The hidden lyrics of “Ashes to Ashes”

“Ashes to Ashes” is one of Bowie’s best known, most beloved songs. The continuing story of Major Tom, now found as a junky lost in space, serves as a very personal commentary on addiction, more or less confirms the validity of an interpretation of “Space Oddity” as a drug song, and marks Bowie’s most reflective and self-referential piece of music up to that point. It’s a great song, and it’s on my favorite album, so I have been listening to it for decades.

Yet it wasn’t until I read Adam Steiner’s excellent book, Silhouettes and Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) that I came to realize the song includes virtually indecipherable lyrics that I think can rightly be characterized as “hidden.” Now, before I go on– once I read about them, I discovered that hidden though they are, they are not unknown. There isn’t a lot out there about these lines, but if you look, you can find other sources that acknowledge them. I guess, if you know, you know.

Also, I kinda got in trouble for saying something similar about lines in “Rebel Rebel” in the past, which while much clearer, are underemphasized in the studio version of the song and frequently omitted in Bowie’s live performances. The hidden lyrics on “Ashes to Ashes” are entirely different– I’d be genuinely surprised if anyone tells me that they actually heard these lyrics without knowing about them first.

OK, so what are they? Here they are:

“No everlasting aesthetic;
Songs that please the ear can leave the mind blown;
I was hoping to kick but the planet was glowing;
And I was ready to go in ’74”

Steiner writes of the lines, “these snatches of internal conversation beg that we hear what we want to, our subconscious wrestling with the desire to ‘understand’ the message…”

The lines appear about 50 seconds into the song, and are subtly spoken underneath Bowie’s far more prominent vocals:

“The shrieking of nothing is killing, just
Pictures of Jap girls in synthesis and I
Ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hair
But I’m hoping to kick but the planet it’s glowing”

Of note, the lines about the planet glowing are similar, which is part of the reason the other “hidden” lyrics are hard to understand. Elsewhere in the song, Bowie simply repeats lines in this understated, quiet voice and, to the extent I ever thought about it before, I probably just assumed that what I was hearing was an out-of-sync recantation of the surface lines.

What does it all mean? Well, I think Steiner got it right– this is a secret toy surprise for the audience to discover and make of it what they would. That said, the discovery does “leave the mind blown,” and the last two lines seem very much to be about Bowie’s personal struggle with his addiction. 1974 was about the time Bowie’s drug use became far more extreme and a threat to his life.

Parenthetically, I think about another instance where Bowie sets a marker down in a song by naming a year that mattered in his life– “Down in space, it’s always 1982,” from “Slip Away” (2002). 1982 was the year before Let’s Dance, the album that turned Bowie from edgy and subversive to widely popular, ultimately leading to a kind of creative nadir that he spent the last three decades of his career trying to recover from. Much in the same way, the events of 1974 altered the course of the rest of Bowie’s life. But the line from “Slip Away” is front and center– these “Ashes to Ashes” lines are literal subliminal messages.

So, again, I only caught on once I read Adam Steiner’s book, and that book was focused on Scary Monsters. I wonder what else is out there on other albums?

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I had the pleasure of interviewing Adam Steiner for this blog. if you missed it, click HERE to read the interview.