“I still love this song”: The track that David Bowie couldn’t escape
It’s impossible for artists not to get tired of a handful of songs in their catalogue. Any song can fade into white noise when someone plays it too often on the road, but half the battle is putting the same amount of emotion into it and making the audience feel like they’re hearing it for the first time all over again. No one can outrun the legacy of their hits, but David Bowie always had a unique approach to revisiting some of his back pages.
Because if there’s one thing that Bowie was known for, it was always pushing himself forward. He could have spent years trying to make the same kind of glam rock masterpieces that he made on Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, but he knew that whatever his muse told him to do was far more important than what made the most money, and even when the fans liked it on records like Let’s Dance, it wasn’t impossible for him to move on to something different like Earthling later.
But before he even developed his glam-rock persona, there was a good chance that Bowie was going to be considered an also-ran in the late 1960s. There had been plenty of artists that have added a bit of camp to their music, but had albums like Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust not blown the doors open for him, he would have only been known as the musician with the strange red haircut singing about travelling to far-away lands on ‘Space Oddity’.
And somewhere in between the pre-fame clown and the rock and roll alien was The Man Who Sold the World, which has since gone down as one of the most interesting detours in Bowie’s career. It was clear that his glam persona was coming into view a little better, but the amount of hard rock infused into this album alongside his acoustic material made it sound like Black Sabbath were backing him on a handful of tracks. ‘The Width of A Circle’ already had a grand scope to it, but there’s always been something endearing about the title track.
Despite most people knowing it these days for Nirvana’s immortal cover of it on MTV Unplugged, Bowie’s original take on ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ is far more interesting, knowing where he would be going. This mysterious figure that Bowie thought died a long time ago could have been a fairy tale for all we knew, but there was a lot more going on with ‘The Starman’ when he wrote it than writing fanciful tunes.
He knew he had crossed an artistic threshold with this tune, which made it all the more refreshing whenever he played it live, saying, “I still love this song a lot. I guess I wrote it because there was a part of myself that I was looking for… You have this great searching, this great need to find out who you really are.” So, really, the fact that the song is still relevant is because Bowie sees himself as both the protagonist and the man who sold the world at the same time.
Because looking at where he would go for the rest of his career, Bowie was having a conversation with himself on this tune as to where he would be going next. He knew that working in the world of vaudeville entertainment wasn’t going to work, but looking at the vast amount of work he left us with, Bowie made his entire life based around being ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, always reinventing himself in new ways no one had ever thought of.
So while Nirvana’s version is incredibly morbid as Cobain spoke about dying alone months before his death, Bowie was only talking about killing off part of his original persona. There were many people who were willing to mould their identity into something else in order to hit the big time, but in this track, Bowie knew the version of Davey Jones that he had been for years was the one who died a long, long time ago.
