Day 328 | Red Money

With this song, Bowie took the music of “Sister Midnight,” which he co-wrote with Iggy Pop and was recorded by Iggy for his album, The Idiot, and wrote a completely new set of lyrics.  Presumably this is the better known song, but I actually like “Sister Midnight” better (Bowie performs it on the live album, A Reality Tour). Like many Bowie songs, there’s a lot here to dissect.  There’s a line, “I could not give it away,” followed soon by “project cancelled,” near the end of the song.  This suggests a link to the closing song on the Blackstar album, “I Can’t Give Everything Away.”  There’s some ambiguity in terms of what Bowie can’t give away. In the later song, I assumed Bowie discussing his artistic product, and that might give some clarity about the meaning of the earlier song’s oblique lyrics.  But exactly why Bowie can’t give whatever it is away is clearly different  from song to song—in the earlier song, ‘it” is of so little value that he was unable to give it away, whereas in the later case the reverse is true—Bowie didn’t have the resources to give “it” away.  The other connection is that they are both closing songs and they both mark ends (“project cancelled” closes out the song, the album and the Berlin trilogy—“I Can’t Give Everything Away” closes that album, Bowie’s entire catalogue and indeed his life).  So all this means that “Red Money” deserves to be revisited and dissected a little more.    The video here is of the band Shearwater, which covered the entire Lodger album.  I have posted their videos throughout this tribute because their performance is faithful to Bowie’s album versions.  In the spirit of endings, this will also be the last such video in this series.