Divine Symmetry | 4 | Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” and Bowie’s “Zeroes”

And me, my little red Corvette has driven by
– “Zeroes,” Bowie

“Zeroes” is one of my favorite Bowie songs from his 80s period. I don’t think it was released as a single and is, I think often overlooked because it’s buried in Never Let Me Down (1987), which is widely regarded as one of Bowie’s weakest albums and representative of his creative nadir. But it’s a good song with some great lyrics.

Bowie turned 40 in 1987. He was just past his commercial peak, driven by the 1983 album, Let’s Dance, but still doing stadium shows (that’s where I first saw him live). The critical reception to this album helped push him over the edge from being a hot commodity to yesterday’s news. Bowie seemed to have sensed it coming, and was frustrated with his own creative stagnation. He would discuss this openly later, but “Zeroes” suggests he was struggling even at the time.

The “Little Red Corvette” line is clearly a reference to Prince, whose song, “Little Red Corvette” was sexy, edgy and commercial successful — the kind of song Bowie used to make. Bowie chronicler Nicholas Pegg noted in the Complete David Bowie, “Bowie responded to a leading question by agreeing that Prince was ‘sort of the eighties version’ of himself, in terms of the more exhibitionist forms of theatricality and musicianship.’ He hastily went on to insist that, ‘I’ve moved on to a different area now…’”.

But the line in “Zeroes” suggests that maybe Bowie hadn’t moved on, especially when considered in context:

Now tomorrow’s back claiming redemption is on your heels
And a toothless past is asking you how it feels
And me my little red Corvette has driven by
My fair weather heart has fallen in

This is Bowie expressing regret about his past and his missed moment, and concern about his own ability to seize the opportunity for creative redemption. As always, at least with Bowie’s best songs, his lyrics are not straightforward, but I read regret and self-doubt in this song, which after all is called, “Zeroes.”

All this becomes even more interesting in considering what the Prince song is actually about. The eponymous Little Red Corvette is not a car, but a lover. The song is about a “fast” woman (actually, there’s nothing in the song specific thing gender, but I’m going to go with woman here) who cycles through partners. The song’s narrator is struggling with his temptation to become her next conquest with the full knowledge that he might be a one-and-done lover. Though I can’t say that I’m as familiar with Prince lyrics as I am with Bowie’s, it seems perhaps ironic that in this song, the singer, Prince, is the one who’s interested in slowing down.

It’s also ironic that Bowie should take the term, “Little Red Corvette” and use it as a metaphor for opportunity. Although the narrator of “Zeroes” is also singing to a potential lover, “Little Red Corvette” is not a reference to her (again, I’m making a presumption about gender). To the extent that Prince is singing about an opportunity, it’s an opportunity to have a really fun if not terribly meaningful Saturday night. Bowie is singing about making the most of a moment in time and squandering the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution in that moment. In the context of the song, “the Zeroes” is the name of a fictional band, so, while the line from point A to point B is not straight, Bowie might be signaling that his potential lover is music itself.

Consider the idea that Bowie is singing to the personification of music with these lines, from later in the song:

Hi, can I walk you home again today
Gotta get forgive and forget hey-hey
Something good is happening I don’t know what it is
Don’t you know we’re back on trial again today

Its like he’s looking for another chance, seeking forgiveness for sins of the past (like his critically derided previous album, Tonight), with full consciousness that he and his lover (again, think music) will be on trial again this go around. Pegg notes that the “something good is happening” is resonant of Bob Dylan’s song, “Mr. Jones,” which he suspects was deliberate because Bowie was Mr. Jones. But I’m also thinking of Bowie’s later song, with Tin Machine, “I Can’t Read,” suggesting that he was struggling with an inability to discern the good from the bad. (Or even earlier, in “Sound and Vision” where Bowie struggles with the creative process by deciding to “sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision”). Later still, Bowie would reflect on the mid-80s period and lament that his mistake was trying to give the people what they wanted instead of making music for himself. And sure enough, more lines in the song can be heard in exactly this context:

I say the dream was all for you
You’re nobody else
Tonight the Zeroes were singing for you

I should note that I have heard the line as, “You and nobody else” rather than, “You’re nobody else”. Not sure if that makes a difference. Anyway, the meaning I read into this as connecting “the dream” to an audience of one— music itself, or perhaps the narrator himself, rather than a mass audience. Tonight the Zeroes are singing for you. In his self assessment, Bowie had become a Zero, but in aspiring to turn things around, he’s returning to his singular muse.

By the way, could Bowie have been deliberate in his use of the word “tonight” here— like he’s leaving a clue that this song is a lamentation on his last album? Bowie certainly wasn’t a stranger to double-meanings.

The Prince song, on the surface has nothing to do with any of that. That said, I suspect that Bowie was consciously suggesting that success is a fickle lover, much like Prince’s Little Red Corvette. There are a few other lines in the Prince song that remind me of lines in Bowie songs. I don’t think Prince was doing this on purpose, but I can imagine Bowie listing to the song through the filter of his own lyrics:

You’re the kinda person that believes in makin’ out once
Love ’em and leave ’em fast

These lines remind me of the part of “Suffragette City” where Bowie suddenly declares, “wham bam thank you ma’am.” In that song, the narrator is the aggressor. “Wham bam” isn’t the same as “love ‘em and leave ‘em” but it’s pretty much the same idea. In Bowie’s mind, was he the Little Red Corvette? As much of a stretch as this might seem, Bowie was very much aware of his own red hair during the period where it was he, not Prince, who was expressing “exhibitionist forms of theatricality and musicianship.” At one point in the mid-70s while changing his look, he kept his hair red because that’s how he was known in the United States. It is that version of himself that had driven by.

There’s a couple other lines that trod on similar ground as Bowie songs. Saturday night is a point in the week’s cycle that appears in many rock songs, and in this case gives Prince’s narrator an excuse to indulge: “…it was Saturday night, I guess that makes it all right.” This makes me think of, well it makes me think of Saturday Night Fever and “Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting,” but also Bowie’s “Drive in Saturday.” All of these songs and more frame Saturday night as kind of a magical period of abandon, where the normal rules and patterns of society don’t apply.

Elsewhere in the song, Prince describes what happens when he decides to go for it. Suddenly, the girl isn’t a Corvette: “the ride is so smooth; you must be a Limousine.” This makes me think of the line from “Fame,” “what you like is in the limo,” as well as the lines from, “Golden Years,” “Gonna drive back down where you once belonged; In the back of a dream car twenty foot long.” Not quite the same thing, but both Prince and Bowie use images of limousines to evoke desire and pleasure. And in the case of “Golden Years,” here’s another connection between Bowie being reflective and “Little Red Corvette” (albeit a distant connection).

In the end, both songs have somewhat ominous endings. After Prince describes a wild ride, he concludes, “ Babe, you got to slow down; Little Red Corvette; ‘Cause if you don’t, ’cause if you don’t; You’re gonna run your body right into the ground.” Bowie, meanwhile, throws his hands up— his last lines are, “Doesn’t matter what you try to do; Doesn’t matter where you try to go; Doesn’t matter who we really are” before fading out with a chant of, “doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter.”

How depressing.