“Prophetic”: the song David Bowie thought everyone got wrong
When Blackstar came out on January 8th, 2016, everybody saw it as another David Bowie masterpiece and marvelled in particular at the album’s cryptic lyricism that explored dark themes of mortality. When Bowie’s death from cancer was announced just two days later, people began to realise that it wasn’t just an album that grappled with fears of ageing and that it was written as his swan song to the world.
Bowie hadn’t told the world of his illness before his passing, and once fans started picking up on the most minor details that he had left for them to discover, the overall themes of the album took a turn and were perceived in a completely different light. Not even his closest colleagues realised what he was doing at the time. When the penny dropped for longtime producer Tony Visconti that Bowie was on his deathbed, he reportedly exclaimed, “You canny bastard, you’re writing a farewell album.”
Throughout his career, Bowie’s work was filled with symbolism that invited multiple different interpretations from listeners, and fans would regularly over-analyse or miss the point behind his cryptic lyrics. His unusual approach to stringing phrases together in songs often gave his songs a mysterious and dream-like quality, but that isn’t to say that he didn’t ever write about real-world subjects that were close to his heart.
In an interview with Arena in 1993, he was told that his work “often seems to hold up a mirror to itself,” and that he is often able to go on deep, soul-searching journeys within his music in order to continually reinvent himself. While Bowie agreed with elements of the sentiment levelled at him, he also had a number of aspects of it to debate.
“I think I have a certain vocabulary,” Bowie began, “that, however much I change stylistically, there is a real core of imagery. I don’t see any abrupt changes in what I’ve done. To a symbolist, which is what I am, characters and situations are manifestations of things that he can’t explain.”
However, he quickly refutes this by saying that there are many contradictions in his lyrics that people have misinterpreted as meaning something completely different. “What often amuses me is the reaction to a song like ‘Loving The Alien’ – where so many reviewers said, ‘Oh, Bowie out in space again.’ And the alien, in this case, was Muslim, which is prophetic because here I am married to one. I was talking about people being aliens to each other.”
The song itself explores Bowie’s distrust of organised religion and the conflicts that it causes in the world. While it was released in 1984, he would go on to marry Somali-born model Iman in 1992, which is the “prophetic” angle to the song that he was referring to. Contrary to the song’s message, Bowie himself was ‘loving the alien’ and embracing the difference in faith between himself and his wife.
Not only had he seen into the future, but he’d convinced the public that he was writing another space-themed song to follow ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘Starman’ through cleverly disguised lyrics. Tony Visconti was right: Bowie was a canny bastard.
