Site Maintenance: Pablo Picasso

The site maintenance series features songs whose original links on earlier blog entries broke. Where I can, I replace those original videos and then add a still different video and updated commentary. Such is the case with this odd song, which Bowie included on his 2003 album, “Reality.”

The song is a cover from the proto-punk band, The Modern Lovers, who originally recorded it for their self-titled album in 1972 (which was their only album). I have yet to listen to that original album in its entirety, but in pulling it up to hear the original version of this song, I came across the opening track, “Roadrunner,” which I also knew better as a cover, from Joan Jett. Both songs sounded more amateurish and contain their own kind of energy (though the Jett and Bowie covers are also energetic).

Of “Pablo’s Picasso,” Bowie said that he took the lyrics and attached them to his own, totally new music. That sounds right to my ears, though Bowie didn’t take all the lyrics. Already a pretty simple song, Bowie streamlines it further. Why he did this and why he chose to borrow the lyrics from this particular song is a puzzle. Both the original and Bowie cover are not bad songs, but its odd for a Bowie song. The lyrics border on comical— Picasso is not identified as a painter or towering figure of the 20th Century, but rather as a chick-magnet who, we repeatedly hear, is NEVER called an asshole. As I characterized it in my 2016 commentary, its like Picasso is Fonzie. In this respect, the song really isn’t about Pablo Picasso. In fact the only truly identifying trait connected to the actual Picasso in the song is his height, and that might be inaccurate. The song has Picasso at 5’3,” but multiple internet sources indicate he was an inch taller.

Bowie often expressed disdain for reading too much into his lyrics. His “cut up” technique famously injected a strong element of randomness into his songs, which he wanted the listener to interpret rather than be told what to think. He repeatedly spoke of the music itself as being more important to a song than the lyrics. In his vast, vast catalogue, Bowie certainly had several straightforward songs, but the abstract quality of many of his lyrics is a signature technique. So, he might have chosen these lyrics to highlight a musical idea he had in mind. The actual Picasso was Spanish, and Bowie’s music has a Spanish feeling to it that is totally absent from the Modern Lovers’ original version.

Reading more into the choice of lyrics, the song describes someone who is unusually short but overpoweringly sexy and charismatic. I am reminded how many fans and critics reflected, especially after his death, on how Bowie made it alright to be different. The other things we know about Picasso coming into the song are that he’s one of the most highly regarded artists of his time, a celebrity and an icon. We don’t need the song to tell us this about Picasso, but what we learn, at least about this comic book version of Picasso is that he was short, had an intense stare that women couldn’t resist, and wasn’t disparaged. Though Bowie himself was not especially short, if we take the mention of Picasso’s stature as a stand-in for typically unattractive strangeness, Bowie could be singing about himself, offering reassurance to his oddball followers that with enough confidence (as projected both by the stare and the song subject’s driving around in an El Dorodo), you too can be a chick-magnet.

I’m not sure how much of this message was reaching out to “normal Bowie’s” fans in 2003. Bowie in middle age presented as the least threatening and most regular-guy version of himself. However, Bowie might have been thinking about posterity. The song has multiple elements that harken back to earlier points in time. The original was recorded during the height of Bowie’s Ziggy period, probably when he most reassured nonconformist young people. Picasso is a figure from the past, and the Spanish-sounding musical elements seem old-fashioned. I have read interviews in which Bowie realized that new fans experienced his entire back catalogue as new. So maybe Bowie meant for this song to be appreciated in retrospect, heard alongside songs like, “Rock and Roll Suicide,” in which we are comforted with the words, “you’re not alone.”