David Bowie Cover of the Week: Benny Ras performs “Loving the Alien”

Even fans who don’t like Tonight tend to like “Loving the Alien,”* one of only two songs from the album written entirely by Bowie. Bowie himself later said that the album version of the song was over-produced, or something along those lines, and would later perform a more stripped-down version live. Benny Ras’s cover of the song is not in danger of over-production. This is just a guy and his guitar, but that’s enough to remind us what a good song this is.

I don’t know much about Benny, but he’s a Dutch musician. I will say that I didn’t find much especially noteworthy about the first several seconds of this cover, but Benny’s performance builds and he reveals real passion at the height of the song. I don’t think he meant for this to be spectacular— if anything, spectacle detracts from the song’s original mid-80s context. It doesn’t need to be a big production number in order to work. In any case, I liked this very much.

I like it more in part because I don’t come across many covers of “Loving the Alien.” Amidst the typical covers of “‘Heroes,’” “Space Oddity” and “The Man Who Sold the World,” this one stood out. That isn’t enough for me to select it as cover of the week, but it helps.

It also helps that the song is an example of how Bowie had fun with words. He had to have known that fans, perhaps longing for a return to the days of Major Tom and the Starman, would assume that the word “alien” referred to an extraterrestrial. But of course it doesn’t. If anything, Bowie used the word to lure an audience into contemplating his (still oblique) message about religious strife in the middle-east. In any case, the lyrics are as clear as day in Benny’s rendition of the song, which gives us reason to renew our contemplation of what Bowie was trying to get at. Well done.

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* One notable detractor of Bowie’s version of this song is Chris O’Leary, author of the Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog (which is far superior to mine) and a couple of books about Bowie. You can click on the bolded words to read Chris’ commentary on the song, which I can over-simplify in characterizing as concluding that it was kind of a noble failure. That said, I don’t think anything Chris wrote extends to Benny’s performance, which he might conceivably like better than Bowie’s (!)