What did Bowie mean by “Reet Petite?”

I selected as “cover of the week” on Monday the DAM Trilogy tour’s cover of “Red Money” (1979). And ya know, as often as I listen to Bowie songs, I still learn—or even hear—something new every once in a while. There’s a line in that song that I never quite picked up on:

“I was really feeling good
Reet Petite and how’d you do
Then I got the small red box
And I didn’t know what to do”

It’s the “Reet Petite” that I had missed all these years. So, what is it? Fortunately, the Google machine has an answer. “Reet Petite” is the name of a Jackie Wilson song, which in turn took its name from an earlier Louis Jordan song. “Reet” apparently was slang for “fantastic.” Both songs were about a girl.

OK, but what does that have to do with the Bowie lines? Ahh… I’m not sure. The website “Genius Song Lyric Finder” annotates the line with this note: “‘Reet Petite’ is, following the Jackie Wilson song, ‘the finest girl you ever wanna meet,’ so the relation with the first line (‘I was really feeling good’) is quite signified: David was in a sweet spot of his own life and with his own marriage with Angie. He thought that with Angie, he had known the ‘Reet Petite’ of his life. Nothing more further of the truth.”

I mean, maybe?

Sometimes it takes listening to a cover to remind me of how good a Bowie song is. Bowie was at his best when his lyrics were impressionistic rather than literal. “Red Money” is actually pretty cryptic. Bowie described the song as being about “responsibility,” which is surely what its last lines speak to (“such responsibility is up to you and me”). But Bowie was the least reliable interpreter of his own lyrics. Though he sometimes offered explanations, those explanations were often themselves confusing, and he would occasionally contradict himself from one interview to another. Bowie probably wasn’t asked too many questions about “Red Money,” and to the extent he wasn’t, he had fewer opportunities to contradict himself.

Chris O’Leary describes “Red Money” as Bowie’s self-referential endnote to the 1970s—an intentional reuse of “Sister Midnight” that symbolically closes the Berlin/Eno/Iggy Pop era even as Bowie insisted it was “mere whimsy.” In O’Leary’s reading, the song reflects Bowie’s late-Lodger anxieties about becoming just an influence, about creative exhaustion, and about facing a wider, less interior world. By overwriting “Sister Midnight,” he turns a summoning into a dismissal: Iggy Pop’s dream imagery becomes Bowie’s landscape of failed missions, “men who aren’t men,” and the burdens of responsibility symbolized by the “small red box.” Although Bowie hinted that the song was a kind of resignation note, O’Leary cautions that this, too, might be misdirection. In the end, the track is largely a Bowie solo reconstruction—his voice layered against guitars as he signs off the decade with the line “it’s up to you and me.”

None of this gives any greater insight into the “Reet Petite” reference. To some extent, Bowie might have just liked the sound. I’m thinking of the line from “John, I’m Only Dancing, ”Annie’s pretty neat; She always eats her meat,” which might have a naughty resonance but also has an “eet-eet” rhyme, like “Reet Petite.” I’m also thinking about the line from “D.J.”, “feel like Dan Dare lies down.” That doesn’t rhyme, but it is a somewhat obscure cultural reference that Bowie articulates in such a way that’s easy to miss. So, he likes to do that type of thing.

But why?

Sadly, if you’ve read this far I don’t have some grand theory. But here’s a guess: Bowie might have had the name of the earlier song, “Reet, Petite and Gone,” in his head rather than the later Jackie Wilson song. “Gone,” in the context of the earlier song—like “reet”—was slang. In this case, as far as I can gather, “gone” meant something like “far out.” Bowie was, to some extent, a connoisseur of slang, and he liked words that had double meanings. He played with “gone” in “Diamond Dogs” with the line, “well, she’s come, been and gone,” and in this case, though he doesn’t even say the word, he might have been evoking both its slang and literal meanings. If Lodger has a theme, it has to do with movement, and here his “Reet Petite” might best be read simply in the context of the words that follow, “and how’d you do,” which sounds like it could be a greeting, especially if its short for “how do you do” rather than “how did you do” (though again, the phrase could carry multiple meanings). “Red Money” is the last song on the album, and to some extent it implies the cessation of movement (“project cancelled”). This might be an instance of Bowie simply having an expression in his head that evoked a thought and sounded good as a line.

How sure am I of this? Not sure at all. But if you have a better theory, let me know