Lyrics Series | 5 | From “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)

“Someone scrawled on the wall “I smell the blood of les tricoteuses”
Who wrote up scandals in other bars
I’m having so much fun with the poisonous people
Spreading rumors and lies and stories they made up”

I don’t usually comment on my work life in this blog, and I’m not going to explicitly do so today. But on the occasion of the publication of What’s Left Unsaid, the memoir by my friend and former colleague Melissa DeRosa (click on her name to link to her web page) I’m highlighting some lyrics that have helped me get through the last three years.

The awkwardly named “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise)” has long been one of my favorite songs. For years I didn’t understand all the words. I would hardly have understood the meaning of those words better simply by looking up the lyrics (which I eventually got around to doing). If Bowie used his “cut up technique” on only a few actual songs, this was almost certainly one of them.

I found myself listening to Diamond Dogs over and over during the darkest days of 2021, and especially this song (I think of it as one song). The song is atmospheric and puts Bowie’s voice through an impressive workout, but I kept coming back to the lines about the poisonous people spreading rumors and lies and stories they made up. Anyone familiar with the events that were going down that year— and since— will understand the significance of those lines to me.

But what are “les tricoteuses?” I didn’t put much thought into what Bowie was saying in that part of the song— it sounds to me like, “tree cutters.” But les tricoteuses were not arborists. They were the women of the French Revolution usually depicted as knitting by the guillotine. They helped kindle the flames of the Revolution through bread protests, but were ultimately sidelined by ambitious politicians who replaced one regime with another before they too were replaced and so on until France was left with Napoleon. Les Tricoteuses may have started with a legitimate gripe, but ended up being used by others who simply wanted power. Nonetheless, they are typically depicted as content in their bitterness, watching the heads of nobles roll into wicker baskets.

So what do these lines mean to me? Well, that’s all I’m going to say. Draw your own conclusions.

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I’m linking this post to a video from Brian Drew, who seems to have recorded several Bowie covers. Bowie’s studio version of this song is really one of his masterpieces, so worthy though Drew’s cover it, it doesn’t quite achieve the heights of Bowie’s original. That said, I’m using a cover for the sake of diversity.