See the great white scar
over Battery Park ….
all the corners of the buildings
who but we remember these?
– though as usual with Bowie lyrics it seems to be about other things as well, given the multiple possible meanings of “new killer / nuclear” and “star.”
89. Angie Aparo, “Spaceship” (2000):
No particular thematic linkage between today’s two songs, I’m afraid, apart from the use of sci-fi tropes to comment on contemporary society:
85. David Bowie, “Future Legend / Diamond Dogs” (1974):
The line “Fleas the size of rats / sucked on rats the size of cats” is reminiscent of the gigantic mutated animals in H. G. Wells’ story Food of the Gods:
The line “With your silicone hump and your ten-inch stump” is reminiscent of William S. Burroughs’s reference to “electronic attendants who carry the weapons that are screwed into their stumps” in The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. (Bowie mentioned Burroughs as an influence on the song.)
Bowie and Burroughs, before reading my blog
Bowie and Burroughs, after reading my blog
The line “Hunt you to the ground they will / mannequins with kill appeal” is reminiscent of the deadly animated store mannequins in the Third Doctor story “Spearhead From Space” (1970):
The line “ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes / coveting the highest of the sterile skyscrapers” anticipates J. G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise (as well as the Seventh Doctor story based on it, 1987’s “Paradise Towers”):
The line “The Halloween Jack is a real cool cat / and he lives on top of Manhattan Chase / the elevator’s broke, so he slides down a rope / onto the street below” anticipates Tyler Durden’s prophecy in Fight Club: “You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower”:
The line “This ain’t rock and roll! This is genocide!” anticipates the line “This ain’t no party! This ain’t no disco! This ain’t no fooling around!” from the Talking Heads’ 1979 song “Life During Wartime” (featured in an earlier installment of this SciFi SongFest, but the live version below is more fun than the version I posted before – indeed this is one of my favourite videos in this SongFest):
I don’t think David Byrne gets enough exercise though.
86. Michael Jackson, “Thriller” (1982):
From Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” with “red mutant eyes” that “hide between trees” and “hunt you to the ground,” it seems a short step to the lines in Jackson’s song:
Creatures crawl in search of blood
to terrorize y’all’s neighborhood ….
Stand and face the hounds of hell
and rot inside a corpse’s shell
And Vincent Price’s spoken section for “Thriller” likewise parallels Bowie’s spoken intro for “Future Legend / Diamond Dogs.”
The line “There’s no escaping the jaws of the alien this time” is an obvious reference to 1979’s Alien, but perhaps a reference to 1975’s Jaws as well.
The music video for “Thriller” is both an extended homage to 1957’s “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” (as well as to various zombie movies) and a major influence on 1985’s “Teen Wolf.” The way Jackson breaks through the door may also be a nod to The Shining.
It is a great weight off my mind to know that Michael Jackson did not endorse a belief in the occult.
87. Jon Pertwee, “Who Is the Doctor” (1972):
Finally, what with Doctor Who references and songs with spoken-word sections, it’s a natural segue to this spoken-word Doctor Who song, from Jon Pertwee, the Third Doctor. The music is from Delia Derbyshire’s iconic arrangement of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme:
Two songs of unreachable utopias. Both more fantasy than science fiction – but I warned you from the start that my application of the rules would be somewhat relaxed.
83. David Bowie, “When I Live My Dream” (1967):
I also never promised all the songs would be good. Some of Bowie’s pre-“Space Oddity” work is kinda bland:
84. Donovan, “Atlantis” (1968):
Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars ….
Two songs about gigantic, multi-armed entities who have departed:
81. David Bowie, “Glass Spider” (1987):
82. Leslie Fish, “Where, Oh Where Has Cthulhu Gone?” (1996):
Fish’s line “The old god woke at once and screamed” seems like it might be a callback to the lines “Then once by man and angels to be seen, / In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die,” in Tennyson’s almost-sonnet “The Kraken” – which in turn was very likely an influence on Lovecraft’s original conception of Cthulhu in the first place.
In “Baby Universal,” the titular baby – who may be an echo of the Star Child who arrives in the skies of Earth at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey – attempts to address the human race, apparently via telepathy: “Hallo humans, can you feel me thinking? / I assume you’re seeing everything I’m thinking”:
80. Klaatu, “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” (1976):
On the other hand, Klaatu – a band taking its name from the extraterrestrial visitor in The Day the Earth Stood Still – attempts telepathic contact in the other direction:
For better or worse, the Carpenters’ cover version is better known:
76. Glenn Miller Band, “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There” (1939):
This song’s opening lyric –
Last night I saw upon the stair
a little man who wasn’t there
he wasn’t there again today
oh, how I wish he’d go away
– is borrowed, with slight alterations, from William Hughes Mearns’s poem “Antigonish” (a reference to a famous haunted-house case in Antigonish, Nova Scotia). There’s conflicting information as to when he wrote it (by some accounts, 1899; by others, that date was originally part of the title – a reference to the haunting – and not the date of composition). There are also conflicting accounts as to whether the original version reads:
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today!
I wish, I wish he’d go away!
or instead:
As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again to-day!
I wish, I wish he’d stay away!
Some online sources, including Wikipedia, attribute the musical version’s subsequent verses about coming back at 3:00 etc. to Mearns also, but as far as I can determine, the original poem was just those four lines.
Mearns did apparently write several sequels to the poem, however – the most popular of which, “Alibi,” includes the interesting twist of the POV narrator’s being a man who wasn’t there:
As I was falling down the stair
I met a bump that wasn’t there;
it might have put me on the shelf
except I wasn’t there myself.
– which brings us to:
77. David Bowie, “The Man Who Sold the World” (1970):
The title is borrowed from a Heinlein story (“The Man Who Sold the Moon”), but the lyrics “We passed upon the stair … although I wasn’t there” seem like a mash-up of the stairway meeting in “Antigonish” and the POV reversal of “Alibi” – which is why I quoted those two poems above.
But another influence that’s been suggested for the song is Ray Bradbury’s 1950 story “Night Meeting” (one of the tales in his Martian Chronicles), in which a native from Mars and a human colonist from Earth encounter each other unexpectedly across a temporal rift in a dark Martian valley. Consider the following excerpt from that story:
“I can see through you!” said Tomás.
“And I through you!” said the Martian, stepping back.
Tomás felt of his own body and, feeling the warmth, was reassured. I am real, he thought.
The Martian touched his own nose and lips. “I have flesh,” he said, half aloud. “I am alive.”
Tomás stared at the stranger. “And if I am real, then you must be dead.”
“No, you!”
“A ghost!”
“A phantom!”
They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself intact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds. …
Michael Whelan’s painting for the cover of The Martian Chronicles
“We landed over a year ago, remember?”
“No.”
“And all of you were dead, all but a few. You’re rare, don’t you know that?”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, dead. I saw the bodies. Black, in the rooms, in the houses, dead. Thousands of them.”
“That’s ridiculous. We’re alive!”
“Mister, you’re invaded, only you don’t know it. You must have escaped.”
“I haven’t escaped; there was nothing to escape. What do you mean? I’m on my way to a festival now at the canal, near the Eniall Mountains. I was there last night. Don’t you see the city there?” The Martian pointed.
Tomás looked and saw the ruins. “Why, that city’s been dead thousands of years.”
The Martian laughed. “Dead. I slept there yesterday! … See all the carnival lights? There are beautiful boats as slim as women, beautiful women as slim as boats, women the color of sand, women with fire flowers in their hands. I can see them, small, running in the streets there. That’s where I’m going now, to the festival; we’ll float on the waters all night long; we’ll sing, we’ll drink, we’ll make love. Can’t you see it?”
“Mister, that city is dead as a dried lizard. …”
From Daniel Torres’s illustration, for the Ray Bradbury Chronicles
The Martian grew very serious. “Tell me again. You do not see the city the way I describe it? The pillars very white, the boats very slender, the festival lights – oh, I see them clearly! And listen! I can hear them singing. It’s no space away at all.”
Tomás listened and shook his head. “No.”
“And I, on the other hand,” said the Martian, “cannot see what you describe. … But … as I came up the pass an hour ago …. I felt the strangeness, the road, the light, and for a moment I felt as if I were the last man alive on this world ….”
“So did I!” said Tomás, and it was like talking to an old and dear friend, confiding, growing warm with the topic.
The Martian closed his eyes and opened them again. “This can only mean one thing. It has to do with Time. Yes. You are a figment of the Past!”
“No, you are from the Past,” said the Earth Man.
“You are so certain. How can you prove who is from the Past, who from the Future? …”
“But the ruins prove it! They prove that I am the Future, I am alive, you are dead!”
“Everything in me denies this. My heart beats, my stomach hungers, my mouth thirsts. No, no, not dead, not alive, either of us. More alive than anything else. Caught between is more like it. Two strangers passing in the night, that is it. Two strangers passing. … What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken? You do not know. Then don’t ask. …”
Tomás put out his hand. The Martian did likewise in imitation.
Their hands did not touch; they melted through each other.
“Will we meet again?”
“Who knows? Perhaps some other night.”
Certainly it’s not hard to feel an echo of that passage in these lines:
We passed upon the stair
we spoke of was and when
although I wasn’t there
he said I was his friend
which came as some surprise
I spoke into his eyes:
“I thought you died alone
a long long time ago”
“Oh no, not me ….”
I laughed and shook his hand ….
I gazed a gazely stare
at all the millions here
we must have died alone
a long long time ago
Who knows? not me ….
78. The Highwaymen (Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash), “Highwayman” (1985):
Finally, this song about a highwayman from the past who is also a starship pilot in the future seems to make an appropriate pairing with Bradbury and Bowie’s time-crossed interlocutors:
The line “Perhaps I may become a highwayman again / or I may simply be a single drop of rain” may be an echo of Taliesin’s similar declaration:
I have been a multitude of shapes ….
I have been a drop in a shower ….
I have been a sword in the grasp of a hand ….
