The hidden song within “Rebel Rebel”

So what you wanna know
Calamity’s child, chi-chi, chi-chi
Where’d you wanna go?
What can I do for you? Looks like you’ve been there too

The video accompanying this post features Bowie performing “Rebel Rebel” during the Glass Spider tour— which happens to be the first time I saw him live. What I wouldn’t necessarily have picked up at the time, is that he left out a significant part of the song, which is something he did on more than one occasion. It’s a part of the song that picks up where, in many other songs, new information and clever new lyrics are usually not introduced for the first time. This section of the original version of the song almost — though not quite— functions as the type of song within a song technique that Bowie employed in “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Repirsed),” “Memory of a Free Festival” or, later, “Blackstar.”

So why would Bowie sometimes keep this hidden?

This part of the song is plain for all to hear in its original version, but, at least in my own experience, it comes at a point where it’s almost an afterthought. Do you notice it? Do you notice when it went missing, as in the case of Bowie’s performance of the song in this video?

“Rebel Rebel,” one of Bowie’s best known and most covered songs, starts out with an iconic guitar riff and proceeds with some memorable lyrics including the refrain and the part about your mother not knowing if you’re a boy or a girl. It goes through its lyrical cycle before heading for a conclusion. But then, with about 40 seconds left in the song, Bowie introduces some new lyrics, which, over the years I have come to think of as the best part of the song, at least in terms of the lyrics.

I mean, “Calamity’s child?” That has to be a band name, right? Or a super villain? Can it be that Bowie just came up with the term as a knockoff? It’s just too good a use of the English language to be forgotten. I appear not to be the only person who thinks this— a quick search on YouTube finds several songs called “Calamity’s Child.” I don’t know if any have a connection to “Rebel Rebel.”

And, the questions that preceded and follow that line— “what you wanna know?” “Where’d you wanna go?” Along with, “Looks like you’ve been there, too” manages in less than three complete sentences to evoke an entire personality. I can almost see that person he’s describing, even though none of this paints a visual picture. Whoever this is a wild, world-weary (though still young), unpredictable and compelling. “What can I do for you?” The narrator is rapid-fire prodding this person for her wants and needs because he wants her and the excitement she brings. She is attractive because she’s unpredictable and dangerous. He doesn’t so much want to service her as join her. It is at this point that the truly rebellious quality of the song’s characters emerge.

This brings us back to this video— Bowie would perform “Rebel Rebel” throughout his career and make various adjustments along the way. So why remove these lines? I don’t know. With few exceptions, Bowie didn’t waste a second of any song he recorded, so there must of been a reason for him to remove these lines, which are not only evocative but carry with them their own rhythm.

To paraphrase the song itself, how could we know?

Well, I don’t know, but here’s my theory: The word “rebel” is, in our culture, is used so broadly as to have virtually no edge. There are high school mascots called rebels. For years, the Confederate flag was broadly not recognized as a hateful symbol supporting slavery because of its association with the more abstract concept of “rebels.” Even Bowie has a lesser known song, “The Rebels’ Revolutionary Song” that is more or less a joke. “Rebel Rebel” is so well known and has become so much part of the larger culture, that the concept of an inscrutable, countercultural, norm-defying figure — born of “calamity”— who is attractive precisely because of these qualities has kinda been lost. These, almost afterthought lyrics turn out to be key to the song, but when Bowie, say, was performing it during his stadium shows for a wider audience, he was going for the more generic appeal to being a “rebel,” which, in that context roughly equates to being spunky.

Whatever his reasons, I get the sense that he put the lines in there to begin with because he saw an opportunity to keep painting that picture. While there are plenty of Bowie songs that make use of repetition in their closing, here he saw added value in pushing on. Added to the words themselves are outgoing grunts and sounds— “cha cha”— like he’s devolving into an animal state. That might be too much to put out there during Bowie’s more mainstream periods.

But mostly I just like how the lines sound…