The experimental songs that didn’t work for David Bowie: “It proved nothing”
Before Taylor Swift monopolised the term “eras”, there was an artist who truly represented the word. An artist whose eras wasn’t just rendered to the simple life chapters and romances like that of Swift’s music, but an artist whose eras were truly defined by artistic difference.
You guessed it, I am referring to David Bowie.
He has largely defined what we consider to be artistic evolution. From the minute he released his sophomore album Space Oddity, it was clear that he had no intention of maintaining a consistent sound or aesthetic. An idea outrightly confirmed three years later, with his fifth album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which did away with the idea of his own persona being one homogeneous identity.
Around the lucidity of art, Bowie proved that things could always change. No, in fact, they must always change in order to truly reflect the ever-changing tides of society. He was mercurial and captivating, but all the while compelling and musically sublime. Apart from his millennial sidestep into drum and bass, his continued pursuit of difference never compromised the quality of his art.
While music is ultimately an endless box of possibilities, the truth is, there are only a select number of notes, keys, chords and structures through which creativity can be channelled. While Bowie’s conceptual ideas continued to run wild, the theoretical backbone of music almost struggled to keep up.
“‘Fantastic Voyage’ was one of three songs written with the same exact chord changes” he once explained, when outlining how he tried to find the fun in what was feeling like a tiresome pursuit. He continued, “It was an experiment. Always experimenting. ‘Boys Keep Swinging’: that’s the same changes and structure. Then there’s a third which didn’t make the album: not finished.”
But mirroring chord structures is inevitable in music. They are the backbone of many songs and so it’s the embellishment around them that makes for nuance and difference. But on his album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) Bowie decided to double down on repetitive experimentation, recording two versions of ‘It’s No Game’ for the record, both of which had the same melody and backing track, but then produced differently.
Speaking of, when “This song’s chord structure appeared on the album Lodger in two forms. First, as it appears here and then further in as ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ (they were men’s dresses, I tell you). Both the tempo and top-line melody are rewritten, but he claimed in terms of innovation, “it proved nothing.”
It goes to prove the never-ending possibilities that exist within musical theory. Sure, Bowie can attest that the experiment with ‘It’s No Game’ proved nothing, and ultimately the shared melody inevitably made the two songs sound connected. But the evolution of his wider career proved otherwise.
Across several decades, Bowie proved how malleable the simple structures of music can be and how conceptual changes, be it subtle or overt, can drastically change the delivery of a musical idea.
