David Bowie

Drifting out of the depths of inner space floats Major Tom, on a doomed mission from which he’ll never return. David Bowie, who may ultimately be the great imitator rather than the great innovator, floats face down on the sky of 70s glam rock, pansexuality, and androgyny as the inscrutable Ziggy Stardust in this classic track. While I’m not the biggest Bowie fan, I do admire his ability to reinvent himself as the fashions change every few years, staying not quite ahead of the curve, but close enough behind the breaking swell to be washed ashore in the wake of the next big thing. Folk, glam, rock, punk, drum ‘n’ bass, he has the remarkable Teflon ability to seem less like an opportunist than he probably really is. A frightfully fashionable cultural chameleon, he knows who to hang with when and could be found in the center of many of the coolest music scenes on both sides of the pond for over thirty years now.

This song, written and recorded to coincide with the first moon walk, has long been recognized as being not about some brave space cadet spinning obliviously out of control as his small capsule floats helplessly towards the sun but about some rather ordinary individual drifting hopelessly out of reach in the quicksand grasp of a heroin overdose. This song is so evocative and such a touchstone that it has created its own small musical cottage industry. I think it’s in no small part due to this song and his Ziggy Stardust persona (and striking looks) that Bowie got the lead role as a space alien in Nicholas Roeg’s quirky 1976 film, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Ten years after recording Space Oddity, Bowie released Ashes to Ashes, singing,

and a few years after that, a virtually unknown German musician named Peter Schilling hit the charts with his dance track, Major Tom (Coming Home).

Despite its lush beauty, there is a tragic and ominous element to this song, with its severe stereophonic gymnastics (definitely a headphone track) and its beautifully artificial Mellotron string beds – the Mellotron was, in a sense, the first sampler, and worked by using bits of audio tape spinning on a cylinder, one piece of tape for each key on the keyboard. When you pressed a key down, a playback head would touch the tape and that sound would come out. They were most often used for the kind of warbly string sound heard on this cut, but there was nothing stopping creative individuals from pulling the machine apart and recording whatever they wanted on the bits of tape. Time consuming, expensive and awkward to be sure, but a provocative machine nevertheless. The, for the time, obligatory psychedelic freak-out ending and exotic instrumentation help to contribute to the trippy track’s nod to the pleasures of drug-induced synesthasia while insincerely warning of the dangers of exploring inner space. Like all of Bowie’s excursions, others had been there, done that, and done it better, but he’s always been a master at judging the zeitgeist and remaining curiously both of the time, and above it.

Some of Bowie’s most interesting work was done soon after he abandoned his popular Ziggy Stardust glam rock persona and joined together with producer Brian Eno, who helped shepherd him through three albums in the mid-'70s. Dark, mysterious, filled with foreboding tones and unusual musical experiments, Low and Heroes (and, to a lesser degree Lodger) pushed the envelope of the times. My favorite tracks on those discs are the instrumentals, thick slabs of sounds swirling through alien landscapes that abandon rhythm for an extended exploration of color, with provocative titles such as Moss Garden, Weeping Wall, and Sense of Doubt (which, not coincidentally, is what Eno always accused Muzak of lacking, in defense of his own work). Recently, Phillip Glass has used these pieces as the basis for two large orchestral works in his inimitable (well, okay, his very imitable) style – the Low Symphony and the Heroes Symphony.

Bowie has evolved several personas since then (Aladin Sane, the Thin White Duke, etc.) drifting through heavy metal and dance music and even narrating a version of Peter and the Wolf and appearing on Broadway as The Elephant Man. Most recently, he’s gone public, selling shares of his songs as a tradable commodity. And, just to prove how terribly au courant he still is, his most recent album was released only on line. Classy, trashy, futuristic, nostalgic, Bowie is everything and nothing, a musical cipher, the male Madonna, Ziggy Zelig. And its hard to imagine a time or a tide when that won’t be true.

As an extreme tangent, pop songwriter and producer Nick Lowe once famously released an EP of songs called Bowi, in response to David Bowie’s Low album (get it?). I always thought that was very funny.