Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. DXII--David Bowie: Space Oddity

While this one is more than a week late, pretty sure licking your wounds is a pretty good excuse....

Sometime during the pandemic, I forced my youngest son to watch David Bowie:  Finding Fame on Showtime one night, and it turned out to be quite good.  It took a look at Bowie's early years (no one worked harder to become a rock star than David Bowie--no one), and during the course of said watching, this week's tune played a prominent role (it was his first hit single).  Though I'd been familiar with the song before watching the documentary, it took on a new life and sent me on a Bowie binge that lasted for several months.  It was a good ride....

I wrote about David Bowie in Jukebox Vol.CCCXXV, and while I wrote that it would be impossible to write a bio paragraph about him, I still managed to do a half-assed one.  Alas, this time there's nothing more to add as his 2016 death pretty much precludes much in the way of new information.

"Space Oddity" was the first single from Bowie's oh so cleverly named second album, David Bowie.  The single would hit #5 in the U.K., but only #124 (with a weak ass bullet) in the U.S.  The album charted in neither.  After Bowie's Ziggy Stardust success in the early seventies, both the album and the song were re-released, and the song would hit #15 (now that's a bullet!) in America in 1973, and number one in the U.K. in 1975 (leave it to the music industry to cash in on a good thing...).  The album would hit #16 in the U.S. and #17 in Great Britain. The album also went through some name changes, but this paragraph has already reached short story level....

Fun Fact:  The song has been said to have been heavily influenced by early Bee Gees music (which has been described as psychedelic folk), and as it was being recorded, Bowie himself said as much.  

The musical and technical complexity (not to mention its multi-layered production) does not lend itself to a single paragraph review, especially to an amateur reviewer such as myself.  In a word?  Otherworldly.  The story of an astronaut lost in space has been given many interpretations, but the one I'd like to share is from James E. Perone, who said that Major Tom was a metaphor for "individuals who are unaware of, or do not make an effort to learn, what the world is."   It seems like that interpretation makes it an apt song for what we witnessed this past Tuesday, with the legions of fools who voted for Donald Trump without any idea of what they've unleashed.  May they, like Major Tom, end up floating far from the world, and away from those of us who did not put selfishness before the rights and dignity of our fellow Americans.

Lyric Sheet:  "For here, am I sitting in a tin can/Far from the world/Planet Earth is blue/And there's nothing I can do..."

Enjoy:

R.I.P. America

Peace,

emaycee