Divine Symmetry I 7 I “Panic in Detroit;” “Love is a Battlefield” and “How”

Thus far I have written in the “Divine Symmetry” series about similarities between Bowie lyrics and those of others. Here I’m going to attempt to write about musical similarities, and I realize I’m on thin ice.

I know next to nothing about music, so I consulted with a friend who does. I asked him to listen to Bowie’s “Panic in Detroit,” Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield” and Cranberries’ “How” (click on the bolded song names to link to the other two songs). I have long thought the three songs shared a similar sound (not to confuse things, but Bowie’s “Up the Hill Backwards” shares the same commonality). But what exactly am I hearing that’s similar? My friend who knows about music heard things that I hadn’t, but we both had a hard time isolating exactly what it is I’m hearing.

So here’s my attempt to use non-musical terminology: it’s the galloping sound. I’m not even sure what instruments are making it. I think Bowie uses a mix of electric guitar and bongos, while Benatar, I think is using a synthesizer and the Cranberries are using a base guitar…I think. Is it a Bo Diddley beat? Is it the baseline? The chord progression? I’m not sure, I’m throwing out phrases I don’t fully appreciate. It’s an answerable question, but I don’t have the answer. Listen for yourself and you’ll hear it.

Whatever it is, the sound creates a sense of urgency, motion and a kind of violence. All three songs have something to do with conflict — Bowie’s is about societal breakdown— the “panic” is used in the sense of a riot. Benatar tells you what her song is about in its title, though the video and the lyrics seem to tell two different stories. In any case, she’s describing a very tumultuous form of love. The Cranberries’ song is about betrayal and abandonment. The word, “How,” is used as an accusation. It isn’t followed by a question mark. One person is confronting another here.

My friend suggested trying to think about what the sound of the music evokes divorced from the song titles or lyrics. Again, I think urgency and motion, though not necessarily violence per se. The word I keep thinking of is “galloping,” however that’s not exactly right because the beats of the hooves are not uniform. But it is rapid movement, anyway.

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So, going back to terms I don’t really understand. I think what I’m hearing is in fact the Bo Diddley beat. There are a boatload of other songs that use it, and are faintly similar to these three— the Who’s “Magic Bus;” Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away;” even two other songs covered by Bowie on Pin Ups, “I Wish You Would” and “Roslyn.” I don’t think the similarities are as evident, but they’re there.

That said, while all these songs have a sense of urgency to them, I have linked the three featured songs here in my mind for years, which is not the case with all the other songs that use the Bo Diddley beat (and hey, maybe that’s not what I’m hearing). To the point of this series, I do think there’s more of a “divine symmetry”— the conflict, the violence, the motion.

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My friend pointed out that all three songs build up before the singing starts. This seems especially true with “Love is a Battlefield,” where the initial music is followed by a softly-spoken word introduction. After that, Benatar sounds like she’s ramping up her voice while singing, “Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh” and then nearly screaming, “We are young…” Although this is a a song I have been listening to for years, I only really noticed this effect while preparing to write this entry. The “whoa-ohs” really function like the phone booth for Clark Kent— she enters, spins around and comes out as a powerhouse.

“Love is a Battlefield” really isn’t part of the soundtrack of my life, and “How” is even less so. But “Panic in Detroit” is one of my very favorite songs. More than the clever lyrics (which I’ll come back to in a future Lyrics Series post), it’s that sense or urgency. It’s like the song is racing against the clock.

My life has become less stressful in recent years, but I recently realized that the stress has been replaced to some extent by lethargy. The stress is unnerving on one hand but enlisting on the other. On some level I relate that sensation to what I’m hearing in “Panic.” To some extent the other two songs might be establishing a similar type of paradox. Both Benatar and the Cranberries are singing about love, but love as conflict. There’s a paradox. Their passions are enflamed, though not necessarily in a happy way. The Bowie song, too, is filled with paradox— the narrator reacts to violent revolutionaries as if they are celebrities, even asking for an autograph from the “only survivor of the National People’s Gang.” Not as simple as “love hurts,” but paradoxical nonetheless.

So added to the urgency and conflict, the music must be saying something about paradox.

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So, that’s my foray into attempting to writer about music. How did I do?