The cartoons that inspired David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’
When it came to the post-modern, David Bowie was something of a master. The chameleonic creative succeeded in pulling the world into focus. Rather paradoxically, he did this by tearing it apart. His work was often an amalgamation of fragments, narratives that had been blown into a thousand shards and carefully reassembled. Nothing was unimportant, and everything had value. Overheard conversations, news broadcasts, food packaging: all of them could be used as source material. The same was true of cartoons, two of which David Bowie makes reference to in his manic post-modernist collage ‘Life On Mars’.
There are few Bowie tracks as labyrinthine as ‘Life On Mars’. David most probably brainstormed the lyrics using the ‘cut-up’ technique, something he’d learned about from William S. Burroughs, who developed the method in a hotel room with artist, poet and creator of the Dreamachine, Brion Gysin. The method asks the artist to take a text and cut it into fragments. They are then free to reconfigure this jumble of isolated phrases and words, juxtaposing disassociated ideas to create powerful new images.
Explaining why he uses the technique during a conversation with the BBC, Bowie once said: “What I’ve used it for, more than anything else, is igniting anything that might be in my imagination,” he says. “It can often come up with very interesting attitudes to look into. I tried doing it with diaries and things, and I was finding out amazing things about me and what I’d done and where I was going.”
This approach is perhaps why the lyrics to ‘Life On Mars’ imply a narrative even though they make very little sense written down. Bowie offers us a warped but undeniably recognisable reflection of the world we inhabit. In this way, the Hunky Dory track is itself cartoonish. Like the world of Mickey Mouse, who Bowie makes reference to in the second verse, the world of ‘Life On Mars’ is off-kilter, but it’s definitely ours.
Bowie also makes reference to a second cartoon. Some fans have suggested that when he sings “Look at those cavemen go,” Bowie’s alluding to V.T Hamlin’s Alley Oop, a long-running newspaper comic centred on the adventures of the titular caveman and a supporting cast comprised of his girlfriend Ooola, his pet dinosaur Dinny, and his best friend Foozy, who, much like Bowie in ‘Life On Mars’, speaks only in rhyming couplets.
The series was created by V.T Hamlin in 1932. In 1939, the illustrator decided to introduce a new plot device which would allow him to expand his choice of storylines. This involved Alley and the gang being zapped into the 20th century after stepping into the time machine of inventor Dr Elbert Wonmug. The titular caveman becomes the scientist’s right hand made, going off on all sorts of adventures, including trips to Ancient Egypt and the England of Robin Hood. The comic endured throughout the 1970s and was eventually turned into an animated series in 1978.
