Day 210 | Prisoner of Love

The most noteworthy thing about this song is that it got an official video, which is what I’m posting. As best I can tell, the song’s narrator is in love with someone who is vulnerable to being taken advantage of by others. The narrator might be either overly protective or at a point where he realizes his love is blinding him to the limitations of his lover. I think that’s how he’s a “prisoner of love”—he should walk away but he can’t. The song suffers from a few characteristics common with Tin Machine: to begin with it gets preachy. Bowie singing about his own predicament and mental anguish is all well and good, but then when he starts lecturing, “don’t be fooled by fools who promise you the world…” he is as simplistic in his admonitions as he is mysterious in his self-reflection. The other problem is that he (they) can’t just leave this as a run of the mill song, but try to elevate it with profound-sounding insertions like the Allen Ginsberg reference, “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation…”—really? Couldn’t Bowie have come up with his own way of making whatever point he was trying to make? What does the invocation of the poem, “Howl,” do to the song? Then there’s the similes about love walking into town, which to me sounds like a reference to U2’s “When Love Comes to Town,” which was released a year earlier. If that was intentional the purpose is lost on me. Finally there is a totally unintentional comic resonance about the song that Bowie and the band could not have possible prepared for—its similar title to the Mel Brooks more recent song, “Prisoners of Love,” which to me is one of the funniest numbers in the Producers musical. Album: Tin Machine

Note from 2018: I don’t know what happened to the “official video” but it has vanished from You Tube, so I instead posted an audio link to a 1999 remaster (I am still a little unclear as to what a “remaster” is, but it is posted here).