David Bowie Cover of the Week: Zachary Scot Johnson covers “Cygnet Committee”

I selected this week’s featured cover in part because of the sheer ambition of the artist, Zachary Scot Johnson, who is working his way through covering the entirety of the Space Oddity (1969) album. As if that weren’t a big enough exercise, it is a small subcomponent of his ongoing Song a Day Project. The antecedent of this very blog was my own type of song-a-day project, in which I posted a different Bowie song on Facebook every day for a year after Bowie died. Writing about a song a day is one thing, but recording a cover song every day for more than a decade is on an entirely different scale.

So, Johnson has this cover thing down! He knows what he’s doing, has his own style, and—well, I won’t go so far as to say that he’s made “Cygnet Committee” his own, but he’s certainly made a distinctive adaptation of a song that I don’t think quite gets its due. I almost randomly chose this among Johnson’s covers in part because it came up first in my feed. His other covers are done in a similar style and are of a similar quality, so I’m not saying this is better or worse than his “Janine” or “God Knows I’m Good.” But it also gives me an excuse to write a little about “Cygnet Committee” itself.

I had an odd thought, as I do, while listening to this cover, which is that the songs from the Space Oddity album, with the exception of the title track, occupied a relatively smaller and smaller share of the totality of Bowie’s work with every new album he released. The song “Space Oddity” always retained an outsized share, and no, I’m not talking literal mathematical ratios here. What I mean is that when I started getting into Bowie in the 1980s, there were simply fewer Bowie songs and albums—depending on what you want to count, about half of what exists today. So songs from any particular album seemed more essential and defining. “Cygnet Committee” is far from forgotten today, but it gets mentioned less and less in essays and analysis about Bowie and his work. Though there’s a through line between this song and, say, “Blackstar” (2016) in that they are both (as are others in between) epochal, thematically impressionistic, and replete with cryptic lyrics, you’re likely to find more reflections on the later song these days than the earlier one.

But I think “Cygnet Committee” contains many of the seeds that would bloom into themes that Bowie would address for the next half-century. Often interpreted as a commentary against the ’60s and the hippie movement, which I think is right, I hear the song to be a broader condemnation of ideology, groups, and a particularly Bowie-sequenced theme of individuals offloading their agency to charismatic figures. In the song, peace-and-love-sounding rhetoric becomes increasingly violent. For what end? The song’s narrator asserts, “I will fight for the right to be right; I will kill for the good of the fight for the right to be right.” Ten years later Bowie’s friend Eric Idle would echo this style of thinking in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, but that’s another story for another day. What’s interesting as a point in time for Bowie is that he’s belittling the idea of rights. Other songs on the album get to more fundamental needs like hunger (“God Knows I’m Good”) and deadly government oppression (“The Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud”), but the narrator of this song is willing to kill for the good of the fight for the right to be right. In all of Bowie’s more than 400 songs, he never articulates a defense of principles (which I actually think is related to one of the themes I was writing about last week—Bowie’s repeated use of the word “nothing,” but that’s really opening up a different line of argument).

Anyway, as with many future Bowie songs, groupthink is disastrous here. Also, this might be the first appearance of this charismatic figure — “our friend, a talking man,” who would later appear in guises ranging from Ziggy Stardust to Big Brother. In this song, the narrator claims, “We used him, we let him use his powers; we let him fill our needs, now we are strong.” Though the next line is not “then the kids killed the man,” implied is the entire cycle of the group turning over its own power to this demagogic figure (“we want you, Big Brother”), only to later bring him down. Bowie does not imply that this is a good dynamic.

At this point in his life and career, Bowie was among the crowd, looking to his left and right and seeing phonies using hollow words to pledge themselves to empty causes, while building up their own designated leaders only to later bring them down. Soon enough, though, Bowie was looking down from the stage at those crowds. He’d go on to compare rock stars to gods (in, for instance, a comment to photographer Mick Rock) and Hitler to rock stars. I am reminded of a quote I read in Glenn Hendler’s book about Diamond Dogs in which Bowie claimed that he could get his audience to do anything, which he seemed to find dangerous and disturbing. The road to all that starts with “Cygnet Committee.”

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Zachary Scot Johnson is a Minnesota-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who has toured the U.S. since 2001, performing alongside artists such as Shawn Colvin, Keb’ Mo’, Marc Cohn, and Suzanne Vega. His ongoing endeavor, The Song a Day Project, features him recording and posting a song—either an original or a cover of artists like Joni Mitchell, Rosanne Cash, or Lisa Loeb—every day from wherever he happens to be. The series has run continuously for more than 4,200 days, spanning over eleven and a half years without a single missed day.

Link to his website HERE. I based the above biographical sketch of Johnson on information from his website.