‘Holy Holy’: David Bowie’s experiment with nonsense
When you look at the discography of David Bowie, you come across a range of different musical directions, each of which is more exciting than the last. Bowie didn’t just focus on his music when he was writing but on the direction of his act as a whole. He would take into account the likes of his look, the marketing, the artwork surrounding the piece and the overall tone of a record.
As a result, every time Bowie announced he had a new album coming out, people everywhere would grow incredibly excited. It was one thing getting new music, but getting a whole new era of Bowie was incredibly exciting for people, as it felt as though they were listening to a new artist altogether.
Consider a song like ‘Let’s Dance’, which was a completely different direction for Bowie. He embraced rhythm and melody in a different way and made a disco-infused song that ushered in a brand-new period for him. It was one of his most commercially successful eras ever, and it proved to be some of his most successful work to date. Not to mention, having people like Nile Rodgers and Jeff Beck help with instrumentation also went a long way.
“I tried to produce something that was warmer and more humanistic than anything I’ve done for a long time,” admitted Bowie, “Less emphasis on the nihilistic kind of statement.”
Nile Rodgers enjoyed the message behind this Bowie song, saying it was a fun tune but had something deeper behind it. “When David wrote those lyrics, he was talking about the dance that people do in life; the conceptual dance of not being honest,” he said, “He sings, ‘Put on your red shoes and dance the blues’. Like you’re pretending to be happy but you’re sad.”
Of course, while many of Bowie’s songs were well thought out and showed a different side of the artist, some other tracks reflected his wilder side. While many songs touched upon outlandish or otherworldly themes, others didn’t make any sense at all, as they seemed to combine various themes that weren’t connected in any way whatsoever.
‘Holy Holy’ is a good example of this. A lot of people have tried to dissect the lyrics to the track, and in doing so, they find that it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. There are three separate themes connecting the track, neither of which seems connected. The first is a man asking a woman to come to bed, the second is Bowie asking someone to set him free, and the third is Bowie admitting he wants to do something evil. The lyrics come together and give us nonsense, but this may well have been intentional.
Bowie had a writing style that embraced nonsense in a very wonderful way. This would see him cut out sections from various books and magazines and move them around until they fell in an order that made sense. This is likely what he was doing on the song ‘Holy Holy’, and is why the track feels so disjointed. The method did prove successful for Bowie, though, as this song turned out well, and he also used a nonsensical way of writing when coming up with ‘Moonage Daydream’.
