn’t. Bowie’s jailed protagonist on 1. Outside (1995) claims to have not been there. Bowie would have deliberately chosen the same fake name as Bob Dylan did for his civil-rights song, “Oxford Town,” which was obviously inspired by Oxford, Mississippi, except that the Mississippi city is not called Oxford Town. In all the other cases, Bowie uses fake locations to telegraph a simplistic connotation, unburdened by the complications and subtleties of reality. In this case he might be trying to suggest that his narrator was unfairly jailed on account of his race, without ever actually saying anything like that.
7. Paris. Bowie and Adrian Belew mention in their song, “Pretty Pink Rose,” (1990) “She tore down Paris on the tail of Thom Paine; But the left wing’s broken, the right’s insane.” Bowie seems not to think too highly of revolutions. They never work out in his songs. The American patriot, Thomas Paine, supported the French Revolution but was jailed and almost executed by the Great Inquisitor Marc-Guillaume Alexis Vadier. Bowie mentions, “the blood of les tricoteuses” in “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise) (1974), which I take to be another group of protesters who were ultimately disappointed by the French Revolution, which began with an egalitarian justification but ended up with Napoleon. “Pretty Pink Rose,” which also mentions Russia, seems to be political, but it’s hard to pin down. But by placing Paine’s trail in Paris, rather than in the United States, Bowie manages to inject more meaning into the song than the words alone articulate.
8. Belfast. “Star” (1972) opens with the lines, “Johnny went to fight in Belfast; Rudi stayed at home to starve,” followed by Bowie’s pronouncement that he could make it all worthwhile as a rock and roll star. What Bowie is doing is laying out all the bad alternatives for a young, British guy in the early 70s. He’s referring to British soldiers going off to fight in Ireland during the Troubles as an American song might mention Vietnam. Except the mention of fighting in Belfast seems to be a little more value-neutral than most American anti-war songs’ mentions of Vietnam. Its less a political statement and more just something the song’s narrator would rather not do compared to becoming a rock star (I think about the line from, “It Ain’t Easy,” “think about the places a young man can be”). But it’s also a moment in time— the line would make no sense today. Bowie decided to ground this particular song in a gritty reality before returning to some of the more out-there science fiction themes of the Ziggy album. The point is to make the song, the situation and the album’s larger context relatable.
9. Washington. “Young Americans” is replete with imagry Bowie associated with the United States. The song’s protagonist is, “all the way from Washington,” which Bowie must have thought of as an all-American city. After all, it’s the Capital, right? I’m not sure how many Americans would have chosen Washington to represent Anywhere, USA— maybe today it would have made more sense to say, “Springfield.”
10. The Villa of Ørmen. Bowie leaves one more mystery for fans to solve with one of his final songs, “Blackstar” (2016). The song opens with the lines, “In the Villa of Ørmen stands a solitary candle.” There is, in fact, an actual Villa of Ørmen— it’s in Norway. And the word, “ormen,” apparently means “serpent” in Norwegian. This has led to interpretations ranging from the line having something to do with Aleister Crowley to us having it wrong because what Bowie is actually saying is, “the Villa of All Men.” The rest of the song gives us little to work with, although the video does feature a candle. Here, instead of using a place name to say more than could otherwise fit into a song, Bowie is using the name as a kind of negative space. It really invites listeners to inject their own meaning. Or not. Bowie sometimes used words just because he liked the way they sounded.