‘Space Oddity’: the David Bowie classic he thought he wrote “too early”
It’s usually the artist’s choice when to release their best material. Even though you’ll logically want to release the best songs whenever you make a record, some pieces deserve a little more time in the oven before they can be unleashed upon the world, which usually involves everyone toying with the production until it’s perfect. David Bowie may have had to hit the reset button with Space Oddity, but the title track may have come a bit too soon for rock history’s iconic alien.
If Bowie had continued on the path he took with his debut album, the music world would have lost one of its greatest creatives. Bowie was born to be different from the norms of rock music, but his approach to combining the fanciful side of rock with baroque pop tunes felt absolutely ridiculous.
Bowie himself admitted to not being a fan of his early work by the time it was done, eventually turning towards something different on his next album. While there are still many remnants of his old sound left over from his debut, ‘Space Oddity’ sticks out like a sore thumb in the greatest way possible.
It may have been good timing that it was tied in with the Apollo moon in the months between its release, hearing Bowie sing about Major Tom searching for new lands beyond the cosmos may as well be his theme song. Alongside a piece like ‘Changes’, Bowie was leaving his mark as someone interested in breaking free from the conventions of rock stardom, which may have been a bit too soon for his liking.
When discussing his rise to the top in the late 1960s, Bowie thought that ‘Space Oddity’ may have been the right track at the wrong time, telling Nicholas Pegg, “[It’s] a very good song that possibly I wrote a bit too early because I hadn’t [had] anything else substantial [to follow it] at the time.”
Considering that Bowie would spend his next album fumbling in the dark for new sounds, it’s easy to see where he came from. Not that The Man Who Sold the World is bad — in fact, it’s quite good. The only problem is that it’s not exactly the album that ‘Space Oddity’ had promised would come afterwards; instead, it relies on hard rock and metal half the time to tear through Bowie’s songs.
Looking at where Bowie would go once the glam rock movement kicked in, this was practically the litmus test for what glam was supposed to be. Marc Bolan and Elton John may have rubbed elbows with Bowie during his ‘Ziggy Stardust’ era, but given that he sported his signature red hair in the video for ‘Space Oddity’ years before, he was ahead of the curve long before everyone else.
If anything, the glam rock movement says more about the Bowie that made ‘Space Oddity’ than every song on his sophomore effort, using the same strange chords that keep listeners on edge on tracks like ‘Life on Mars?’. Bowie may not have had the musical power yet, but he was still ready to wipe out anyone who stood in his way.
