“I’d Rather Be High” (2013) and drug references in Bowie songs

Back in 2016 when I was doing my song-a-day tribute, the video I used for this song was really a commercial for Louis Vuitton. The entry and video are still in this blog if you want to see it. Today I came across one of these videos with images generated by artificial intelligence, and, unlike my earlier post, it includes the entirety of the song.

I mentioned “I’d Rather Be High” a few days ago in discussing Bowie Song of the Year #3, “How Does the Grass Grow,” also from The Next Day and also accompanied by an video with images generated by AI. Both songs address aspects of war. “I’d Rather Be High” expresses a soldier’s desire to do anything other than fight. You get the sense that the soldier is very young (seventeen, in fact, as the lyrics indicate), and that he (presumably he) was drafted for a desert war. The decision to go to war is made by “generals full of shit” but battled by teenagers who don’t feel any investment and don’t want to be there.

“I’d Rather Be High” is certainly not a drug song, but it’s interesting to note that this is another example of a Bowie song that implies that drugs are not something to be celebrated. Tin Machine’s “Crack City” (1989) and “Like a Rocket Man” (2013) come to mind. So do his oft-perform covers or “Waiting for the Man” and “White Light/White Heat,” two Velvet Underground songs that have to do with drugs and drug addiction— both songs paint bleak pictures.

Bowie repeatedly references drug use as a way to mitigate an unpleasant situation (much as in “I’d Rather Be High”): In “Candidate” (1974), he and his desperate lover will “buy some drugs and watch a band, and jump in the river, holding hands” (that is to say, they will commit suicide together). In “Young Americans” (1975), the housewife who married too young and is dissatisfied with her husband would, as heaven knows, “take anything.” The narrator of “Stay” (1976) muses, ‘maybe I’ll take something to help me,” while the narrator of “1984” (1974) warns that “you’ll be shooting yip on anything” because “tomorrow’s never there.” The subjects of “Scream Like a Baby” (1980) don’t have a choice— they “pumped us full of strange drugs.”

Bowie doesn’t really have an explicitly pro-drug song, though he’s at least not condemnatory in “Memory of a Free Festival” (1969) when he mentions, “Someone passed some bliss among the crowd.” “The Jean Genie” has some possible drug references — the Jean Genie is “walkin’ on Snow White” and “sleeps in the capsule,” which might or might mean that he uses cocaine when he’s out on the town and takes barbiturates to come down and sleep. “Station to Station” (1976) rules out “the side effects of the cocaine” before coming down on determining a sensation “must be love.” But that’s a kind of value-neutral reference to cocaine. Some have interpreted “Space Oddity” (1969) to be about the sensation of taking heroin, much like, “White Light/White Heat” is about the sensation of injecting speed. The Velevet Underground released that song the year before Bowie recorded “Space Oddity,” which was probably about the time he had what he called a “flirtation” with heroin, years before he became addicted to cocaine. I’m not sure that “Space Oddity” has anything to do with heroin, however Bowie must have at least come across the theory, which gives more context to “Ashes to Ashes” (1980). That is Bowie’s most straightforward song about drug addiction and reveals that the Major Tom character, originally introduced in “Space Oddity” to be a “junkie” who is “strung out in heaven’s high.”

At least a few of Bowie’s song were inspired by drug-related incidents. “Always Crashing in the Same Car” (1977) partially references an encounter Bowie had with a drug dealer in a parking garage. I have read a few accounts that “TVC15” refers to a drug-fueled paranoid delusion about a demonic television (either Bowie’s delusion or Iggy Pop’s). Several of Bowie’s more chaotic songs sound like he might have been high when he wrote them (however all that chaos takes quite a bit of thought to pull together).

Later in life, Bowie reflected ambivalence about his own struggles with drugs. He said at one point, “I’m ambivalent about it now. It was an extraordinary thing to have to go through. I wouldn’t want to go through it again, but I’m sort of glad I did.” That ambivalence shows through in his songs. Taken together, they definitely show dark aspects of drug us and addiction, and none, as far as I can tell, unambiguously telegraph the message that drugs are fun or add anything useful to one’s life or society as a whole. But, with the possible exception of “Crack City,” none fit nicely into the “Just say no” agenda.

Bowie’s final drug reference, as far as I can tell, was in “Lazarus” (2016), which includes the line, “I’m so high it makes my brain whirl.” In a different context, those words could suggest a hedonistic boast (I’m thinking of Katie Perry’s song, “Last Friday Night”— “its a blacked out blur, but I’m pretty sure it ruled”). But if there’s any doubt about why the narrator of “Lazarus” is so high, the video featuring “button eyed” Bowie in a hospital bed strongly suggests the drugs he’s on are to ease the pain of dying. Whatever experimental or recreational or even utilitarian purposes drugs might have served a younger Bowie, at the end all they were doing was mitigating pain. At that point, like the solider in the song, he’d rather be high.