The Bowie Project #3- The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
On his
third studio album David Bowie moves away from the largely acoustic psychedelic
folk of his previous self-titled release and shifts into a new hard rock sound
with the backing of a full band. After the success of the single “Space Oddity”
the year before failed to boost the accompanying album sales, Bowie decided to
form a band with bassist Tony Visconti and drummer John Cambridge. They name
themselves the Hype and recruit the now legendary guitarist Mick Ronson.
This group (which would later evolve into the Spiders from Mars) wore flamboyant superhero-like costumes designed by Bowie’s first wife Angie, who he married on 20 March 1970, just one month before he started recording this album. Bowie was Rainbowman and wore a multicoloured outfit, Ronson was Gansterman and would dress in a sharp double-breasted suit, Visconti was Hypeman and dressed like Superman with a giant ‘H’ on his chest, and Cambridge was Cowboyman wearing a frilly shirt and an oversized hat. The theatricality of the Hype's stage shows act as a forbearer to what would later become the Ziggy Stardust phase of his career. Cambridge was quickly dismissed from the band and replaced by Woody Woodmansey before work began on the album.
It is the
full band that makes this album sound unlike any other Bowie release, it’s loud
and hard, and it has much more in common with hard-rock groups like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple than his previous work, which was more inspired by vaudeville
music hall and 1960s pop rock. Although song writing credit is attributed
solely to Bowie on all the albums nine tracks, Visconti insists that much of it
was a collaborative effort born out of jam sessions together:
The heavier tracks were kind of written by all of us, but Bowie got full writing credit. Nowadays, of course, everyone in the band gets writing credits. Back then we were expected to consider ourselves as arrangers of our own parts.
The album
opens with “The Width of a Circle” and this demonstrates a serious creative leap
forward in terms of lyricism. It is a hard rock track with biblical allusions,
references to gay sex, end times, mysticism and madness. Mick Ronson’s guitar work
is front and centre here for the entire eight-minute track. The lyrics are so
strange and unusual that it is quite difficult to accurately analyse them, and I
am not sure you are even meant to. The narrator seems to be exploring
themselves in some sort of Nietzschean confrontation (references to German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche will come up again and again on this album), having
a sexual encounter with either God or the Devil, and it also makes reference to
Lebanese-American visual artist Kahlil Gibran. It is a great track, and it
really sets the tone for the rest of the album.
Next up is “All the Madmen” one of many tracks that deal with insanity. It has been described
as depicting “a world so bereft of reason that the last sane men are the ones
in the asylums". Bowie wrote the song about his older half-brother Terry Burns and his struggles with mental health. Burns was a huge influence on the
young Bowie and introduced him to jazz music, literature, and philosophy, but
in 1967 he suffered the first in a series of psychotic episodes that would lead
to him being institutionalised. Terry Burns would continue to have mental
difficulties his entire life and in 1985 he ran away from Cane Hill Hospital in
Croydon and went to Couldson South railway station, he laid his head down on
the tracks and died by suicide from an oncoming train. Bowie could not attend
the funeral as he feared his fame would turn it into a media circus. The influence of
Burns is clear throughout the whole album, and he would go on to inspire later
Bowie songs including “Five Years”.
“Black Country Rock” is a departure from the thematic heaviness of the rest of the album, an
upbeat blues song reportedly inspired by T-Rex’s Marc Bolan. The lyrics are simple
and repetitive and feels a little bit like a filler track on the record, not
bad but easily forgettable.
Closing off
the albums first side “After All” a song inspired by Nietzche’s Übermensch philosophy as well as the occultist Aleister Crowley. It has a dreamy quality, is
written in waltz timing, and it does not have that heavy rock sound of the rest
of the album. The song appears to be a dismissal of the 1960s hippie dream,
rejecting its idealism and innocence stating their “just taller children that’s
all”. It is said originally Bowie wanted this album to be half-acoustic,
half-electric like Bob Dylan’s 1965 release Bringing It All Back Home, this
idea would be quickly dismissed but this track is one of the more obvious
examples of what was written for the acoustic side. While initially the song
does not really grab the listeners attention, upon multiple listens I’ve found
it more interesting. Writer and biographer Nicholas Pegg has described it as one of Bowie’s most underrated songs.
References to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
are made throughout the record
Opening
side two is “Running Gun Blues”, a commentary on the Vietnam war that satirises
the gung-ho mentality of many soldiers and the cheerleaders of conflict. It was
reportedly inspired by the Mỹ Lai Massacre in 1968 where hundreds of South Vietnamese
civilians including children and infants were murdered en masse. Originally covered
up by the US Army it became public knowledge in 1969 and fuelled opposition to
the war. The song is outwardly political which is unusual for Bowie who tends
to bury his statements in layers of symbolism and fantasy.
Then its “Saviour Machine”, which tells the apocalyptic tale of a sentient computer, meant to
bring world peace, that begs to be disconnected before it causes death and destruction
to Earth. This song, much like “God Knows I’m Good” off his previous album,
demonstrates Bowie’s early skepticism around modern technology. Thematically
the song is really interesting but musically it doesn’t really do anything for
me and is probably one of my least favourite tracks on the album.
But my actual
least favourite track is the next song “She Shook Me Cold”, an almost heavy
metal rocker influenced by bands like Cream, Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck, it
does nothing for me. The lyrics refer to a man receiving oral sex from a woman
with lots of heavy guitar solos, it just doesn’t feel like Bowie.
Then we are
onto the title track “The Man Who Sold the World” which for me is hard to separate
from the Nirvana cover version that I imagine these days is much more well known
than the original. But they are quite different from each other, the Bowie
version has got an eerie dreamlike quality that is hard to define. Bowie
himself described the song as being about searching for an identity and
discovering yourself:
I guess I wrote it because there was a part of myself that I was looking for… that song for me always exemplified kind of how you feel when you're young, when you know there's a piece of yourself that you haven't really put together yet – you have this great searching, this great need to find out who you really are.
The album
ends with another song inspired by Nietzsche. “The Supermen” could be described
as a loose adaptation of Nietzsche’s 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra
with Bowie stating, “I was still going through the thing when I was pretending
that I understood Nietzsche... And I had tried to translate it into my own
terms to understand it so 'Supermen' came out of that." The main theme
from the book is the idea of the Übermensch (Superman) whereby if humanity can
reach a position of heightened self-awareness that we could cast aside God in
favour of higher moral ideals, that we could shift away from Christian values
and live in a world grounded in humanism. The track is unfortunately a little
bit too pretentious to really strike a chord and it seems even Bowie agrees
with that.
Overall,
the album has a lot of positive points and it definitely grows on you the more you listen to it, it’s deeply philosophical and
demonstrates that for Bowie there is no shortage of concepts or ideas he wants
to explore. Some of the songs are fantastic with “The Width of a Circle”, “All
the Madmen”, and “The Man Who Sold the World” being standouts for me, but other
songs feel like filler, are overtly pretentious, or get bogged down in the hard
rock sound the album is going for. It’s interesting to see Bowie making this
type of music and there’s an alternative world out there where he went down the
hard-rock/heavy metal route for the rest of the 70s (he gets back to it in the late 80s/early 90s with Tin Machine), but for I’m glad things
panned out the way they did, and this opened the doors for Bowie to release Hunky Dory the following year, which I would consider the first truly great David
Bowie record.
The Man Who Sold the Word (1970) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (6/10)
Comments
Post a Comment