Bowie’s first hit (and probably his best-known sci-fi song), released a year after 2001: A Space Odyssey and a week before the Apollo 11 moon landing, looking back toward one and forward to the other, and frequently revisited and reinvented over the course of Bowie’s career:
Another version:
And another:
And yet another:
And still another:
And one more:
16. Peter Schilling, “Major Tom (Coming Home)” (1982):
And then – partly an homage, partly a re-telling, and partly a sequel (Major Tom fanfic, perhaps):
I’ve come across some more family documents online: my grandfather’s and uncle’s draft cards (1918 and 1942, respectively); my grandparents’ passport application and subsequent return immigration info, for their honeymoon in France (1923); and the passenger manifest for my mother and her family on their trip to Hawaii (1937). Posted here.
Bowie wanted to adapt Orwell’s novel as a rock opera, but couldn’t get the rights; so instead he wrote a number of 1984-themed songs that weren’t specific enough to run afoul of the Orwell estate. Here’s one:
Another version:
And another, combined with a different 1984-themed song, “Dodo”:
And continuing the theme of year-specific songs prophesying dystopia:
Two non-Bowie songs this time, but the first one counts as Bowie because I’m also including Bowie’s cover of it. Incidentally, Bowie not only covered it but reportedly based the name “Ziggy Stardust” on its author, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy (Norman Odom), though the two don’t really seem to share an aesthetic:
11. Legendary Stardust Cowboy, “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship” (1968)
Yes, the song’s title says “spaceship” (and “on”) but the lyrics say “spacecraft” (and “in”). I can’t help it.
As for the line “I shot my spacegun / and I thought about you” – well, that could mean either that he’s masturbating to thoughts of the addressee, or else that he’s fantasising about killing the addressee. (Or possibly has already killed the addressee: “I looked way back: / the stardust trail / leading back to you / What did I do?”)
The whole thing comes across as rather less creepy in Bowie’s 2002 cover:
12. Nick Cave with Grinderman, “Man in the Moon” (2007):
If the above song was a morose, lonely ballad of separation-by-space-travel from the standpoint of the person who left, this next one is a morose, lonely ballad of separation-by-space-travel from the standpoint of the person who was left. Though the line “That’s what I was often taught” immediately makes one doubt that his father’s disappearance had anything to do with outer space:
Has any other pop star written a hostile song about himself from the standpoint of his disgruntled and resentful back-up band?
Of course Bowie makes sure to have his band compliment his talent (“boy, could he play guitar”) and his appearance (“God-given ass”) along with their complaints about being relegated to back-up status (he “became the special man; then we were Ziggy’s band …. So where were the Spiders?”) while he “took it all too far” and was “making love with his ego.” And although the official moral of the song is supposed to be Bowie/Ziggy’s destructive vanity and narcissism, the band’s plotting to “crush his sweet hands” suggests rather that Bowie is casting the Spiders in the role of Nietzsche’s envious Untermenschen. (“Before you they feel petty, and their baseness glows and smoulders against you in invisible revenge,” Nietzsche writes in Zarathustra.) Small wonder that the partnership broke up unhappily soon after. (I love Bowie as an artist; but like many of my favourite artists, he seems to have been a bit of an asshole, especially – though not exclusively – during his early years.)
According to Wikipedia, the name “Spiders from Mars” was inspired by a “UFO sighting, where a stadium crowd thought they had witnessed Martian spacecraft, which turned out to be migrating spiders” – which, yes, is totally a thing:
But of course Nietzsche also uses spiders in Zarathustra as a metaphor for envy-ridden egalitarians. And Ziggy’s own status as either an extraterrestrial, or else a human specially chosen as a spokesman by extraterrestrials (depending on which interview Bowie was giving at the moment), cast Bowie neatly in the role of the “Homo superior” of “Oh You Pretty Things,” even if at other times he suggested that he was merely the harbinger of a development that he expected would surpass him and leave him behind. The song straddles self-aggrandisement and self-mockery – both genuine, I suspect:
9. David Bowie, “Ziggy Stardust” (1972)
A different version:
And continuing the Nietzschean theme of the resentment of the lesser against the greater:
