Olivia Wilde’s two favourite David Bowie songs
There is a moment in everyone’s childhood when the floor is just about pulled out from under them, and the dangerous precipice of the future presents itself. Often it is the cultural slap across the chops of music which coaxes this presentiment to the fore. David Bowie‘s appearance on Top of the Pops already represented a weird allure: who was this androgynous alien being bedecked in a multicolour kimono? He showcased all the dangerous come-hither attraction of some street side fisty-cuffs in one fell swoop and had the music to stand up to it.
And then it happened—with one lanky finger, he unzipped the TV screen and welcomed a million bewildered eyes into his new bohemian oeuvre. From that moment on, the world wouldn’t just change for a couple of thousand enamoured youngsters, but for all of us, and the reverberating ripples are still shaping things to this day. He had music with all the depth of a carefully constructed sci-fi universe, and vitally, it had plenty to say about our own planet.
In her directing work, Olivia Wilde has seemingly tried to create something similar. Her latest feature, Don’t Worry Darling, is both visually dazzling and an alternate reality that takes a scathing look at our own. Given Wilde’s love for the Starman, it is easy to see how his bold outlook has inspired her as an artist.
In fact, regarding her recent creative ventures, she told The Talks: “It’s only when we give up the safety of comfort that we will actually break new ground. That’s where the most interesting art always comes from! David Bowie said something like, ‘Swim out creatively. Swim out just past the point where your feet touch the ground, that’s when you’re getting somewhere.’ And I think that’s it. You have to be a little bit challenged, scared, intimidated.”
His expansive approach also represents the moments she is most fond of in his back catalogue. When asked to pick her favourite song by Bowie, she opted for ‘Life on Mars‘. Explaining that it “encapsulates so much of what made Bowie so unusual. Not only is it melodically really brilliant, but it’s a story. It brought in his love of exploration, the idea of something else out there. And it references what we have in front of us, and what’s out there.”
At the time when she championed the 1971 effort from his Hunky Dory LP, she was still married to Jason Sudeikis and explained to Variety, “It’s also my favourite karaoke song. Jason and I always do that; it’s our go-to duet. But you can’t go wrong, I love ‘Space Oddity’ equally.”
Before concluding, “I love all of Bowie.”
The fact that Bowie is still proving to be a profound influence was always part of his aim, too. As he proclaimed when he finally found fame: “I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture I was living in.”
