David Bowie Cover of the Week: Are You Awake? Covers “Modern Love”

This “Modern Love” cover comes from Are You Awake?, a small, anonymous Sweden-based YouTube channel launched in August 2024 whose creator describes it simply as, “When no one is looking I sing my favorite songs.” That’s all I can find about the singer here, other than that her channel includes some other lovely covers. So, OK, the cover I’m featuring this week has an air of mystery about it, but the reason I’m featuring it is simply that I like it! More precisely, I like Awake’s vocals here. Oddly, I think her style strikes closer to what I think the song is actually about than Bowie’s.

What do I mean by that? “Modern Love” was one of Bowie’s big mainstream hits from Let’s Dance in 1983. This song, and the album as a whole, helped transform Bowie from a dangerous, edgy performer who had some hits for sure, but who was just too strange to be fully mainstream. Let’s Dance changed that, brought him into living rooms just as MTV was getting big, put him on the cover of Time Magazine and packed stadiums.

But while the sound of Bowie’s music became more accessible, many of the lyrics did not. “Modern Love” is a great example (“Let’s Dance” is another). The upbeat, pop quality of Bowie’s performance masks a set of lyrics that express despair and uncertainty about institutions including religion and love itself. What exactly was Bowie saying about God and man? Well, characteristic of his writing in general, the words of the song don’t communicate a linear set of ideas. He conjures vague ideas that seem to point in a direction but are difficult to nail down. None of this would have been new for longtime Bowie fans in 1983, but his newfound followers almost certainly just weren’t paying attention.

I found a quote from Nile Rodgers, who described Bowie’s version of the song as, “an old barrelhouse rocker with a real pounding Little Richard-type piano, while on top it has a very sophisticated jazz horn sound.” Awake’s cover tones all of that down. I mean this less pertaining to the instrumental aspect of her cover, though that does it too. I don’t know where the instrumental part comes from—it might be something like karaoke. I don’t think Awake is performing on the instruments. But I do think she’s singing, and her singing is subtle, somewhat tentative and deliberate. Her voice is more contemplative than dynamic. This style aligns with the song’s inherent questions and uncertainty.

So, too, are her facial expressions and the composition of the video itself. Black and white, contained within the small frame allowed her by her phone, focused on nothing but her face, the image is very intimate. Her eyes shift from pleading, to uncertain, to something not quite ecstatic, but perhaps anticipating a kind of ecstasy that the song itself doesn’t actually bring. If you watch the video, you might not come away with exactly the impression I got from it, but what stands out is the contrast between Awake’s intimacy and introversion and Bowie’s outward projection in his famous, and famously extroverted, video from the time.

There’s another contrast that in a way also works as an odd parallel between the two videos—the footage of Bowie singing is taken from a live performance in front of a huge concert audience. His backing band provides strength in numbers and his enormous audience is worshipful. Bowie is total confidence and domination. If the lyrics suggest uncertainty, the performance does not. Awake is the only human in her video, and all we see of her is her face (we see Bowie both close up and from afar, dancing and singing in his hip, pastel ’80s suit). Not only is Awake’s backing band unseen, and probably not even “hers,” but the presence of the earphone in the shot establishes an awareness of the process of her making the video. The scant framing is that she sings her favorite songs when no one is looking. You get that sense from the video, like we’re seeing a girl, alone in her room, singing along to a song she likes.

The contrast is obvious, but the parallel is this—both videos say something about the state of music at their times. Anyone can make a video with their phone, by themselves in their room. The term “musician” has become democratized, and many for whom the term applies have little or no interaction with a live audience. While certainly there are still big concerts like that which Bowie appears at in his video, there’s a lot more music being made in the style of Awake’s video these days, and the unifying sense that “everybody” saw Bowie’s video has evaporated 40 years later.

That said, there’s a hint that Awake is a little more purposeful than she’s letting on. The video is clearly lip-synced. There are whole parts of the vocals that she doesn’t even attempt to sing along with. Assuming that the voice is genuinely hers, that has to be intended. I take the point to be even further detachment from the song itself, like the hesitancy of the lyrics creeps into her performance. But the closeup of her face tells us that she’s thinking about what it all means.

And that works for me.