Hunky Dory

Changes
Oh! You Pretty Things
Eight Line Poem
Life on Mars?
Kooks
Quicksand
Fill Your Heart
Andy Warhol
Song for Bob Dylan
Queen Bitch
The Bewlay Brothers

Hunky Dory. Never was an album-title so appropriate. From every angle you look at it, the album is absolute fineness, the measuring rod by which any other album should be defined. And the title is becoming for another reason: "hunky dory" is an American slang term, being used here by an arty English songwriter, serving as an example for the secret ingredient in the stew - the perfect blending of highbrow and lowbrow, of different styles and cultures, of things that were considered alien to one another. It is a seeming hotchpotch that creates a seamless unity, a new coherent vision that arises from what looks at first like fractures of other visions. It is the first album that manifests this unique quality that would become Bowie's trademark.

Musically, Bowie brings together all the styles of his first three albums – the theatrical symphonies of the first, the acoustic ballads of the second, the heavy metal of the third – and merges them perfectly, and with the addition of Rick Wakeman's jolly piano, Mick Ronson's magical arrangements and Ken Scott's bright production, he turns it all into wonderful pop, at once light and dark, provocative and accessible. And as a songwriter he really flowers, perfecting both his candid side and his theatrical side, becoming so subtle that it is hard to tell when he is being himself and when he's playing a character, when he is being straightforward and when ironic. Which, of course, fits perfectly with the identity-confusion that is the heart of the album.

Philosophically, the album picks up where the previous one left off. In The Man Who Sold the World, Bowie tried to redirect the revolutionary spirit of the counter-culture towards Nietzschean goals, towards creating a world of heroic Supermen. Hunky Dory continues this line, invoking some of those who promulgated the Superman ideal: Nietzsche, Crowley, the Nazis, The Coming Race. And while the previous album existed mainly on a mythical, timeless plane, this one takes the Superman concept and sticks it right in the present, in the pop culture of the early seventies. After going on a tangent to find a philosophical answer that would satisfy his spirit, he now comes back to bring the answer to the world.

But then, he comes crashing down in the face of everyday reality, which is nothing like his dreams. Bowie shares his own everydayness with us, which at the time was all about the birth of his first son. 'Kooks' is a loving record for little Zowie, which does not try to transcend the everyday plane, but rather finds its joys in it. But 'Oh! You Pretty Things' takes this birth as an omen for the coming of the Superman, as Bowie looks at his child and imagines that he is the beginning of the next stage in the evolution of humankind, a "Homo Superior". When the track ends, however, we slide right into 'Eight Line Poem', which takes us down from these euphoric heights and back to the mundane reality of the nursery, telling us that the key to another existence is somewhere out of our reach. In fact, the state of mind that dominates the album is that of being stuck in a boring, meaningless existence, waiting and hoping for something to come and break the monotony. There are passages that express this feeling in 'Changes', 'Oh! You Pretty Things', 'Life on Mars?', 'Quicksand', 'Song for Bob Dylan' and 'Queen Bitch'. There's clearly a need for a new messiah, someone who will come and show us the way out of the rut.

But others don't realize it. Most are still stuck in their counter-culture tracks, believing in its old dogmas and messiahs, failing to see that they are no longer relevant. Bowie already took apart the fundamental beliefs of the counter-culture in records like 'Space Oddity', 'Cygnet Committee', 'Memory of a Free Festival' and 'All the Madmen', and he continues to do so here. The central piece is 'Song for Bob Dylan', in which he assumes the identity of a Dylan fan who is waiting for his hero to come back and show him the way, instead of thinking for himself. Another example is his rendition of 'Fill Your Heart', a cute Hippie ditty about the power of love, which is presented as the thing that can lead us to salvation. Bowie sings it affectionately, but also playfully, clearly poking fun at its naivety – it's quite obvious that he is assuming a character here as well, of some starry-eyed Hippie singer. Then there's 'Life on Mars?', which attacks Sinatra's anthem 'My Way', and its suggestion that you can determine your own unique way and live a heroic life. The heroes of this record are fully aware that they are stuck in an existence that offers no exciting alternatives, no heroic ways of life, just variations on the same boring theme. And 'Quicksand' dramatizes the situation, bringing forth the tension caused by the discrepancy between his Superman dreams and his actual reality, showing that it is driving him mad. He must find a way out.

And so he turns to self-reflection, to find a truth he can build an authentic and heroic way of life on. 'Changes' provides the answer: you can be a Superman if you learn how to control your own changes. The impermanence of the self, which in tracks like 'Quicksand' and 'The Bewlay Brothers' is perceived as a problem, as something that prevents you from hanging on to any lasting truth, here becomes the fundamental building block. It is a problem for Man, not for the Superman. Instead of trying to find something eternal to hang on to, he is going to learn how to hang on to things only temporarily, and let go when they are not good any more.

The question then becomes: what is the criterion for the change, how should you change in order to ensure your happiness? The answer is: a real change cannot come only from within, but must be aided by someone who comes from the outside, an alien. In 'Life on Mars?', the heroes wish for a way of life that is beyond their world, but they cannot reach it on their own. They need what the hero of 'Oh! You Pretty Things' gets: a hand that comes down from another world and pulls him up. But note: the hand doesn't pull him all the way to that other world, but rather gives him the ability to remain in his old world and change it. The change Bowie talks about is not movement from one existing world to another, but rather a process of infusing elements that are handed over from another world into your own world, and creating a new world out of the merger. And for that to work, the alien cannot be just any alien, but someone who brings a logic that corresponds to something that you already feel inside. The alien merely gives you the means to express it, means which your own world could not provide.

So we have the characteristics of Bowie's Superman: he is someone who is in control of his changes, and does so by merging with an alien, to transform his own world and create something new. And, once again, Bowie pretends to be the spokesperson for his generation, as though this way of thinking is actually what the whole youth rebellion of the sixties was about. 'Changes', 'Oh! You Pretty Things' and 'Life on Mars?' show the youth as excited by aliens and by the prospects of change, against their disapproving parents; and 'Kooks' shows that Bowie intends to be a different kind of parent, as he tries to impart to his son a love for things that are strange. But Bowie also knows that this is not exactly the case, and most members of the counter-culture are actually looking for something stable to believe in. 'Song for Bob Dylan' creates a contradiction between the ever-changing, super-brainy Dylan, and his pathetic fan who fears change and wants Dylan to reassure him with something familiar. And 'Queen Bitch' also has a battle between two persons, one that gives in to the alien figure of the queen bitch, and one that is afraid to do so. Bowie identifies himself with the apprehensive one, showing that he also has this fear in him, and needs to overcome it if he wants to live the life he envisions. And the track that comes right after it and closes the album is 'The Bewlay Brothers', which also has tension between two figures, one stable and one ever-changing. Bowie identifies himself mainly with the stable one, but in the end it seems that the changing one is taking over, and sings his way out of the album, and towards a shift in Bowie's personality. From here on, he will be a changer.

Alright, so now we know what our way of life should be, but where can we find the aliens it requires, seeing as the question "is there life on Mars?" remains unanswered? Well, it turns out that the alien doesn't have to come from Mars: there are enough aliens on Earth as well, people and cultures whose logic is contrary to your own, and which can give you the hand that will pull you out of the quicksand of your own thought processes. But, we must remember, this alien logic must correspond with something you feel inside, and alienates you to the logic of your own culture. So what was it about Hippie logic that Bowie's innermost sensibilities rejected? First of all, there was their attitude towards artificiality. The Hippie logic rejected artificiality, and aspired to be completely natural. Hippie rock distinguished itself from the "artificial" pop world, and claimed to be coming from the soul, from the inner self. But Bowie found that there is no inner self, and that the self has to be created. The artificial, then, becomes his truth, and he needs an alien that stands for artificiality. And, it just so happens, there was someone around whose entire persona and aesthetics were a celebration of the artificial. Andy Warhol becomes Bowie's model, the alien that can show him the way to make art out of artificiality. The record 'Andy Warhol' celebrates Warhol's artificiality, and expresses his desire to incorporate it.

Now, if the self is not something to be found inside, but something to be artificially created and made superhuman and heroic, then the models to imitate are obviously the Hollywood stars. In 'Life on Mars?', Bowie emphasizes the importance of movies in helping us create our images, and 'Andy Warhol' celebrates Warhol's ability to turn himself into a figure that looks like it came straight out of the movies. This is an ability which Bowie would obviously like to emulate, because in 'Quicksand' he proclaims himself the essence of Garbo, the greatest star of all. His aspiration to be like Garbo is shown once again on the album cover, where his portrait looks like a conflation of two famous Garbo photos:



















































Consider also this Katherine Hepburn photo, another possible inspiration:




















Bowie, then, wants to live his life as if he was a star on the silver-screen. He wants to infuse the glamour and artificiality of Hollywood and pop culture into the "naturalistic" world of Hippie rock, and thus transform it. And for that, he needs to change the settings: while the Hippies preached an escape from the urban world and a return to nature, Bowie finds more truth in the city, the place that is about artificiality, alienation, plurality of identities and self-creation. And once again he finds the alien that can help him express this sensibility, in the form of the Velvet Underground, the New York band whose celebration of everything urban was adverse to Hippie logic. 'Queen Bitch' shows Bowie's attempt to merge his style with that of the VU, and create a new musical experience.

And 'Queen Bitch', with the help of 'The Bewlay Brothers', brings another alien on board. In the Victorian mind, the nature of human sexuality was very well-defined: there are men and there are women; men are attracted to women, and women are attracted to men; they have sexual intercourse, and from that babies are born. But under the surface of this world, a gay subculture was formed, in which the rules were different, in which one's gender or inclinations were a lot more flexible and various, and in which sex was done for joy, not for procreation. For someone who went through the sexual revolution of the sixties, it was obvious that the Victorian worldview was wrong, and the gay world held at least some of the truth. The final two tracks of the album, borrowing images and terms from the gay subculture, show Bowie preparing to bring the two worlds together, to create something new.

The stage is set, then. If Bowie wants to save youth culture from its decay, he will have to create a new messiah, a Dylan for the new decade. What are the attributes of this messiah? Well, he has to be bigger than life, manifesting the Superman ideal; he has to appear as an alien who hails from another world, such as Mars, and cracking the sky to reach down to the children of Earth and pull them to another plane; he has to be someone who can change images and identities, and recreate himself at will; he has to master the glamour and artificiality of the pop world; he has to be the epitome of stardom, someone who is practically made out of stardust; he has to know how to live in the urban world, and turn city life into magic; and he has to be a being of indeterminate gender and sexual inclinations, a new step in the sexual revolution.

By the time Hunky Dory saw light, in December 1971, Bowie was already putting the finishing touches on exactly such a figure.

The Bewlay Brothers

Yikes!

Here is the moment I was dreading. The most inscrutable record in Bowie's early work. Hell, perhaps the most inscrutable in his entire work. With every record I analyzed so far, I had a pretty good idea beforehand where I was going with it, although once I started, I was always surprised by where the analysis took me. With 'The Bewlay Brothers', I haven't a clue what it's all about. As I write these words, I'm getting prepared to dive into it, and I have no idea what I'll come up with. Are you ready? Let's go.

One thing that seems obvious is that this record is meant to be elusive. To begin with, the style is quite different than Bowie's other records of that period. In those other records, you can always find the main narrative or themes it revolves around. Here, the picture is muddled by fancy words, enigmatic images and wordplays, and it is very hard to extract a story from it. Some have postulated that this record has no meaning at all, that Bowie is simply making fun of those who take him too seriously, providing them with an impenetrable lyric to bash their heads against. But that doesn't compute with the way Bowie treated this record over the years - it seems to mean something very deep and personal to him, and that seems to be the reason for the masquerade. This makes the role of the interpreter very hard, and I don't think we can ever get to the bottom of things. But we can try.

A quick first glance at the lyrics reveal that they contain many images that bring to mind the themes he was dealing with in other records from that period, like religion, insanity, drug use, homosexuality and transvestitism. It is tempting to see the Bewlay Brothers as a couple of hustlers, who go through all sorts of adventures together. But it seems to me that this is just the outer-shell imagery, and the thing that we should focus on is the relationship between the brothers, and their identity.

Recently, Bowie revealed that he took the word "Bewlay" from a brand of pipes of that name, and that it actually stands for "Bowie". That certainly clears the smoke a little. Let us think of the record as "The Bowie Brothers". Next we should ask: who are the Bowie Brothers?

The easy solution would be to suggest that he is talking about his mentally ill half-brother, and many, indeed, regard the record as a tribute to Terry, expressing the soulful connection between the two. This would account for the personal feel of it, and there are images in the record that support this interpretation. But I am not going to go in that direction. One things seems apparent: these guys are together through everything - in the feeble in the bad, in the devil may be here, in the blessed and cold, etc. So the way I see it, the two brothers aren't two persons, but two sides of Bowie's own personality.

This would correspond with the other bookend of Hunky Dory. In 'Changes', Bowie tells us that when he tried self-reflection, it produced a duality in his being: the "myself" was facing the "me". And we have encountered this duality elsewhere in his work, most notably in 'Width of a Circle'. But what is the nature of this duality? Are there two distinct persons, living in the same body? No, not unless you suffer from a multiple personality disorder. In a regular case, this duality would mean that your identity can never encompass all parts of your being: if you define yourself in a certain way, there will always be parts of you that will be left out of this definition, and they will become the "other side" of your personality. And since 'Changes' defined identity as a fluid thing, this duality must also be fluid: one moment you think of yourself in a certain way, and it splits your being accordingly, and the next moment you think of yourself in a different way, and your being is then split differently. This fluid duality, I feel, is what we find in 'The Bewlay Brothers'. There are no two distinct personalities throughout the record, but rather a process of splitting, operating within the resulting duality, and then splitting in a different way. This fluidity is one of the things that make the record so hard to grab onto.

So we have a certain picture in mind, of a fluid process of splitting and re-splitting. Armed with this picture, let us proceed to dissect the record.

And so the story goes, they wore the clothes
They said the things to make it seem improbable
The whale of a lie like they hope it was

This portrays people who have put on a spectacle, a fancy lie which they knew was false, but made it so seductive in its improbability, that other people fell for it. But who are "they"? Hard to tell, but judging by his other records of the period, I'm led to think that he's talking about the counter-culture again. The sixties youth wore fancy clothes to distinguish themselves from the adults, and pretended that they were going to create a new world, but it was all just a fabulous lie.

And the Goodmen of Tomorrow
Had their feet in the wallow
And their heads of Brawn were nicer shorn
And how they bought their positions with saccharin and trust

Of course, not all the youth were members of the counter-culture. "The Goodmen of tomorrow" are most probably those kids who conform to society's norms, comfortable to stand in the wallow of mediocrity, to not think too much, to comb their hair according to the rules, to use false sweetness to win the trust of employers and advance in society. They are the opposite of those in the opening passage.

So we have two sides here, and if we go by our reading, we will say that they are two sides in Bowie's personality as well. He also has a rebellious side and a side that wants to conform. He sees parts of himself in both groups.

And the world was asleep to our latent fuss
Sighing, the swirl through the streets
Like the crust of the sun

But apparently, he didn't feel he belonged to any of the groups. There was a part in him that wanted something else, which was not provided by them. It remained latent, fussing below the surface, but not reaching the ears of the world. He was showing a false exterior to the world, an exterior that was like the crust of the Sun – that is, something that can hardly contain the inner burn.

The Bewlay Brothers
In our Wings that Bark
Flashing teeth of Brass
Standing tall in the dark
Oh, And we were Gone
Hanging out with your Dwarf Men
We were so turned on
By your lack of conclusions

Finally, he found a way to express the latent fuss, to create his own identity. Seems that here he recalls breaking away from those two groups, both conformed society and the counter-culture, and establishing himself as David Bowie. Which of course immediately split his personality differently, producing the Bewlay Brothers. The following images are vague, but they seem to denote a certain attitude, standing alone in the face of the world and making noise to rattle it. He dropped out of society, and went hanging with its "Dwarf Men", with the castaways. It suggests that he joined a circus, and that brings to mind his decision to become the clown, the Pierrot that plays mirror-image to society. In that position, society's "lack of conclusions", its inability to find any lasting truths, did not depress him, but rather turned him on – it gave him room for artistic expression.

I was Stone and he was Wax
So he could scream, and still relax, unbelievable
And we frightened the small children away

The nature of the new split revolves around animation vs. in-animation. One side is stable and solid, like a stone, while the other side is flexible and changing, like wax. He recognized himself with the solid side, while the flexible side was reserved for his characters. That's the way I understand these lines: Bowie is talking about the aesthetic position he took in the years 67-71, when his "self" stood apart from society, as a songwriter, while his characters were the ones who dove into the stream of everyday life, putting on faces and frightening the children.

And our talk was old and dust would flow
Thru our veins and Lo!
It was midnight back o' the kitchen door
Like the grim face on the Cathedral floor

But then he felt that this position was making him gather dust. The image of dust flowing through his veins invokes images of drug use, and is probably meant to do so, but I feel the main meaning is something else. I think it is another comment on the passage of time, of the feeling that his time is "running wild" and that he is wasting his life away instead of living it like it should be lived. The stroke of midnight reminds him that he is constantly moving towards death (the grim face on the Cathedral floor), and that he should find a way to utilize his life better.

And the solid book we wrote
Cannot be found today

This sounds like a direct reference to 'Oh! You Pretty Things', where he's telling us that the books he writes today will be found by the golden ones, the race of super humanoids of the future, and only they will be able to understand it. I think Bowie is saying that the albums he made so far present a solid worldview, but they cannot be understood by his contemporaries. He needs to find a way to connect better.

And it was Stalking time
for the Moonboys
The Bewlay Brothers

Seems to me that here the other "brother" is taking over, that brother that is about action and change. From his point of view, the kind of art they have been producing until now is nothing but stalking, portraying the actions of humankind without taking part.

With our backs on the arch
In the Devil-may-be-here
But He can't sing about that

For this other brother, the scenery of midnight in the cathedral, with the sense of impending death and the devil close at hand, is not frightening, but rather presents options. But he knows that his brother cannot sing about such things, cannot take these options, and that's why he took over. I think Bowie is hinting at his Crowleyan stage, where he opened up to the darkness.

Oh, and we were Gone
Real Cool Traders
We were so Turned On
You thought we were Fakers

And so he moved on from being a clown to being a Satanist, trading one lifestyle for another. The other brother, the one that believes in stability, felt that they were being fakers for changing so dramatically, but this brother holds the belief expressed in 'Changes': the self is always a "faker", there is no such thing as a real self. Therefore, realness should be defined differently: you are real when you follow the thing that turns you on at the moment, and change yourself accordingly.

Now the dress is hung, the ticket pawned
The Factor Max that proved the fact
Is melted down
And woven on the edging of my pillow

Until now, he was talking in past tense. Now, he talks about the present. It seems that the other brother, the one who is more stable, is back in the driver's seat. And from his point of view, that period when the other side was in control was nothing but an act. Well, this act is now over, he has removed the dress and makeup, and the Max Factor stains on his pillow suggest that it was nothing but a dream.

Now my Brother lays upon the Rocks
He could be dead, He could be not
He could be You
He's Chameleon, Comedian, Corinthian and Caricature
"Shooting-up Pie-in-the-Sky"
The Bewlay Brothers
In the feeble and the Bad
The Bewlay Brothers

The other brother, he tells us, is dormant for the moment, but he knows that he might wake up. He describes that other side as chameleon (denoting his flexible, changing nature), comedian (denoting his Pierrot nature), Corinthian (probably denoting his evangelic nature, in bringing to mind St. Paul's epistles), and caricature (again this has to do with the Pierrot, who caricaturizes human nature. This is why "he could be you", that is, anyone of us). That other side is also "shooting-up pie-in-the-sky", filling their combined being with dreams of a better existence, while the more stable side sees no escape from the feeble and the bad.

In the Blessed and Cold
In the Crutch-hungry Dark
Was where we flayed our Mark
Oh, and we were Gone
Kings of Oblivion
We were so Turned On
In the Mind-Warp Pavilion

This passage hints that they were prostituting themselves to someone, oe something. But now they are gone again, setting out on another mind-warping adventure.

Lay me place and bake me Pie
I'm starving for me Gravy
Leave my shoes, and door unlocked
I might just slip away
Just for the Day, Hey!
Please come Away, Hey!

Once again he goes through a transformation. The brother that is in control now is that brother that enjoys change, shoots for pies in the sky and wants to ride the gravy train. He is calling for the other brother to join him, to "come away" on the new adventure. But there is also a new awareness: this is going to be temporary. The phrase "just for a day", which will play a crucial role in Bowie's art, makes its first appearance here. He knows that this new transformation is only a phase, and the day will come when another side of him will take over his being, and have a different view of things.

Alright, that is my take on 'The Bewlay Brothers'. It proved as slippery as I expected, and there are still many things in it that I failed to account for. The strength of this interpretation is that it contains many of the themes that appeared elsewhere on the album: the impermanence of identity; the criticism of society and the counter-culture; the feeling that he is stuck in a meaningless existence and wasting his life away; the battle between different sides of his personality; the need for something better. The record maneuvers between those themes, and this maneuvering, I tried to show, manifests his inability to find a stable position.

This interpretation also detects some autobiographical aspects, references to his past transformations, and it ends in the here and now, as he's getting ready to make another change. He is now ready to put on the dress and makeup once again, because his journey made him realize that there is no stable truth, but rather that truth is found in the process of creating and recreating yourself. What you have to do is find something that turns you on, create a whale of lie based on it, and then you'll be GONE, on a wondrous adventure. But you also have to remember that it is only temporary, and the lie will eventually blow up. Therefore, you have to stay connected to that other side of your being, the other "brother", and occasionally check up things from his perspective, to see if the lie still holds, or if it is time to move on.

With this realization, Bowie slips away from the passive-songwriter stance of his previous albums, and enters a new phase in his career.

Queen Bitch

In 'Changes', Bowie found the key to happiness: changing yourself, through giving in to strange fascinations. When you are fascinated by something that is alien to your logic, and you allow yourself to be taken over by that fascination, it transforms you, and the process induces joy. The question now becomes: what is there in the world around him that is alien to his logic, and which fascinates him?

One answer was the underground gay culture, which was beginning to become more visible at the time. Homosexuality was already legal, but it was still an alien. Why? Because the Victorian mentality that ruled Britain, the US and most of the Western world regarded sexuality as something very well-defined. There were men, there were women, they were attracted to each other, and they had sex in order to have babies. Anything else was considered to be against nature and morality. But throughout the 20th century, under the surface of Victorianism, thrived a gay subculture, in which gender and orientation were a lot more flexible and various, and where sex was done for joy. In the minds of the regular folk, those gay people were unnatural and immoral, which meant that they were capable of any atrocity. All manners of sexual "perversion" were therefore attached to the stereotype of the gay culture, which made it evermore frightening: the fear was that if you open yourself up even a little to homosexuality, you will become perverted, and slide into that world of S&M, fetishism, trans-sexuality, pedophilia and more. But times were beginning to change: after the sexual revolution, sex was no longer regarded as a means for procreation, but as a means to have a good time, and people were ready to experiment. The gay world was still frightening, but also intriguing.

Now, in England, homosexuality wasn't completely alien. Gay people found spaces in society that accepted them, and avenues in which they could express themselves. Gays were very instrumental in the rise of pop culture in Britain, and the swinging sixties might not have happened if it wasn't for gay stylists, designers and managers who infused their camp irony and style into the mix. Bowie himself was the protégé of such a manager, the erudite Ken Pitt. Another place was British theatre, were homosexuality was practically a rite of passage, and Bowie, who was introduced to the thespian crowd through the ultra-campy Lindsay Kemp, got a real taste of it. His ties to the gay underground were strengthened even further with his marriage to the bisexual Angie, and the couple's frequenting of gay bars and discos. Through these connections, Bowie acquired knowledge and feel for the gay life, and with the Arnold Corns project, he already tried to turn it into something that would cause a stir. The English public, however, remained indifferent. Gayness just wasn't all that alien and shocking.

In America, on the other hand, things were quite different. Gay culture was driven deep underground, and found almost no expression in mainstream culture. Consequently, when gays did express themselves, they did it in a more aggressive, outrageous and in-your-face manner. One American institution that did accept them was Andy Warhol, whose entourage included some fabulous gay characters, adding to his glamorous image. Under Warhol they could reach a larger crowd, and when some of them put on a trashy play called Pork, they got to take it all the way to London, at the end of 1971. That introduced Bowie to the more bizarre world of New York gayness, and he was fascinated. The Pork cast, on the other hand, were not impressed by Bowie, which shows us that at that time he still lacked the edge needed to be a true alien. Thankfully, they did like his more outgoing wife, and through this connection, Bowie would eventually develop that edge, and turn the Pork people into part of his entourage. No less important, he established a link to Warhol's crowd, and through that to another kind of alien he was drawn to, a musical alien.

What was it that made the Velvet Underground so alien and antithetical to the logic of the Hippie counter-culture? Several things, really. For starters, their music wasn't based on blues scales, but built around John Cale's electric viola and organ sounds, taken from the European avant-garde, over which Lou Reed delivered his poetry in an unmelodic, half-spoken, nagging style. Secondly, while the Hippies espoused a return to nature, Reed took his subject matter from the characters who populated the streets of New York, including those "unnatural" gay people. And thirdly, Hippie rock was usually a personal confession, seen as a soulful expression of the singer's humaneness, while Reed was usually assuming a character, and portraying the seedier sides of the human soul. Listeners who were used to think of music as a personal expression confused Reed with his characters, and saw him as depraved.

But it went a lot deeper than that. The Hippies believed that once we unmask the fake identities that society thrusts upon us and release our inner selves, we will all come together in harmony and love. Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll were methods to do it, to break out of your shell and come together with your brothers and sisters. In the Velvets' records, on the other hand, the characters who do sex, drugs and rock'n'roll also want to break away from society, but they do it not to find their "real self", but simply because they want to disappear, to erase the self. Thus, the junky in 'Heroin' does drugs because he wants "to nullify my life", the masochist in 'Venus in Furs' does S&M sex because he wants to "sleep for a thousand years", and the singer of 'White Light / White Heat' describes a quasi-religious experience in which your entire being is consumed by white light and white heat. The latter record is usually interpreted as a paean to the sensation of hard drug consumption, but to me it sounds more like Lou Reed recalling the sensation of the electric shock treatments he was given as a teenager, in order to "cure" him from his homosexual tendencies. Shock treatments, in the fifties, were regarded as a magical cure for social deviancy, but their effect on Reed was opposite: he became more rebellious, dark and cynical, and nursing a drug habit that started with his post-treatment sedatives and flourished to include every drug in the book. 'White Light / White Heat' may be a celebration of the rush of smack through your body, reliving the sensation of the shock treatments, of the feeling of your soul turning to cinder. The Velvet Underground, then, hammered at the foundations that the Hippie logic stood on: on one hand they were part of the sixties rebellion, taking the "sex, drugs, rock'n'roll" credo further than anyone else. On the other hand their art suggested that what waits at the end of the voyage is not happiness and harmony, but the void.

No wonder, then, that they so perturbed the Hippie mind, and were marginalized in the predominantly Hippie rock world of the late sixties. Bowie's mind, though, worked differently. He was already into the Velvets back in 1966, when Ken Pitt got him an acetate of their first album, and they were his secret love affair, so alien to the sprightly world of mid-sixties London. We don't know how much of an influence they exerted on him at the time, but the fact is that in 67 he started to write theatrical songs about deviant characters, more comical in nature, but containing hints of the darkness that only the Velvets touched upon. In 'Little Toy Soldier', a record about a girl who owns a mechanical whip-wielding soldier which she uses as a sex toy to satisfy her masochistic fantasies, he blatantly paraphrases the Velvets' 'Venus in Furs'. So the Velvets were always there in the background, but now in the early seventies, after the Hippie dreams were dashed, their music suddenly started to make more and more sense. After The Man Who Sold the World tried to escape the city and go up the mountains to look for alien encounters that might change his world, Bowie was now ready to look for the alien in the dark corners of city life, among the urban characters that populated the Velvet Underground's albums. 'Queen Bitch' marks his first attempt.

I'm up on the eleventh floor
And I'm watching the cruisers below

The beginning of the record finds our hero in a hotel room, looking at the street below him. If we want to take it allegorically, which of course we do, we will say that it symbolizes Bowie the songwriter, who stands apart from society and describes the people in it, from a seemingly higher point of view.

He's down on the street
And he's trying hard to pull sister Flo

Now we find another character, one who actively participates in the daily life of society. This guy, apparently, is trying to seduce a lady.

My heart's in the basement
My weekend's at an all time low

The third couplet is a reversal of the first: although he is seemingly higher than the "cruisers below", he actually feels lower than them. Something depresses him. Until now, Bowie was comfortable in being a mirror-image to society, describing without participating. Now, suddenly, there's a feeling that he's missing out on something.

'Cause she's hoping to score
So I can't see her letting him go
Walk out of her heart
Walk out of her mind

And the fourth couplet is a reversal of the second: the guy thought that he was the pursuer, but the singer, from his vantage-point, sees that he is actually the pursued. This woman is not of the usual kind. She's something else…

She's an old-time ambassador
Of sweet talking, night walking games
And she's known in the darkest clubs
For pushing ahead of the dames
If she says she can do it
Then she can do it,
She don't make false claims
But she's a Queen, and such are queens
That your laughter is sucked in their brains

The lady is a Queen of the nightlife, ruler of that shady sexual world which "normal" folks dare not tread. That other guy is in over his head with her, and he is about to become her prey. This is a rather rare scenario in a world were women were still expected to play the passive role, but of course, we've met this scenario before in Bowie's music: in 'She Shook Me Cold', the hero is a man who treats women as objects for conquering, until he comes upon a woman who subdues him with her sexual powers, and turns him into her love slave. But there, the meeting takes place in some magical location, and it is suggested that she has supernatural powers. The Queen Bitch, on the other hand, is a real-life person, straight from the underbelly of the urban world. She brings to mind the "Femme Fatale" that the Velvet Underground sang about. She may be despised by society, but she is impervious to this mockery (it is "sucked in her brain') – she knows who she is and what she wants. In that, she has the edge over the regular people who conform to society's norms, and that gives her the ability to manipulate them.

Now she's leading him on
And she'll lay him right down
But it could have been me
Yes, it could have been me
Why didn't I say,
why didn't I say, no, no, no

Suddenly, we have a twist: it comes out that the singer isn't mocking the other guy, but actually envies him. He wants to be her sexual prey, and apparently he had his chance, but chickened out. So now he's relegated to the role of observer, missing out on the experience. That is why he is so depressed.

She's so swishy in her satin and tat
In her frock coat and bipperty-bopperty hat
Oh God, I could do better than that

Another thing that attracts him about her is her glamour, but the way he portrays it is curious. While the verses make it seem like Bowie is trying to imitate the style and lingo of the New York scene, the chorus brings out the Englishness of the whole affair. It's hard to imagine Lou Reed describing someone as "swishy in her satin and tat". Bowie doesn't go all the way in his imitation – he retains something of his own style.

The interesting line here is "Oh God, I could do better than that". It can mean several things. Maybe he's still talking about the fact that he missed the opportunity to do something better than sit around and mope; maybe he's bragging that he could find a woman that is even wilder; or maybe he thinks that he can be even swishier than her! In any case, it further manifests his desire to become part of that world.

So I lay down a while
And I gaze at my hotel wall
Oh the cot is so cold
It don't feel like no bed at all
Yeah I lay down a while
And I gaze at my hotel wall

Boredom grows…

But he's down on the street
So I throw both his bags down the hall

Another twist: it turns out that the other guy was his roommate. His jealous fit suggests that they may have even been lovers, or that he was hoping that they would be, until the Queen Bitch came between them. I'd rather look at it allegorically, though. My interpretation is that we should not see them as two persons, but as two sides of Bowie's personality, the side that wants to remain as an observer portraying society through his art, and the side that wants to take part in the action. Until now, the former ruled Bowie's art, and he remained a detached songwriter, taking part in the action only through figments of his imagination. His decision to "throw both his bags down the hall", to get rid of that other guy, can be understood as an announcement by Bowie the artist that from now on he will be the center of the action, not his imaginary characters. In other words, he is going to switch from the role of a standoffish songwriter to the role of a performer.

And I'm phoning a cab
'Cause my stomach feels small
There's a taste in my mouth
And it's no taste at all
It could have been me
Oh yeah, it could have been me
Why didn't I say,
Why didn't I say, no, no, no

His former stance, of someone who stands above society, is now felt to be tasteless. He resolves to give in to the temptations that are out there, to let the thrills and dangers of the urban world engulf him, and start living life.

The record leaves a lot to the imagination, and it is unclear what exactly is going down. Are the two men lovers? Is the Queen Bitch actually a gay man, a "queen"? Is the singer also a queen, who was dreaming of seducing that other guy, and the Queen Bitch beat him to it? There are many possibilities, and I will leave it for the listener to decide for themselves. What is important is that Bowie writes a song that shatters Victorian logic, muddling the lines of gender and orientation. The penultimate track of Hunky Dory shows us that he is ready to move on to a new phase, to take the plunge from the 11th floor down to the streets. It's time to change, and since real change can only come through associating with an alien, he is going to open up to that alien world of "deviant" sexuality, presented through his gay friends and through the music of the Velvet Underground. He hasn't made the step yet – as the record ends, he's still in his room in his empty cot – but he is about to.

But it also shows us that change, for Bowie, doesn't mean a total resignation to that alien from another world, to the point were it erases who you formerly were. Simply moving from one existing world to another is not change, since it doesn't create anything new. Real change is when you take something from an alien world, and merge it with parts of your own world, to create something that doesn't belong in any of the worlds. The album cover side-notes describe 'Queen Bitch' as "some V.U, white light returned with thanks", and that's basically what it does: it takes the Velvets' music, reworks it and fuses it with his own, and sets it back on the world. Musically, 'Queen Bitch' still retains the spirit of British R&B, with some Velvet mannerisms - the monotonous melody, the half-spoken singing, the harder hitting beat – worked into it, and lyrically it also fuses Reed's street poetry with Bowie's writing style. In that, 'Queen Bitch' is a portent of the future.

Song for Bob Dylan

'Song for Bob Dylan' is, obviously, Bowie's cunning reply to Dylan's own 'Song to Woody', which was the very first self-penned song he has ever recorded, back in 1961. In it, Dylan is addressing Woody Guthrie, the old folk troubadour who dedicated his life to going on the road to lift the spirits of the downtrodden and oppressed everywhere in America, and encourage them to group together and stand up for their rights. "Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song / 'Bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along / Seems sick an' it's hungry, it's tired an' it's torn / It looks like it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born." As we can see, the song isn't really about Woody, but about the world we live in, a world that can and should be much better, and Dylan is lauding Guthrie and other folk singers as people who are trying to make a change. He is also vowing to try and follow their footsteps, and become part of the folk tradition. The record is not considered among Dylan's finest, but it set the stage for the next decade, in which he paved his own road, and became the hero that others aspired to follow. Now, at the beginning of a new decade, Bowie is repeating the trick, setting the stage for himself. But 'Song for Bob Dylan', as we shall see, is not as simple and straightforward as 'Song to Woody'.

The difference between the two records highlights the difference between pop and folk. What is "folk music"? Simply put, it is traditional songs without a designated author, passed on through the ages. But in nineteen-thirties America, it became more than that – it became an ideology. In the age of the depression, when it seemed like capitalism had failed, socialists found in folk music an alternative that they described as manifesting the true spirit of the working class. While pop records were perceived by the folkies as music made by the capitalist industry in order to condition the minds of the workers to accept their inferior position, folk songs were seen as music that emerges straight out of the life and toil of the workers themselves, an authentic expression of their struggle against the world. Also, while pop music was individualistic in nature, a folk song was the collective effort of many writers over the ages, and was therefore seen as representing the collective spirit of the everyman, the basis on which the future universal society will stand. The folk ideology revolved around two main projects: the first was to unearth folk songs, and spread them throughout the land; the second was to write songs that retained folk sensibilities, while propagating a socialist ideology that called the workers to unionize and fight. Woody Guthrie was the quintessential folk hero, both a gifted writer of new songs and a great interpreter of traditional songs, famous for not trying to make money out of his talents, but using them to go around and galvanize the workers into action, sometimes under serious danger. The folkies believed they are going to change the world.

By the fifties, however, things have improved considerably for the common people, and the folk movement lost its power, finding itself on the run from the jaws of McCarthyism. But McCarthy was brought down in 1954, and a folk revival was on the way, finding new causes to focus on. This coincided with the rise of rock'n'roll and youth culture, and so rock'n'roll and folk became rivals trying to win the hearts of the young generation, both playing a big part in the upheaval of the next decade. And in the midst of that rivalry stood Bob Dylan, whose compass teetered between these two opposite poles, and whose ingenious maneuvering between them made him the skipper of youth culture in the sixties. But Hunky Dory is infused with the feeling that youth culture has lost its way, and needs to find a new direction. It is therefore only natural that Bowie would turn to Dylan, and seek new enlightenment.

Oh, hear this Robert Zimmerman
I wrote a song for you
About a strange young man called Dylan
With a voice like sand and glue

It was in 1960 that Robert Zimmerman, a fresh faced kid from Minnesota, arrived at the big apple, and became part of the folk music scene in Greenwich Village. His story was typical for his generation: in 1955 he was taken over by rock'n'roll and wanted to be like Little Richard, but by the end of the decade, when rock'n'roll was tamed by the industry and taken over by maudlin teen idols, he traded his electric guitar for an acoustic, and became part of the "folk boom" of the early sixties. But the fact that he changed his name to Bob Dylan, after the poet Dylan Thomas, shows that he still had a pop sensibility, and a knack for poetry more abstract than that favored by the folkies. In 1961 came his eponymous first album, in which only 'Song to Woody' is an original composition, and which stands out for the unusual delivery, with a voice that did not sound like anything that was previously considered a "singing voice". Some likened it to “a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire”, but for others, it was the definitive folk voice, the personification of the folk credo that every man should be allowed to sing. As folk was becoming so popular that it became too close to pop for its hardcore fans, Dylan's raw vocals symbolized their unwillingness to compromise and be nice. The singer here, celebrating Dylan's "sand and glue" voice, obviously belonged to that faction.

His words of truthful vengeance
They could pin us to the floor
Brought a few more people on
And put the fear in a whole lot more

In 1963, Dylan emerged as the most important songwriter of the folk revival. The two albums he released that year – The Freewheelin' and The Times They are A-Changin' – combined reworking of old folk themes with an up-to-date commentary on the state of America, and sharpened the folk message. Dylan poses himself as someone who walks the land and therefore knows what "the people" really want, which is to live in peace and integrity, and points fingers at those who deny them of it: the plutocrats, the war-mongers, the racists, and those who pretend to speak in the name of God. Most powerful are his apocalyptic visions, in which he tells us what will happen if those people continue to run our lives. Basically, he is just reiterating the old slogans of the folk movement, albeit in a more seditious manner, but he does add something new: he designates the youth as representing the new harmonic world, which will replace the bad world the adults have created. And that message thrilled a big part of the young generation, amongst them, as we can see, the protagonist of this record.

You gave your heart to every bedsit room
At least a picture on my wall
And you sat behind a million pair of eyes
And told them how they saw

In the second verse, the irony in the record begins to come through. We realize that Bowie is once again assuming a character, this time of a Dylan fan who is not exactly a credit to his idol. Dylan's words were supposed to set us free, but here we find that this fan's reaction to him is nothing but idolatry, and he basically expects Dylan to tell him how to think. Dylan preached equality, but this fan understands equality as a state where everyone thinks the same, according to what one person tells them. The collective spirit of folk is here depicted as herd mentality.

Dylan must have felt something similar, because his next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan from 1964, moved from the polemics of the previous two albums into a more private space, dealing mainly with troubled relationships. Many folkies wrote it off as a phase he was going through, but a closer listening revealed that he was going through a real transformation. The key track is 'My Back Pages', in which he mocks his previous stance, describing it as just another dogmatic and prejudiced ideology like the ones he was condemning, and attacks his former self as just another self-righteous preacher who pretended to know the one and only truth. But every verse ends with "Ah, but I was so much older then / I'm younger than that, now", thus breaking away from the old and stale folk ideology and creating himself anew. Once you get that, some of the other tracks reveal themselves to be more than they seem, and the troubled man-woman relationships turn out to be allegories for his relationship with his fans. "I ain't lookin' to block you up / Shock or knock or lock you up / Analyze you, categorize you / Finalize you or advertise you" he sings in the opening track, rejecting the mantle of identity-definer for the young generation, "All I really wanna do / Is baby, be friends with you." Obviously, Dylan encountered many fans who treated him just like this person in Bowie's record, and wanted them to start thinking for themselves instead of following him blindly. But the closing track manifests his disillusionment with his fans. “Go away from my window / leave at your own chosen speed / I’m not the one you want, babe / I’m not the one you need” he intones, “You say you’re looking for someone / Who’s never weak but always strong / To protect you and defend you / Whether you are right or wrong / Someone to open each and every door… / But it ain’t me, babe / No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe / It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe.”

This switch came with a change in his writing style, which became a lot more abstract, drawing from Beatnik poetry, refusing to feed the listener with a spoon. But Dylan needed more than that – he needed a new sound to fit his assertion that he was "younger than that, now". He didn't have to look far. His "no, no, no" to his fans coincided with his infatuation with a band that said "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!", and was unavoidable during that year, the year of the British invasion. Most folk fans, of course, regarded the Beatles as abhorrent, delegates of the fake and superficial world of pop; but Dylan heard in them the revival of the rebellious and ecstatic power of early rock'n'roll. His next album, Bringing it All Back Home from 1965, blends his old acoustic folk balladeer sound with the electric mayhem of rock'n'roll and with his new poetic surrealism, to create a new kind of musical experience. The final words on the album dramatize his break from his former self, and his goodbye to his old fans: "Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you / Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you / The vagabond who's rapping at your door / Is standing in the clothes that you once wore / Strike another match, go start anew / And it's all over now, Baby Blue."

And this new direction did indeed alienate a lot of his old fans, who kept on standing in the clothes that he once wore and accused him of selling out. But in their place came hordes of new fans. That "other match" that he struck started a new fire, a fusion between folk and rock'n'roll, that was to change the face of popular music. Until then, rock'n'roll sneered at the politics of folk, and was focused on the politics of having fun. But Dylan's new sound enabled the folk and rock'n'roll kids to mingle, and form a new consciousness, which saw rock'n'roll as the vehicle to change the world, and turn it into the just place that folk envisioned and the fun place that rock'n'roll envisioned. And, once again, they regarded Dylan as their leader.

But Dylan's next move took him away from this direction. The single 'Like a Rolling Stone' broke the mold of a pop record, turning it into art that doesn't have to obey external rules, but is driven by its own inner force. The lyrics are a nasty gloat at a prim high-society chick who lost all her fortune, and now has to learn to live on the street with the people she once patronized. But as his voice soars gleefully into the chorus, you realize that she is actually better off, now that she's free of all the former conventions that bound her. The record becomes Dylan's own liberation, his final break from the collective consciousness of folk, an assertion of his individual freedom to go wherever he wants and keep changing by his own rules, and remain a rolling stone that gathers no moss. From here on, his music would become elastic, and his lyrics almost undecipherable. Which, of course, didn't go down well with some of the fans…

Then we lost your train of thought
The paintings are all your own
While troubles are rising
We'd rather be scared
Together than alone

The singer rejects the message of 'Like a Rolling Stone' – he would rather remain within the warm confines of a collective consciousness. But Dylan did not yet escape the clutches of this type of fans. Many of them kept on clinging to his lyrics, believing that their vagueness holds clandestine secrets, the key to the salvation he promised in his earlier records. This was the mentality that pervaded in the counter-culture of the late sixties, the belief that throwing the mind into psychedelic loops would set it free to see the truth, and that this truth should then be imparted to the rest of the world. Once again, then, Dylan's music was annexed by a dogmatic consciousness, and his reaction was to merge his rock style with traditional country music, creating a sound that went completely against the revolutionary spirit of the time. While the counter-culture believed it was carrying out his message, Dylan snubbed the counter-culture altogether, refusing to play along with its expectations. By the end of the decade, it became obvious that Dylan wasn't on board with the revolution.

Now hear this Robert Zimmerman
Though I don't suppose we'll meet
Ask your good friend Dylan
If he'd gaze a while down the old street
Tell him we've lost his poems
So they're writing on the walls
Give us back our unity
Give us back our family
You're every nation's refugee
Don't leave us with their sanity

'Song for Bob Dylan', we now realize, is another one of Bowie's critical attacks on the counter-culture. As we've seen in previous records, he does share some of the counter-culture's sentiments: when the singer here says "don't leave us with their sanity" (that is, with the kind of boring normality that society defines as "sane"), we know he speaks out of Bowie's mouth. But his expectation from Dylan to show us the way is obviously criticized. This fan behaves like he knows who Dylan "really is" (which is probably why he addresses him by his real name, acting like they're old buddies), and urges him to "return to himself". He is a slave to a dogmatic revolutionary ideology, and has the gall to demand of Dylan to pay his dues to it as well. Bowie, on the other hand, would rather follow Dylan into the land of the unknown.

Ah, here she comes
Here she comes
Here she comes again
The same old painted lady
From the brow of a superbrain
She'll scratch this world to pieces
As she comes on like a friend
But a couple of songs
From your old scrapbook
Could send her home again

The "painted lady" is one of Dylan's abstract songs, who are so dressed up in fancy words that they're hard to figure out. Opening yourself up to these songs, letting them "scratch your world to pieces", can transform you, free you from your old prejudices and inhibitions and set you free to create yourself anew. But this fan wants exactly the opposite: he wants songs that will assure his current identity, and he's afraid of songs that attack it. He remains close-minded, stuck in his corner, and cannot be free.

But the chorus also points to an alternative. As we know, Bowie believed he had the potential to be a Nietzschean Superman, and was looking for a way to fulfill this potential. Defining Dylan as a "superbrain" hints that Dylan is a possible model for a Superman existence. The picture he paints here reminds us of Athena, the goddess of war, who was born by jumping out of the brow of Zeus, the god king. If he wants to be a Superman, Bowie will have to write songs that declare war on our world and scratch it to pieces, forcing us to redefine ourselves; and through writing these songs, to keep on changing, and be like a rolling stone. This is what Bowie took from Dylan, and this is what he was about to offer the world.

For all their differences, then, 'Song for Bob Dylan' does do what 'Song to Woody' does: it distills a message from the music of its hero, and sets its author down that path. 'Song to Woody' is simple and straightforward, and speaks in universal terms. 'Song for Bob Dylan' is ironic and individualistic, and leaves it to us to dig for its message. But they both belong to artists who were defining themselves through addressing their hero, and who were about to make the coming decade their own.

Andy Warhol

In the previous two albums, we saw Bowie straying away from the world of pop, going deep into philosophical, mystical and poetic regions. Hunky Dory shows him doubling back and returning to pop, but he returns to it with all the baggage he accumulated on his earlier travels, trying to merge his spirituality with the history of rock music, youth rebellion and pop culture. It is only natural, then, that he would write a song about the man whose name came to embody the philosophical and artistic side of pop, the already-mythical Andy Warhol.

But it's more than that. Even through a preliminary glance at the lyrics, we can already deduce that Bowie felt a certain artistic affinity to Warhol, sensing that the latter's aesthetic approach was similar to what he was trying to achieve. Ever since he started to gain notoriety in the early sixties, it was never certain what Warhol was trying to say. His works highlighted certain aspects of popular culture – artificiality, glamorization, mass production, the turning of everything into commodity, the power of brands, the adulation of stars etc. – but it was never clear whether he was celebrating them or mocking them. Moreover, he turned himself into a living exemplar of these aspects, affecting a glamorous and vacuous persona that never revealed any inner traits, but merely reflected the people around him. In short, he was living out what Bowie only sang about: playing the clown that presents a mirror-image to society.

Another Warholian attribute which was shared by Bowie was what he expressed in 'The Prettiest Star': his fascination with the glamor of Hollywood and its star-system, that system that produced bigger than life figures for us to idolize and try to imitate. Warhol's work reflected that fascination, and as a result, he became a magnet for a certain type of people that started to emerge in the sixties, people who tried to live their actual lives as if they were a star on the screen, creating a unique and larger than life persona for themselves, with fabricated names to match. Warhol called them "superstars", and surrounded himself with them, to magnify his own glamour and to get ideas. Bowie, as we know, had similar sensibilities. In 'Life on Mars?' we see him imagining that life is like a movie, and trying to draw ideas from the films on how to live it. And since he aspired to live it like a heroic Superman, then it was the movie stars who provided the model.

Towards the mid-sixties, Warhol shifted his methods. Plastic art, he claimed, was no longer a sufficient form for capturing the spirit of the times, and the ideal forms were rather cinema and pop music. His foray into the music world brought us the Velvet Underground, a group that put an artistic twist on pop and changed it forever, and his take on cinema was no less revolutionary. By the nineteen-fifties, cinema was starting to take itself more seriously as an art-form, and as a result, it paid more attention to the aspects that traditionally were regarded as more "artistic": storyline, dialogue, acting and so forth. But Warhol saw this as a turn for the worse, and wanted to take cinema back to its roots, back to the time when it revolved around the glamor of the stars. In his movies, he would simply turn the camera on, and let the superstars play out their personae, with no scripted story or dialogue. Thus, the lines between the screen and real life were blurred, and life became a movie. This, as we shall see, was another thing that impressed Bowie.

Before we address the lyrics, let's note the means by which Bowie emphasizes the artificiality of the record. It begins with synthesized noises, proceeds with a rather affected style of singing and playing, and adds studio chatter in the beginning and clapping in the end, all accentuating the fact that this is a piece of manufactured sound. On that background, Bowie can celebrate the artificiality of Warhol's art and persona:

Like to take a cement fix
Be a standing cinema
Dress my friends up just for show
See them as they really are

The first verse unveils the artistic vision that Bowie recognizes in Warhol. He is a "standing cinema", which can be interpreted in two ways: either that he is an artist who is like a cinema show, on which other people play; or that he is himself the embodiment of the spirit of cinema. The interesting thing here is that he says that to see people "as they really are" you have to dress them up, which goes contrary to the ordinary perception that it is rather by undressing people that you reveal their true nature. The Hippies, for instance, held that we should shed off all our cultural masks, and reveal the "real self" that hides beneath - but here Bowie suggests that it is rather the manufactured Warhol superstars who display authenticity. This is one of the fundamental insights governing Bowie's work, an insight which was already hinted at in his earlier records, but is now beginning to emerge more prominently: the idea that there is no such thing as a "real self" that you are born with, and that to be real, you have to create yourself.

Put a peephole in my brain
Two New Pence to have a go
I'd like to be a gallery
Put you all inside my show

The aspiration is to turn his art into a reflection of Humanity. He wants to be a gallery of every side of the human existence, to put us all inside his show. And by that, to provide a peep-show through which we can all see what we are really like. Apparently, Bowie reveres Warhol as an artist whose methods can achieve this ideal goal.

Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall
Andy Warhol, Silver Screen
Can't tell them apart at all

So he tells us that he wants to "hang him on my wall", which normally would mean that he wants to purchase one of his paintings – to hang a Warhol on his wall. But of course, Bowie says it in a way that can also be interpreted as wanting to hang Warhol himself on his wall, to show that he regards Warhol himself as an art piece. And the second couplet tells us that he can't tell him apart from the silver screen, that Warhol is like someone who comes straight out of the movies. The artist is indistinguishable from the art.

Andy walking, Andy tired
Andy take a little snooze
Tie him up when he's fast asleep
Send him on a pleasant cruise
When he wakes up on the sea
Be sure to think of me and you
He'll think about paint
and he'll think about glue
What a jolly boring thing to do

The second verse emphasizes the fact that the art is Warhol's life, not just his job. The "Andy walking, Andy tired" line recalls the laconic tongue which Warhol usually employed to talk about his work, pretending there was nothing deep about it, and that it is merely a way to make money. But Bowie knows that this is only a front, and that Warhol's art is actually the essence of his existence. Even if we try to force him to take a vacation from his "work", it will be to no avail – it's part of who he is. In the coming years, Bowie himself will often belittle his own art in interviews and pretend it is nothing but business, when actually, it was his entire life.

As we can see, Bowie is judging Warhol's art through the Pierrot concept he took from Lindsay Kemp: Warhol, according to his interpretation, embodies the spirit of contemporary popular culture, and provides a mirror-image for the rest of us. Thus, he is a model for the kind of artist that Bowie wants to be. But we can also sense that it is not enough for Bowie. While Warhol, according to the way he describes him, has no individuality of his own (even when we send him away, he can still think only about other people), Bowie wants to put himself in the center of things. Being nothing but a mirror-image is ultimately a jolly boring thing to do. So while he did take a lot from Warhol's art – self-creation, the focus on pop culture, the perception that the artist is the medium – and incorporated it into his own aesthetics, he was not going to adopt his passive stance. For someone who believed he has the potential to become a Nietzschean Superman, being a standing cinema just wasn't enough – he needed to be the Superstar.

Quicksand

The slow strumming on a lone guitar, the confessional tone and the somber mood that dominate 'Quicksand', and make it sound and feel quite different than most other tracks on Hunky Dory, put us right in the world of the singer/songwriters, that brand of self-reflective rock poets that flourished in the early seventies. Up until then, rock'n'roll and youth culture were just living in the now, enjoying the rebellion against the old world and all the new and joyous possibilities it brought. But then, the possibilities seemed to dry out, the joy was gone, and youth culture lost its way. It was time to rethink the direction, and so the singer/songwriters turned their gaze inwards, commenting on the history of rock'n'roll and youth culture, and trying to find new possibilities for happiness. And in Bowie's case, naturally, this reflection took on a highly philosophical guise.

Like any singer/songwriter, Bowie is looking at things through the prism of his own personal history and experiences. In the mid-sixties, he was part of the Mod subculture, a generation of working-class kids who rebelled against the old traditions, and stressed their individuality and personal freedom. But by 1967, youth culture started to feel that personal freedom is not enough, and rebellion should commit itself to a higher cause. The rock'n'rollers started to look for spiritual and mystical answers, for an eternal and permanent truth to hold on to. In Bowie's case, the answer seemed to come from one of the more extreme forms of mysticism: Tibetan Buddhism.

When I call it "extreme", I mean from a Western point of view, because Buddhism goes against one of the deepest intuitions of Western thought: the belief in the existence of the self. Buddhism preaches that human life is full of sorrow, and that no permanent answer can be found in it. Therefore, it basically regards life as an illusion, which we must release ourselves from in order to find eternal happiness, in a place that is beyond life, a place where everything is as one. The individual self, which binds us to life, is also seen as an illusion that separates us from the oneness of true being, and therefore should be transcended. This way of thought appealed to Bowie, and he was quite serious about his Buddhism for a while, and even considered becoming a monk. Eventually he decided it was not for him, but even then, he kept holding on to the Buddhist perception that everything is impermanent, and nothing in life can be relied upon to provide eternal happiness. The question of how to deal with this situation is a question he would grapple with in the coming years, and would actually never leave him.

In the late sixties, Bowie was part of the counter-culture, which was based on Hippie mysticism, a mysticism that was partly influenced by Buddhism, but had a more Westernized approach. The (original) Hippies believed that everything in the universe is constantly moving, but doing so in harmony, and that the self is part of that harmony. The technocratic Western society, they blamed, is enforcing a false self on us, a self that is not harmonious with the universe, and we should destroy that self in order to liberate our real self. Once we do, we will become part of the ever-moving universal harmony, and be happy in our existence. Bowie's records from that period, such as 'Space Oddity', 'Memory of a Free Festival' and 'All the Madmen', show that he identified with the idea that we should free ourselves from the technocratic society in order to be happy, but also expose the problems in the Hippie stance. In the end, the beliefs of the counter-culture are shown to be no better than the world it rebelled against, and to only lead to more misery.

So Bowie started looking for an alternative kind of mysticism, and thought he found it in the teachings of Aleister Crowley. The basic belief here is that Christianity believes in a false god, and blocks our way to achieving a real mystical union with the true God. Christianity divides reality into "good" and "evil", and puts other kinds of mystic knowledge, such as those contained in what is known as the Occult, in the "evil" category. But this division is wrong, and only part of the truth is contained in Christianity, while another part of it is actually in what it defines as evil. In order to reach the truth, the mystic should walk the path between "good" and "evil", and get to what lies beyond. Crowley had appeal to the counter-culture kids because he shared their belief in the positive mystical powers of sex and drugs (the "evil" that is actually good), but he put an even bigger emphasis on the self than the Beatniks did. Liberation, he preached, is to be reached through individualism, through bonding with supernatural forces to reach personal empowerment. In 'Width of a Circle', Bowie starts out by telling us how all the roads that he tried before led nowhere, and how he was looking for a new way, and found it through copulation with a supernatural being. For a while it seems that he found the key to happiness, but then he becomes addicted to the dark side, and finds himself in hell. Crowley's satanic ways, then, are not the answer either

But Bowie did retain the notion that Christian mysticism is insufficient, and that some of the things that Christianity defines as "bad" are actually good. He also connected to Crowley's belief in the positive power of personal will and his belief that man can transcend himself and become something greater, and those beliefs connect to another path he checked at the time, the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche preached that Man is only a bridge to the Superman, a being that will not repress his inner forces but learn how to master them and direct them towards self-creation, and thus live a joyful existence. In 'The Supermen', Bowie envisions a utopian world populated with Nietzschean Supermen, but comes to the conclusion that this world will not be joyful. However, records like 'After All' and 'Oh! You Pretty Things' show that he did embrace the Nietzschean idea that Man has potential to be something greater, and that youth culture should aim towards that goal. But here comes the second question: how do we get there?

That is the question that Hunky Dory deals with, sampling all sorts of ways suggested by heroes of the past. But 'Life on Mars?' dramatizes the problem: everything has already been tried, nothing really worked, and we are fresh out of ways to reach a different type of existence. After years of wandering, Bowie feels that he has reached a spiritual desert. And where there is desert, there is quicksand.

I'm closer to the Golden Dawn
Immersed in Crowley's uniform of imagery

Bowie begins by naming some of his influences. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was an order formed in late 19th century to resurrect the ancient knowledge of the Occult, and Aleister Crowley was one of its most highly ranked members, before he left to form his own order. Bowie tells us that he feels closer to the Golden Dawn, and "closer" presumably means closer than he does to other ways of thought. But it also means that he does not really identify with their message, merely feels close to it. Similarly, he is immersed in Crowley's imagery, and it moves him more than other imageries, but the fact that he calls it a "uniform" suggests that it is only the exterior, while his innermost inklings are different than Crowley's. The Occult, then, may hold the answer, but Bowie isn't sure if this is the path he should choose. The first line may be invoking the famous phrase "the nearer the dawn, the darker the night", showing us that his life became darker because of this infatuation.

I'm living in a silent film
Portraying Himmler's sacred realm
Of dream reality

Heinrich Himmler, as is well known, was one of the leaders of the Nazi party and the head of the SS. What is a little less known is that he was also in charge of the mystical expeditions of the Nazis. The Nazis had their own Superman theory, which drew from Nietzsche and Crowley among others, and they believed that the Aryan race was descended from a master race with powerful mystical knowledge, which got buried under the rule of Christianity. Himmler was one of the founders of the Ahnenerbe, an organization dedicated to search for that ancient knowledge, which can help to transform the Aryans into a race of Supermen. Again, Bowie feels an affinity to this kind of search, dreaming of a different reality where humans can express the full variety of their inner powers. Compared with the reality that he envisions in his mind's eye, the humans of today seem limited, as limited as silent film figures are in comparison with us: two-dimensional, and devoid of some of the most basic human powers. Therefore, Bowie feels like he is himself living in a silent film.

I'm frightened by the total goal
Drawing to the ragged hole
And I ain't got the power anymore
No I ain't got the power anymore

Reduced to that inferior human state, he is also instilled with the fear to pursue the total goal, the realization of his full potential, so he'd rather draw even further into himself, cowering from the world. The line "I ain't got the power anymore", coming right after he sang about those excavators for lost powers, suggests that he is afraid that he lost those super powers that humans once possessed, and that the search is pointless.

I'm the twisted name on Garbo's eyes
Living proof of Churchill's lies
I'm destiny

Another Nazi reference here, coming from Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, who referred to British propaganda as "Churchill's lie factory". What this line suggests is that the Nazis did get some things right, and some of their ideas could form the basis for a society better than our own. Unfortunately, they were also vile mass murderers, and once they were defeated, all the things they stood for were branded as evil, while anything associated with Churchill's democracy was hailed as good. But now, a quarter of a century later, Bowie tells us that his miserable condition serves as living proof that Churchill's way did not produce a perfect and happy society, and maybe we should not reject the notion of the Superman just because the Nazis believed in it. Bowie's assertion "I'm destiny" shows that he believes that he is destined for greatness, that he has the power to lead us to a better world, but how? Well, if he is trapped in a silent film, unable to find the language to express his powers, then it is the heroes of silent film he must learn from. In other words, the Hollywood stars, those who managed to seize the minds and hearts of the world not through their rhetoric or their acting abilities, but through their ability to project a larger-than-life image. The glamour of those stars defies explanation, exists beyond words, and yet we can all feel it. And when you talk about Hollywood stars, none of them shined brighter than Greta Garbo, the archetypal female movie star. Many tried to capture what created Garbo's magic, and it is generally acknowledged that it was her eyes that did most of the work. Garbo's eyes reflect a promise for greatness, and Bowie feels like he has that greatness in him, but that it has been twisted to produce the wretched being he is today. If he can find a way to turn it back on, to acquire some of Garbo's star dust, he might fulfill his destiny.

I'm torn between the light and dark
Where others see their targets
Divine symmetry

The "others" here are probably mystics like Aleister Crowley, who believe that Christianity divides things the wrong way, that the truth is held partly on the side of the Christian "God" and partly on the side of "Satan", and in order to reach the truth, you must walk between them. Bowie, apparently, does not believe that this symmetrical balance is the target he should be aiming for, and this leaves him torn between the light and dark, grasping for a new balance.

Should I kiss the viper's fang
Or herald loud the death of Man?

This couplet seems to be referencing his own records. The first line is a throwback to 'Width of a Circle', where he was getting it on with an infernal serpent, and the second line connects to 'Oh! You Pretty Things', where he was playing the part of the Nietzschean prophet, heralding the death of Man and the cometh of the Superman. But Bowie already tried these paths, and they did not produce happiness.

I'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain't got the power anymore

Thrown in all these different directions, not knowing which one he should commit to, Bowie feels trapped inside his head. Worse, he is not only trapped, but sinking. The line "I ain't got the power anymore" no longer sounds like he's talking about those super powers we once possessed; now it sounds like he simply doesn't have the power to face the world anymore, that he is unable to pull himself out of the quicksand and back to active life.

Don't believe in yourself
Don't deceive with belief
Knowledge comes with death's release

Unable to face life, he falls back to Buddhism. If he cannot find the answer within life, then maybe the solution would be to look for it in death. Maybe he should do what Buddhism suggests, and seek liberation from the self, which would lead to happiness after life. One gets the impression that Death is calling to Bowie, tempting him to give up on his Superman ambitions, and just fade away into nothingness.

I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man
Just a mortal with the potential of a superman
I'm living on

Finally, Bowie comes out and states what until now he was just circling around: that he believes he has the potential to be a Superman. But he does not know how to realize this potential, so he is doomed to live as a mere modern man. He does not belong to any Superman race that might have existed in prehistoric times, and he is not a prophet who can foresee a Superman race in the future. He is stuck in the mundane and gloomy present, and all he can do is live on, dreaming of another existence.

I'm tethered to the logic of Homo Sapien
Can't take my eyes from the great salvation
Of bullshit faith

Being a mere human, he is also bound to the logic of humans, and to their perception of happiness. Most humans do not believe that the key to happiness is within them, but that they should have faith in some external force, either God or some ideology, which will lead them to a happy future, either in heaven or in a utopian society. Bowie deems this sort of faith as bullshit, and knows that if he wants to transcend Man and become Superman, he must liberate himself from the human inclination for faith in external forces.

If I don't explain what you ought to know
You can tell me all about it on the next Bardo

A "Bardo" is the Buddhist term for the stages in the cycle of existence. It has several states, including life, death and rebirth. The Buddhist belief is that we should break this cycle, because life is misery. Therefore, we should dedicate our life to learning how to transcend the self, so that once we die, we become part of the oneness of being. If you fail to do so, you will be reborn into life, and into the misery that comes with it. Bowie sounds like a Buddhist here, suggesting that this knowledge is already contained within us (we "ought to know" it), and that he is only trying to awaken it, and if he doesn't succeed, we will all meet again on the next Bardo. But I don't think Bowie is preaching Buddhism; I believe he is using its terms to say something else. I think the mention of Bardo is to awaken us to the cyclical nature of existence, an awakening that can free us from our "bullshit faith" that there is some eternal happiness at the end of the road. But the way we should deal with it, for Bowie, is not the Buddhist way. The answer should be found in life, not in death, and if we don't find it… well, we can meet on the next Bardo and try again.

I'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain't got the power anymore
Don't believe in yourself
Don't deceive with belief
Knowledge comes with death's release

The record basically ends in failure. He did not find a way to realize his Superman potential, and so he continues to be trapped in his head, sinking slowly into the quicksand of his thought, with Death beckoning him, promising the possibility of something better than this. If he doesn't find a cause to live for, he might eventually give in.

'Quicksand' throws a new level of drama into the Bowie saga. Until now, we have followed his attempts to find a more heroic way of life, watched as he sampled all sorts of paths, and enjoyed his ability to see through them and expose their weaknesses. The main fear he seemed to be living with was the realization that he is "aging fast", that he might grow old without fulfilling his potential. Now, we discover that his distress is more acute. He is not just lost, he is sinking. The discrepancy between his Superman dreams and the drab reality of his actual life is driving him mad, and he won't be able to take it much longer. If he doesn't find the right path, if he cannot come up with a way to pull himself out of the quicksand of his thought and into a life of action, he might drown completely.