The classic song that David Bowie called “grim”
The world of David Bowie wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. In fact, it seemed as though the legendary singer gravitated toward the more sinister side of life quite often. Whether it was letting go of Major Tom in ‘Space Oddity’, throwing darts in lovers’ eyes on ‘Station to Station’ or drawing awful scrawls in ‘Breaking Glass’, Bowie could turn creepy and malevolent at a moment’s notice.
Even his most exuberant material has shades of darkness to it. ‘Modern Love’ isn’t actually a love song, ‘Fame’ is a sordid bit of sarcasm, and ‘Golden Years’ has cocaine-fueled overconfidence practically bursting out of it. But if one song perfectly juxtaposes the jaunty and off-putting elements of Bowie’s style, it would be ‘Fashion’.
“When I first started going to discos in New York in the early ’70s, there was sort of a very high-powered enthusiasm and it had a natural course about it, which seems now to have been replaced by an insidious grim determination to be fashionable, as though it’s actually a vocation,” Bowie explained a shortly after the song’s release on Scary Monsters (and Nice Spirits). “There’s some kind of strange aura about it, and I just wanted to sort of capture that feeling in the song ‘Fashion’. It’s about that grim determination more than anything else.”
Bowie reiterated that focus on “grim determination” while talking to NME in 1980. “It’s more to do with that dedication to fashion. I was trying to move on a little from that Ray Davies concept of determination and an unsureness about why one’s doing it. But one has to do it, rather like one goes to the dentist and has the tooth drilled. I mean, you have to have it done, putting up with the fear and the aggravation. It’s that kind of feeling about fashion, which seems to have in it now an element that’s all too depressing.”
He added: “The American disco I went to in the early ’70s in New York when it was supposed to be the hot new thing that was sweeping the city – well, I never felt that grim determination that one feels now,” Bowie added. “There is that. Yes, I must say I did feel it when I was in London. I was taken to one extraordinary place by … Steve Strange? God, what was it called? Everybody was in Victorian clothes. I suppose they were part of the new new wave or the permanent wave or whatever… (enter Coco making throat-slitting gestures) … it’s the Valkyrie (laughs). We’ll have some more time but I’ll have to keep it to a minimum.”
Check out the “grim determination” of ‘Fashion’ down below.
