“A farce song”: The legendary song David Bowie wanted to delete from history
For David Bowie, space was the ultimate conduit for artistic expression. Conjuring personas to tap into the zeitgeist aligned with a moment in history when more artists were exploring the theme, using it to enhance their aesthetic or storytelling. After all, space served as the perfect blank canvas for themes like identity, alienation, self-exploration, and earthly disillusionment.
When Bowie created Ziggy Stardust, his otherworldly demeanour was accompanied by the kind of innovative and boundary-pushing aura that immediately warranted politically conscious thinking. At the time, many wondered what sort of statement he was attempting to create and the importance of space as a concept for artistic experimentalism.
Beyond that, space introduced another, more elusive quality that set Bowie apart—abstraction and surrealism took precedence over anything grounded in reality. Space is full of mysteries, and a character like Ziggy Stardust embodied that same sense of the unknown, tapping into the alien-like aspects of human nature, such as the deep desire for escapism.
After all, when done well, alien characters and space themes can be the perfect vessel for seeing or feeling things that defy easy description, and that’s exactly where Bowie’s masterful strokes manifested. Brian Eno perhaps captured this appeal best when he described space in art as rendering because it’s something “we can’t really experience directly at all”, saying it’s the ultimate “mental playground where we’re allowed to imagine it could be”.
He added: “Making music about space, then, is sheer fantasy, or perhaps sheer metaphor.”
Therefore, when Bowie released ‘Space Oddity’ to coincide with the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, this convergence of reality and fantasy signalled something few had achieved before, pushing audiences to question their attachment to the artistic tools used in storytelling against the real world. Bowie’s worlds weren’t real, of course, but the feelings they inspired were capturing cultural passion in a way that ignited an even more tangible phenomenon where you felt like you were a part of it.
However, Bowie once admitted to hating the track so much that he wished he could remove it entirely from history, labelling it as a capitalist ploy to gain from the movement. A “cheap shot”, as Tony Visconti once called it, ‘Space Oddity’ was to Bowie “a farce song” written as an “antidote to space fever”. It became so irritating that he felt he wanted to burn his own master tapes.
This may seem a little dramatic, though uncommon when it comes to artists and their most popular songs. Bowie, after all, preferred to shun commercialism and write only what he felt he believed in, and ‘Space Oddity’ was the ultimate manifestation of pandering to the cultural zeitgeist. Although a classic, he felt it inaccurately represented who he was as an artist, so he distanced himself from everything it represented.
