The Man Who Sold the World

Width of a Circle
All the Madmen
Black Country Rock
After All
Running Gun Blues
Saviour Machine
She Shook Me Cold
The Man Who Sold the World
The Supermen

Let's begin with the infamous cover. Even prior to listening, the album already provides the (quite considerable, in 1970) shock of seeing the male artist sprawled in a femininely alluring pose, adorned in a woman's dress. This provocative image is a portent of things to come, but androgyny was not part of Bowie's art yet. His inspiration, he stated later, was a Rossetti painting which he was trying to reproduce. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a 19th century English painter, who started a new school in British art. His paintings went against the traditions that existed since the Renaissance, and had a startling effect on their viewers' perception. And not only the style, but also the content scandalized the Victorian mind, offering a blend of eroticism and spirituality that went head-on against the prevailing Puritanism of the times. A new mixture of eroticism and spirituality is of course what The Man Who Sold the World album is all about, and it is understood why Bowie would want to invoke Rossetti.

But if we try to find the specific Rossetti painting that inspired the cover, we will come to nothing. It seems that Bowie made a mistake, and ascribed to Rossetti a painting that actually belonged to one of his disciples. The actual inspiration is surely this painting, 'Sleeping Beauty' by Edward Burns Jones:















The 'Sleeping Beauty' is, of course, that comatose princess from the fairytale, who has to be awoken. But Bowie is wide awake in the photo, signifying someone who has already awoken from his slumber, someone representing a new kind of human awareness. And Bowie adds another ingredient: a card held delicately between his fingers, as if he is about to throw it, and other cards scattered all over the floor, suggesting that he was the one who dealt them, presumably to us. Cards are a symbol of chance, and a card-dealer is someone who controls chance. The image suggests that Bowie is the man who is not going to let chance dictate his fate, but intends to master his own destiny. The album's title starts to make more sense now.



















As early as this album, then, Bowie is already settling into his artistic worldview, in which the artist does not just portray a certain ideal through his art, but aims to become it. Glaring at us from the cover as if he was himself the very thing that 19th century painters aspired to represent, Bowie assumes a transcendent figure that refuses to let us, "the world", master his fate and deal him his lot, but rather deals his own cards to us. Even before we unsheathe the vinyl and give it a spin, we are already encountered by an image of someone who pretends to break away from the past, and offer a new kind of spirituality, replacing the dying spirit of the sixties counter-culture. Now let's go in, and see if he lives up to his pretensions.

When you're trying to free yourself from a certain worldview, you attack it at the source, and the source of much of the counter-culture's mentality was Beatnik philosophy. The premise of this philosophy is that our minds are conditioned by a technocratic-industrial-militaristic culture that erases our spiritual side, so in order to free our spirit, we must first of all "beat" our mind, destroy our thought processes. That can be done in several ways - drug intake, meditation, shock treatments, hobo life, uninhibited sex, wild music – all designed to throw our mind into another zone, so that it can no longer repress its spirituality. The moniker "Beat" comes from this technique of "beating" the mind, but also from the word "beatific", designating the pure and joyful state we supposedly reach when we manage to free ourselves. The influence of Beat is felt in the subject matter of most of the album, that takes us through some of these consciousness altering states, but in 'All the Madmen', we find that the Beatnik logic is a sham. The hero believes he's liberating his mind through shock treatments, living a spiritual and free life, when in fact he's only descending into the pits of madness and incarceration. Bowie, then, continues the Beatnik search for a higher spirituality, but criticizes the Beatnik dogmas, branding them to be just as false as the dogmas of the culture they're rebelling against.

Bowie's attack on the counter-culture focuses not only on its techniques to achieve a higher spirituality, but also on what it believes the human spirit to be. What the Beatniks (and subsequently the Hippies) believed was that all entities in the universe are constantly moving, and grooving together in harmony. The problem, according to them, is that our rational consciousness detaches us from reality, turns us into onlookers instead of participants, so we are out of this harmony, out of the groove, and cannot enjoy it. When you "beat" the rational mind, you allow your spirit to move spontaneously, and you become part of the universal harmony. Their model was the small free jazz combo, where every musician is carried on the wings of spontaneous improvisation, and still they are tuned to what the others are doing and play together. The belief was that if we can make the whole world groove like that, our lives would become harmonious and happy.

Bowie presents a different picture. He also shows humans as driven by strong irrational forces, but rather than leading to harmony, these forces lead to chaos. The counter-culture believed that in a peaceful world everyone would be happy and groove together, but in 'Saviour Machine', Bowie envisions a peaceful world, and comes to the conclusion that it will not satisfy humanity's innermost drives, and will therefore lead to disaster. And in 'Running Gun Blues', when "the peaceful" (the anti-war movement that sprang out of the counter-culture) finally manage to end the Vietnam war, the soldier-protagonist is left unsatisfied, so he goes out on a killing-spree. The universe just isn't what the Hippies believed it to be.

This, then, is Bowie's first truth: that the universe is not harmonious at its core, but rather violent and chaotic. How should we deal with this truth? We could succumb to it, like the soldier in 'Running Gun Blues' who "promotes oblivion", turning chaos into his ideology. But that way will surely lead us to our doom. Another way must be found.

And so, Bowie seeks the answer in philosophies that view the universe as irrational and chaotic, such as the writings of Aleister Crowley, who chose black magic as the path for a better way of life. Crowley believed that we are driven by the Will, an inner powerful force that is suppressed in Western culture, and should be released. Liberation of the Will, he believed, would connect us to supernatural powers, which will take us to a higher plane of existence. Crowley's influence is felt throughout the album, especially in the attitude towards sex, that seems to adopt Crowley's view that through sex we are releasing the Will. In 'She Shook Me Cold', the hero is a womanizer who thought he knew everything about sex, until an encounter with some fiendish woman teaches him that that purely physical intercourse that he called "sex" is not the real thing, and truly powerful sex is an expression of the Will, an inner force inside him. Here, too, Bowie is putting a spin on the beliefs of the counter-culture: he carries on the call for sexual liberation, but doesn't do it in the name of love and harmony like the Hippies, but in order to release the Will and take us to another level. Similarly in 'Width of a Circle', we hear of another mystical intercourse that takes the hero to the heavens and connects him with a supernatural being, like Crowley promised. But the end of the track finds the hero in hell, in a much lower state than the one he started from. Bowie, then, seems to take from Crowley the idea that we are driven by our Will, and that sex is one of the ways of liberating it, but to reject Crowley's appeal to the supernatural. The Will should be directed elsewhere.

If not the Supernatural, then perhaps the Superman? With this album, Bowie begins his dalliance with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and his idea of the Superman. Nietzsche theorized that the whole universe is imbued with a force he called "The Will to Power", a force that moves every entity, and drives it to overcome other entities. There is no order in the Nietzschean picture of the universe – there is only chaos and struggle, and any semblance of order in it is merely temporary balance. Humans are also driven by the Will to Power, but since they also have intelligence, they can channel it in positive directions, that will bring happiness and beauty instead of violence and oblivion. By nature, said Nietzsche, humans are driven to overcome one another; but they can redirect this drive, and employ it to overcome themselves, to constantly recreate themselves in a way that is more powerful and joyful. The end result of this gradual overcoming, he prophesized, would be the Superman, a being who derives joy from every aspect of Earthly existence. These ideas also saturate the album, and reach their peak in 'The Supermen', in which Bowie envisions a quasi-Nietzschean Utopia of Supermen, and comes to the conclusion that it isn't all that good. So Nietzsche's ultimate message (or what Bowie thought was his message) is also rejected, but Bowie does absorb some of his ideas into his own developing worldview.

The gist of Bowie's new manifesto, then, is a call to move on from the Hippie worldview, and set a new goal for the counter-culture: the revolution should be done not in the name of bringing peace and harmony to the world, but in the name of empowering the human race. For that new message he needed a new sound, something more powerful than the playful flower-power music of the Hippies, and he found it in the fledgling style of heavy metal. Heavy metal was not about musical harmony but about musical power, and its subject matter was darker, sometimes foraying into the same realms of black magic that Bowie was exploring. Ronson's guitar and Woodmansey's drums delve into the possibilities opened by Cream and Jimi Hendrix, conversing with the new musical language that was being developed at the time by bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin (whose guitarist Jimmy Page, himself a Crowley disciple, gave Bowie the riff to 'The Supermen'). Another feature that distinguished heavy metal was its love for the power of technology, an infatuation that went against the grain of the Beatnik/Hippie anti-industrial stance. This is accentuated on the album by Ralph Mace's innovative use of the synthesizer and Tony Visconti's equally innovative production, which give it a futuristic feel that goes well with the sci-fi content of some of the tracks. While Hippie music was now veering towards country-rock, a style that celebrated nature and rejected urbanity, Bowie retorts with 'Black Country Rock', inviting us to his dark and industrial musical land.

And all this is built upon the two concepts that were already the leading guidelines in Bowie's art. In his first album he presented himself as the Bowie knife, which cuts both sides of any argument, and tries to reach a third way that lies beyond. By his second album, he already added the perception of himself as the Pierrot, the clown who presents a mirror-image of society through his art, and exposes humanity's shortcomings. Supplementing the Superman concept, Bowie redefines his role: through his art, he will be the clown who presents humans who try to reach a better form of existence, but fail due to Man's fallacies; but by telling their stories, he will cut through these fallacies to try and create a Superman mentality, a mentality that will not fall into the same traps. He already started to present those false messiahs in his previous album, in records like 'Space Oddity', 'Cygnet Committee' and 'Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud', and now he adds 'Width of a Circle', 'All the Madmen' and 'Saviour Machine'. These records all present characters who fail, but by going through their tragedy, we might find new possibilities for happiness.

With hindsight, we can see that at least one of these records already contains the seed of what was to grow and become Bowie's essential truth. In 'Width of a Circle', the hero realizes that "God's a young man", that the most divine feeling is to be found not in a fixed and eternal form, but in rebellion and transformation. The hero then has intercourse with an alien being that brings about a transformation in his soul, and causes a temporary divine sensation, but then he succumbs to this being, and it drags him to losing himself completely. In time, the realization will come that what brings about the joyful sensation is not that particular being you are copulating with, but the fact that you are copulating with an alien being, and the trick is to break away in time, and hook up with another alien.

It is unclear how much Bowie was aware at the time of this intuition. But what we can deduce is that he no longer sees himself merely as a knife that cuts other people's outlooks, but already starts to believe that he has found a path to form a unique outlook of his own. The title track suggests that he intends to succeed where all those heroes of his records failed, that he is going to live a heroic way of life, and manage to keep it up for years and years, not letting himself fall.

This, then, is what the figure on the cover is telling us. Casually holding the King of Diamonds between his fingers as if he is his master, he sends the message: the highest rank of existence you could come up with in your materialistic mind is the king of diamonds, but I represent something that is higher, and I can play with your heroes and turn them all into cards in my own game. I intend to be the man who sold your world, in exchange for something better.

The Supermen

In 'Saviour Machine', we see Bowie rejecting the regular modern concept of Utopia as unsatisfactory. The question then becomes: can he present an alternative?

Of course, Bowie was not the first to struggle with this question. In 'Saviour Machine', as in several other places in the album, we can detect the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was similarly critical of the modern Utopian dream. Nietzsche's claim, in a nutshell, is that although Western consciousness is now looking for paradise on Earth and not in Heaven, it still thinks of it in terms that are taken from Christianity, and therefore does not realize the full potential of humankind. Therefore, stated Nietzsche, we must first learn to think of humans in a different way, and create a new concept of paradise based on this new perception.

The problem is this: Christianity separated human existence into body and spirit, and asserted that the spirit emanates from God and wants to return to him, but is trapped inside the body. The spirit is seen as driven by its inner free will, while the body is perceived as driven by cravings to outer things, cravings that cause suffering. To be happy, according to Christianity, a person should repress their bodily cravings, while directing their spirit towards God. If successful, that person will return after death to heaven, where they will be free of the body and its cravings, and their spirit will feel fulfillment and happiness from reconnecting with God.

When modern movements denied the existence of God and Heaven, they took the spirit out of the picture. And so they were left only with the picture of Man as a system of cravings that need to be fulfilled. So the Utopia they envisioned was merely a world that will satisfy all human cravings, and keep the people content. But this contentment, claimed Nietzsche, is not true happiness. Humans are capable of reaching a much higher form of joy, because the human being is not driven by cravings alone. The cravings are merely expressions of a strong inner force, which he termed "The Will to Power", and what this Will wants is to overcome. When a human being manages to overcome something, said Nietzsche, they are filled with ecstatic joy, which is the highest form of happiness. Human salvation, he concluded, is to be brought about by a constant process of overcoming.

So merely satisfying the cravings is not enough to make humans happy. Instead, a person should release that inner force that is within them, and direct it towards overcoming themselves, towards recreating themselves as a more powerful being. While other modern philosophies aimed to eliminate suffering by removing the causes of it, Nietzsche preached that one should face these causes, and overcome them. In other words, you should form a way of life that turns their power around to work in your favor, as a source of joy instead of suffering. When you overcome a cause of suffering and internalize it as a source of joy, you become happier and stronger, and can then take on an even bigger cause of suffering. And at the end of that process of constant overcoming, Nietzsche prophesized, humans will live an existence where everything will be a source of joy to them, and Utopia will be achieved. The kind of human that will embody this ideal is what he called "The Superman".

It should be noted that this is actually not the final Nietzschean message, and the Superman is not the real Utopia. The Superman is actually just the ideal that we put in front of our eyes, so that by aiming ourselves towards it, we can live a life of constant overcoming. That, for Nietzsche, is the ultimate happiness: an existence of never-ending recreation and overcoming. But historically, the Superman is the Nietzschean idea that most excited his readers, and had great influence in literature, science-fiction and philosophy. For Bowie, naturally, it took a decidedly sci-fi direction, but he was also quite influenced by Nietzsche's philosophy. We witness it in other tracks on the album: in 'She Shook Me Cold', the hero is busy living a life of sexual conquest to satisfy his sexual cravings, until he meets a lover who makes him realize that there is a stronger force inside him, a force that can take him to another level; in 'Running Gun Blues', the hero cannot cope with a peaceful existence, because there is a confrontational force in him that demands to express itself; and in 'Saviour Machine', the society that eliminated all sufferings is deemed unsatisfactory, because it doesn't provide ways of expression to these forces within man. So now, in 'The Supermen', Bowie ventures to envision an alternative Utopia, based on Nietzschean concepts. Will this Utopia prove to be better?


When all the world was very young
And mountain magic heavy hung
The supermen would walk in file
Guardians of a loveless isle
And gloomy browed with superfear
Their tragic endless lives could heave nor sigh
In solemn, perverse serenity, wondrous beings chained to life

In other tracks on the album, like 'Black Country Rock' and 'She Shook Me Cold', we encounter Bowie's wish to go up the mountains, high above human society, to find a more powerful, heroic and magical way of life. Here he describes a society that has no need to search for such a way of life, because it is already living it – "mountain magic" hangs on them, and they naturally embody Nietzsche's powerful human ideal. But right away, we see that Bowie's vision of the Supermen is very different than Nietzsche's (it may owe something to popular books that distorted Nietzsche's message, and we know that Bowie was reading such stuff at the time, but I have no idea which). First of all, he places his Utopian world not in the future but in the past, at the dawn of humankind. Secondly, he endows his Supermen with traits that take Nietzsche's ideas much further than the philosopher ever did. Nietzsche emphasized earthly life (as opposed to the Christian myth of heavenly afterlife) as the place where ultimate happiness should be sought, as the real paradise. Bowie also puts his paradise on Earth, but adds eternity to it, making his Supermen immortal. Nietzsche also attacked the concept of Christian Love, in which a person represses his inner drives for the sake of others, and demanded to overthrow it. But he did not suggest that we should give up love altogether. Bowie, on the other hand, envisions the Superman world as devoid of any kind of love.

But it is also devoid of any laughter, and this goes completely against Nietzsche. Bowie's Supermen are not happy. The fact that they are immortal is not a source of joy to them – they are described as "chained" to life, as if their immortality enslaves them.

Strange games they would play then
No death for the perfect men
Life rolls into one for them
So softly a supergod cries

The vision exposes the truth behind the illusion of happy immortality. One of the temptations used to sell the idea of Heaven is that in it you will live an eternal existence, without the fear of death. But when you think about it, you realize that an eternal existence is tasteless and meaningless. It is the temporality of your life that gives meaning to your choices, that discerns one action from another. Because these supermen are immortal, their life "rolls into one" – everything feels the same, and nothing really matters. They play strange games, trying to amuse themselves, but nothing can save them from their eternal sadness.

Where all were minds in uni-thought
Power weird by mystics taught
No pain, no joy, no power too great
Colossal strength to grasp a fate

We hear Nietzsche again here: these beings are so powerful that they can withstand any experience that their fate throws at them. Bowie also gives them telepathic powers, with their minds all shared together, so they can all learn from each other. I think what he is trying to say here is that they went through a period where they learned how to increase their power (and that was supposedly a happy period), but now that they reached the ultimate power, nothing can excite them any more.

Where sad-eyed mermen tossed in slumbers
Nightmare dreams no mortal mind could hold
A man would tear his brother's flesh, a chance to die
To turn to mold.

This passage can be interpreted in two ways, depending on how you understand the word "man" in the third line. He could be saying that the kind of dreams that they had would drive mortal men (that is, humans as they are today) insane, to the point where they would try to kill themselves. So it is an expression to the power of these beings, who, like the Nietzschean Superman, can endure sufferings which a regular man cannot. Or it could be that the word "man" pertains to these ancient humanoids, in which case what he is saying is that these dreams drove the Supermen insane, to the point that they didn't want to live any longer, and did everything they could to kill themselves, to escape this nightmare of immortality.

Far out in the red-sky
Far out from the sad eyes
Strange, mad celebration
So softly a supergod cries

Again, an ambiguous passage. It could be that the "sad eyes" are our eyes, and the singer is painting a different world for us, a world where Supermen hold mad celebration to their Supergod. But to me it seems that the "supergod" is just another name for the sad Supermen, who are themselves dreaming of another "far out" existence, an existence in which they could escape their misery. Maybe Bowie is trying to suggest that this is how the idea of Heaven was born, and ultimately destroyed the Supermen. When he repeats this verse for the second time, he replaces "cries" with "dies", and we sense that this wish finally brought that civilization to its downfall, and that the Supermen finally figured out a way to die, and became mere mortals.

And so, the immortal Supermen cleared the way to the human race, a race of mortals with lesser powers, who dream of a Utopian existence. But Bowie shows that any "utopian" world is inevitably bad, no matter if it is the Utopia of 'Saviour Machine' or of 'The Supermen'. Any philosophy that aspires to reach the perfect and "final" form of humankind has got it wrong. To be happy, humans need a world which is imperfect, a world which leaves them with the task of creating their own way of life.

But 'The Supermen' does not completely dismiss the idea of the Nietzschean Superman. From other records in this period, we know that Bowie felt that these powers do exist within humankind, as a potential that can be awakened. His goal would become to figure out a way to realize this potential, and live a heroic existence.

In latter year interviews, Bowie would talk embarrassedly about his Nietzschean phase, and how he misread the great thinker. But this phase was enormously important in the formation of Bowie's own way of life, a way of life which, perhaps more than he ever realized, lived up very closely to the true Nietzschean ideal.

The Man Who Sold the World

We passed upon the stair
We spoke of was and when
Although I wasn't there
He said I was his friend

The song's opening stanza paraphrases Hugh Mearns' famous short poem: "As I was going up the stair / I saw a man who wasn’t there / He wasn’t there again today
/ I wish, I wish, he’d stay away." The poem is apparently about a haunted house, and "the man who wasn't there" is a ghost. But here, the protagonist himself is the one who "isn't there", which surely means that he feels like he's living a false existence, as if he was merely a ghost of a man. The other man is apparently an authentic person, and unlike the man in the Mearns poem, he is not frightened by the non-entity he meets, but speaks with him at length and assures him that he is his friend.

Which came as some surprise
I spoke into his eyes
I thought you died alone
A long long time ago

The protagonist has grown up in a culture that has taught him that it is useless to try to go your own way, and that it is better to conform and accept the identity that society imposes on you. This culture is full of stories that provide examples of people who did go their own way, and ended up miserable or dead. Therefore, he is surprised to find this man before him, a man who did not bow to society's dictations, and still managed to stay alive and well for so many years. But the answer comes:

Oh no, not me
I never lost control
You're face to face
With the man who sold the world

What this man tells him is: yes, it is possible. You can go your own way, not selling your soul to the system, and still survive and remain happy. You can fool them all, and you can keep doing it for many years, maybe for the rest of your life.

The name "The Man Who Sold the World" is most probably inspired by Robert Heinlein's 1950 sci-fi novella The Man Who Sold the Moon. Heinlein's story is about a man obsessed with reaching and controlling the Moon, and building a financial and technological empire to realize his ambition, only to be held back eventually by his obligations to this empire, and having to forgo his dream. He wanted to own the Moon, but he ended up being owned by the organization he built. The man Bowie meets had similar dreams of "owning the world", but he understood that in order to remain in control, the way to go is not to buy the world, but rather to "sell" it – that is, not to become part of the system and try to reach its head, but rather to find a way to remain on the outside. This man is thought to be dead by conformed society because he never let himself belong to any of its categories, and always kept himself under the radar, unbound to society's conventions.

I laughed and shook his hand, and made my way back home
I searched for form and land, for years and years I roamed

The protagonist is merely amused at first, and goes back to his regular life after their conversation is over. But the meeting plants a seed in his mind. He wants to be as free and happy as that man, and he begins to search for the secret of that life. He looks for something solid – a form of happy living, a land of happiness – but years of search produce nothing.

I gazed a gazely stare at all the millions here
We must have died alone, a long long time ago

Looking at society, it now seems to him that it is actually we, the "normal" people, who are dead, even if we don't realize it. We live in our predetermined boxes, conforming to society's norms, and we think that this is "real" life, when actually we are living a fake existence. It seems that we are all dead. Or are we?

Who knows? not me
We never lost control
You're face to face
With the man who sold the world

No, not all of us are dead. The hero now talks about a different kind of "we", not society at large, but a group of people who managed to remain free and real. And he himself, we now learn, belongs to this group as well. After all these years of searching for form and land, he finally found them. Or maybe he didn't, but actually realized that it is the fact that he never committed himself to any form and land that brought him freedom? He doesn't tell us, and leaves it for us to figure out for ourselves. But be it as it may, he is now the man who stops us as we pass him upon the stair, and tells us that there's another kind of life.

In 'The Man Who Sold the World', I feel, Bowie is beginning to come out of his songwriter/storyteller guise, to adopt the stance of a prophet and a leader. Until now his writing was the knife that cuts through every argument, attacking both sides, suggesting that there might be a third way; now, he wants to become the knife, not committing to any side, living out the third way and setting the example. Until now, in the collective consciousness of youth culture, it was thought that a young person has only two options: either burn out, or rust. In other words, either conform to society's norms and live a long but dull life, or rebel and live an intense and authentic existence, but an existence that cannot last for long. Bowie's songs are full of people of the second kind, but this song, I believe, reveals that his intention is to be smarter than them: he wants to live an intense and free existence, remaining in control of his destiny, and drag it out as long as he can. 'The Man Who Sold the World' will become one of Bowie's trademark songs throughout his career, and I believe the reason is that it is one of his personal manifestos, expressing what he aspired to achieve.

She Shook Me Cold

The Man Who Sold the World, introducing the talents of Mick Ronson to Bowie's universe, is close in spirit to the heavy metal genre that was beginning to take form at the time. One attribute of heavy metal was a cruder approach to sex, as the relentless beat and the power grindings of the electric guitars were sometimes used as a musical representation of a sexual intercourse. These were the years of the sexual revolution, and the sentimental approach of the fifties gave way to hardcore sex, in records that won the moniker "cock rock". The cock rockers took the sexual prowess of R&B singers and intensified it even further, and sang about mind-blowing sexual experiences, with women who were out-of-this-world shags. With 'She Shook Me Cold', Bowie blasts his own version of cock rock, but, as always, things are not what they appear to be at first. This seemingly simple and vulgar story of a sexual encounter, told with the aid of explosive metal guitars, is about a lot more than just sex.

We met upon a hill, the night was cool and still
She sucked my dormant will
Mother, she blew my brain, I will go back again
My God, she shook me cold

The word "shake", in R&B (and subsequently rock'n'roll), was one of the euphemisms for sex. You can hear it being used in fifties R&B/rock'n'roll records like 'Shake, Rattle & Roll' and 'Whole Lotta Shaking'. 'She Shook Me Cold' undoubtedly owes to Willie Dixon's R&B classic 'You Shook Me', which just a year earlier was given a full cock rock treatment by Led Zeppelin. But this encounter takes place on a hill, which takes us back to 'Black Country Rock', to the idea that we are not in usual bedroom settings, but climbing up a mountain to get something that is above our world. And "she sucked my dormant will" hints what it is he found on top of this hill.

It is the word "Will" that should prick up our ears. How does "Will" get in here? We can find the answer if we introduce the two figures whose spirit saturates this entire album: Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous philosopher, and Aleister Crowley, the infamous magus. These are two very different thinkers, but there are some similarities between them as well. For one thing, they both liked mountains, but while Nietzsche only climbed spiritual mountains, Crowley was actually known in his day as one of the leading mountain-climbers in the world. But more importantly, they both deified the Will, an inner force within Man which, so they asserted, can overcome anything and take him to ever higher grounds. While most religions and philosophies tell us that we should obey an outside law, Nietzsche and Crowley demanded that we liberate our Will, and let it determine our actions. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", wrote Crowley.

It is important to understand that "do what you will" doesn't mean that you should simply follow your cravings. That won't be freedom, because when you crave something, your Will is enslaved to that external thing that you crave. The Will is more than that. It is an inner force through which you can transform and create yourself, and determine for yourself what it is you want. It is also a very powerful force, and the feeling of it surging through your being is the highest form of joy. But Western civilization, blamed Nietzsche and Crowley, repressed this inner force, and so we are unaware of it, and talk of will only in the sense of willing something external.

We can now begin to suss what it is that the record's hero found upon that hill. He found that he has a force within him, his Will, which was dormant until now, but came alive through intercourse with that fiendish woman, and the feeling of it surging through his being completely blew his mind.

I had no time to spare, I grabbed her golden hair
And threw her to the ground
Father, she craved my head, Oh Lord, the things she said
My God, she should be told

Ok, so after she sucked him, she craves his head. Fair enough. But again, that's only one level of the story. We see that our loverboy is not much of a lover, and he thinks of sex in very physical, animalistic terms: he just wants to throw her to the ground and get his rocks off as quickly as possible. But he's in over his head with this woman, who knows how to turn sex into a spiritual experience. "She craved my head" is a double-meaning: "head" can designate oral sex, but also mind. She wants to take over his mind, to transform it. And the simple-minded boy is easy prey to her beguiling dirty talk, which affects his spirit forever.

I was very smart, broke the gentle hearts
Of many young virgins
I was quick on the ball, left them so lonely
They'd just give up trying

The boy now goes back, and tells us how he was before he met her. He was a very proud rooster, a conqueror who believed sex was about banging as many chicks as he could, without obligating himself to any of them. Until…

Then she took my head, smashed it up
Kept my young blood rising
Crushed me mercilessly, kept me going around
So she didn't know I crave her so-o-o

That one encounter smashed his old identity beyond repair. He knows now that there is a higher form of sex, a higher form of joy, and his old ways just aren't satisfactory any more. He wants that spiritual experience again, and won't rest until he finds it.

I'll give my love in vain, to reach that peak again
We met upon a hill
Mother, she blew my brain, I will go back again
My God, she shook me cold

To the end, the boy remains ignorant as to what really happened to him. He thinks it was the woman who gave him that joy, and so he is desperate to find her again, thinking that this is the only way to relive it. But through his words, Bowie is transmitting a different message: joy is reached through liberation of the Will, letting it smash your old identity and creating a new one. The woman helped him do it, but she was merely an agent, not the source of the joy – the source is within him, lying dormant, and it can be re-awakened in many different ways. The song's hero doesn't get it, so he remains a slave to his desires, looking for that woman instead of looking within. But the songwriter does, and it will be a lesson that will resonate through his work for years to come.

Saviour Machine

In 'Saviour Machine', Bowie deals with one of his recurring themes: Utopia; heaven on Earth. This concept is of course an essential part of the Modern world. While Medieval Christianity claimed that human life is a life of constant misery, which may cease only in the afterworld, the modern movements asserted that the goal must be to abolish human suffering from our own world. All modern ideologies agreed that this is the goal, and they differed from each other only in the question of how it should be accomplished. The welfare state that arose in mid 20th century claimed to be the best and fastest course to get to a perfect world, while the counter-culture of the sixties pretended to present an even faster way. So the argument was merely about the means, not about the end. Very few tried to take a look at the end itself, to ask what will actually happen if we ever achieve the desired Utopia. David Bowie was one of those few.

President Joe once had a dream
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a saviour machine
They called it the prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored till it cried in its boredom

The story begins with a world leader who envisions a computer so powerful that it can devise a state that will end all human suffering. He gets the consent of the people to go ahead and construct it, and lo and behold, it works: the laws that the machine decrees succeed in ending all wars and eradicating hunger. Utopia is achieved, heaven comes to Earth. But then, the smart machine looks at its own creation, and this is what it has to say:

Please don't believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
Or maybe a war, or I may kill you all

The world, says the machine, has not become a good world with the coming of Utopia. Everything is set, all the answers are given, and thus this world provides no outlets for an intelligent mind to express itself. Not only that, but it is boring, so boring that even extreme suffering seems more appealing. The question Bowie poses for us is: is that really the world we want? Will a world that is devoid of any excitement and any need for mental effort really make humans happier?

Don't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn, so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen
You can't stake your lives on a saviour machine

The underlying belief behind most utopian ideologies is the belief that human nature is good, and that evil stems from the irrational way the system is structured. Fix the system, set a rational order, and humans will be happy and content. But the machine sees something else: human nature is not made for living a life of tranquility, and will not be content within a rational system.

This is a notion that permeates the entire Man Who Sold the World album: irrational cravings, violence and disorder stem from human nature, not just from the system. Meaning, that they will not just disappear if you create a perfect state. At a time when the counter-culture actively resisted the war in Vietnam and called for peace on Earth, Bowie comes out with 'Running Gun Blues', which warns us that peace is not for everyone. Other tracks suggest the same: humans need excitement, and some of them would rather live dangerously than choose a safe and boring existence. So a Utopia that offers only an end to suffering, without providing any thrills, is not fit for the human race. The clever machine determines that for the sake of humanity it (the machine) must be destroyed, because the deficiencies of the "Utopia" it created will surely lead to catastrophe.

I need you flying, and I'll show that dying
Is living beyond reason, sacred dimension of time
I perceive every sign, I can steal every mind

Don't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn, so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen
You can't stake your lives on a saviour machine

Trying to envisage something better, the machine enters a state of rapture, flying high on its imagination, relishing in its own power and wanting to use it to take humanity to a higher plane of existence, an existence of ecstasy and magic. But it also knows that it is a dangerous wish, and because it is programmed to care for the wellbeing of humans, it asks once again that they destroy it, before it takes them to an edge they might fall off of.

Bowie, however, has no such restraints. It could be claimed that in the second verse he is no longer assuming the character of the savior machine, but actually speaks for himself, telling us what he, the artist David Bowie, wants to do to us. This is one more record that announces his breakaway from the hippy-dippy peace/love ideology of his generation, and his aspiration to take us to a higher form of existence, one that is about powerful thrills and heroic actions. In this album, he already begins drawing an alternative way to happiness.

Running Gun Blues

The entire Man Who Sold the World album deals with the same themes that Hippie rock dealt with, but does so from Bowie's Nietzschean/Crowleyan perspective. 'Running Gun Blues' is no exception, dealing with the Vietnam War, but in a very different way than the anti-war anthems of the Hippie bands. It is one of the songs that showcases most blatantly how separate Bowie's mindset was from the peace/love ideology of his generation.

I count the corpses on my left, I find I'm not so tidy
So I better get away, better make it today
I've cut twenty-three down since Friday
But I can't control it, my face is drawn
My instinct still emotes it

The protagonist is someone who is on a killing spree, and tries to regain control over himself and stop it. But he is unable to – the killing instinct has taken over him, and compels him to keep on killing.


I slash them cold, I kill them dead
I broke the gooks, I cracked their heads
I'll bomb them out from under the beds
But now I've got the running gun blues

The chorus reveals that our killer is an American soldier in Vietnam, who has killed many Vietnamese, and wants to keep on killing. However, something has happened that stopped his fun, and gave him the blues. What is it?

It seems the peacefuls stopped the war
Left generals squashed and stifled
But I'll slip out again tonight
Cause they haven't taken back my rifle
For I promote oblivion
And I'll plug a few civilians

The song is set in the future, after the anti-war movement would finally manage to stop the war. The Hippies believed that everyone would be overjoyed to go back to living in peace, but Bowie plays someone who isn't. This new state of peace gives our protagonist the blues, as he can kill no more, so he starts to run amuck and kill people indiscriminately – this is the "running gun blues". We don't know if he's still in Vietnam and killing "gooks", or perhaps he has returned home, and does his killing back in his own American neighborhood.

Around that time, the first such stories started to appear, stories about war veterans who survived the jungles of Vietnam, came back home and proceeded to act in anti-social and violent ways. Bowie was one of the first to react artistically, and write a song about it. But his take on it was different than the usual approach, which was to blame their behavior on their difficulties to readjust to civilian life. This approach presumes that a human being is a creature that is inclined by nature to live in a peaceful and orderly society, and has problems only when it can't adjust to the reigning order. Bowie's take on human nature is that it has oblivion at its heart, and if this nature is awakened through war, it is hard to put it back to sleep. If we want peace, we have to bring that into account.

After All

'After All' is remarkable especially for its atmosphere. The 3/4 waltz time, the sinister vocals, the psychedelic overdubs, the use of the archaic "oh by jingo" as a refrain, all turn it into a disconcerting, foreboding slice of noise that feels like it doesn't really belong in rock'n'roll but stems from the darker regions of 19th century romanticism. The lyrics have roots in those regions as well, but they could have only been written by Bowie, and it is a key record to the understanding of his development as an artist.

In 'The Supermen', we see Bowie painting a utopian world based on the Nietzschean concept of the Superman. And although this world turns out to be a bad one, there is definitely something alluring about the powers that those Supermen possess, something more exciting than our own existence. So Bowie may reject Utopia, but not the idea that humankind has inner powers that can take it to a higher level. In 'After All', Bowie sets forth on his mission to direct us towards a different way of life.

Please trip them gently, they don't like to fall, Oh by jingo
There's no room for anger, we're all very small, Oh by jingo

Once again, we hear echoes of Nietzsche, who claimed that the people of his day and before it were all "small" in comparison with what humankind can be, and that our smallness is bound to bring calamity upon us if we don't change. Therefore, he believed that we need to actively destroy our contemporary consciousness so that a better one can emerge. “If something is about to fall off a cliff, it deserves to be pushed,” he said about Western civilization, and he set out to refute all the foundational truths that it is based on. Similarly, Bowie here says that we should "trip" the small people (and he includes himself in that definition), to clear the way for something better to come in their place. But he says it in a merciful and compassionate way, indicating that his intention are noble, and he is attacking our way of life because he wants something better for us.

We're painting our faces and dressing in thoughts from the skies,
From paradise

And here, for the first time, we find Bowie taking on the role of spokesperson for his generation. The "we" he speaks of are obviously the Hippies, who used to paint their faces and think mystical thoughts. While on the Space Oddity album we saw him setting himself apart from his generation and heralding the death of the Hippie revolution, here he reconnects with them, and tries to save the revolution by rewriting its ideals. What Bowie is doing here is basically hijacking: his Nietzschean viewpoint is radically different than anything the Hippies believed in, and yet he presents himself as their voice.

But they think that we're holding a secretive ball.
Won't someone invite them
They're just taller children, that's all, after all

Bowie stresses that the new message is inclusive. It doesn't belong just to the "we" who believe in it now, but anyone is invited to join in. "They", the adults who berate the young revolutionaries, think that they have the advantage of maturity and know better, but actually they are also children, only a bit taller. But the fact that they are children means that there is hope for them as well – they still have the chance to grow and become Supermen. Therefore, they are invited to join us.

Man is an obstacle, sad as the clown, Oh by jingo
So hold on to nothing, and he won't let you down, Oh by jingo

"Man is an obstacle" is again a Nietzschean line. Bowie tells us that the only way we won't be let down by Man is if we hold on to nothing - i.e., believe that Man has no destiny, no ideal to aspire to. But this sort of nihilism doesn’t suit Bowie: he does believe that there is a better destiny for us, but in order to reach it, we must first of all realize that "Man" is merely an obstacle to be overcome, and replaced by something better. This is vintage Nietzsche: Man is a hapless and hopeless creature, and must be seen only as a bridge to the Superman, the next step in evolution. But the "sad as a clown" line comes from another strand in Bowie's world. It connects us to the idea that he got from Lindsay Kemp, the idea that the role of the artist is to be the sad clown, the Pierrot that acts as a mirror image to society and exposes humankind's faults. Merging Kemp with Nietzsche, Bowie comes up with a new concept, a concept which is going to be pivotal to his work in the seventies: the role of the artist is not to display Man's faults so that humanity can learn from it and better itself, but to display Man as an essentially faulty being, in order to help us transcend him. "What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the Superman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment," Said Nietzsche. By presenting Man as a laughingstock, Bowie believes he can develop the consciousness of a Superman. In other words, the role of the artist is not to caricature Man's weaknesses, but to show Man as a caricature, a mere shade of what he can become.

Some people are marching together and some on their own
Quite alone
Others are running, the smaller ones crawl
But some sit in silence, they're just older children
That's all, after all

Bowie now turns to describing the human race as it is today. The people are marching towards what they perceive as Humanity's destiny, and they have different ways of doing so, but these ways lead them nowhere. This image leads us straight into a musical break, which is nothing but a circular, mechanical waltz, bringing to mind those fancy clocks that have little human figures moving around in a spherical track and making repetitive motions. It suggests a society of clockwork people, who think that they are advancing while they're actually just moving around in circles. This is the world that the singer is trying to save us from.

I sing with impertinence, shading impermanent chords, with my words
I've borrowed your time and I'm sorry I called
But the thought just occurred that we're nobody's children at all, after all

"We're nobody's children" is another way of saying "there is no God". In other words, Bowie is telling us that we have not been created for any special purpose. Reality is impermanent, and there's no eternal truth to be figured out. Words and concepts are creations that shade this impermanent nature of reality, and may create a joyful way of life for a while, but not forever.

Bowie knows that what he exposes for us is very troubling, and we can't digest it all at once. So he apologizes for borrowing our time, and allows us to go back to our lives, leaving us with these final words:

Live till your rebirth and do what you will, Oh by jingo
Forget all I've said, please bear me no ill, Oh by jingo
After all, after all

If we are too afraid of the message, Bowie tells us to forget about it, and just carry on living our lives and doing whatever we want. But even here, he says it in a way that is meant to afflict our minds. "Live till your rebirth" tells us that we keep getting born into the same world, so unless we do anything to change it, we will never escape our mediocre existence. Alternatively, it hints that we can be reborn in our own life, when we adopt his new message, and when we do, we will live according to Aleister Crowley's dictum “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law!”, meaning that we will let our own inner will direct us to a higher kind of existence, like Crowley and Nietzsche preached.

'After All' has something about it that sets it apart from all but two tracks on the album (the other two are 'Black Country Rock' and the title track). In those other tracks, when referring to the person speaking, I call him "the hero". According to my interpretations, Bowie isn't speaking for himself there, but adopting a certain character, and the record should be understood as a theatrical piece. In 'After All', I believe that the language is polemic, and Bowie is the speaker who puts forth his artistic manifesto, emphasizing with the recurring "Oh by jingo" that what he says here is important. His goal, the record tells us, is to be the Pierrot who will show us that Man, as he is today, is unable to find salvation. In the coming years, Bowie will act out a series of characters who all start out believing that they found the way to happiness, but end up as failures. But through the telling of their story, he will clear out the road for a new consciousness, which may offer a more permanent happiness.

Black Country Rock

Pack a pack horse up and rest up here on
Black Country Rock
You never know, you might find it here on
Black Country Rock

In the Space Oddity album, we saw Bowie working to distinguish himself from the crowd, to find ways to set himself apart both from mainstream culture and from the counter-culture. But he didn't break away altogether: the songs were placed within urban settings, on the fringes of society, but still part of it. When he spoke of someone who left society altogether, he used a character: Major Tom who left Earth and went into space, or the wild eyed boy who left his village and went to live up the mountain. But when we come to The Man Who Sold the World, we find a different approach. Here, it is Bowie himself who is going up the mountain, and he's packing a horse, which means he's going to stay there for a while, until he finds answers. The songs on this album will go one step further than the previous one, and look for alternative forms of existence, higher up than the boring life in our bourgeois world. In this song, he is inviting us to join him there, up on his metaphoric mountain. You never know, you might find it here – find your truth, the way of life that will bring you joy.

Some say the view is crazy
But you may adopt another point of view
So if it's much too hazy
You can leave my friend and me with fond adieu

This place is not for everyone. Some say that there's nothing to see in these weird other places that we are going to explore, that they are nothing but incoherent haze. But those who open themselves to the experience and are able to endure it might discover a new point of view on life, and a better way to live it.

Of course, there's nothing new about this metaphor. In literature, the act of leaving society and going up a mountain is often used to symbolize a search for a higher form of existence. Other songs on the album leave no doubt that Bowie was reading Nietzsche, whose famous book Thus Spake Zarathustra tells of a prophet who lived in solitude up a mountain for ten years, and then comes down to preach his new gospel. Like Nietzsche, Bowie will not literally go up a mountain, but make his voyage on the mountains of the mind and spirit.

Finally, the record's title suggests another layer. "Country rock" was a musical genre that combined country and rock, and was relatively new at the time (started 1968). "Country" symbolized going out on the prairie, which fit very well with the Hippie ideal of returning to nature, but in emulating the country spirit, rock music also absorbed more traditional American values, and started down the road to conformity. Bowie isn't ready to conform just yet. He will also "go out on the country" in search of his nature, but his country is "black country", a name that designates a region in the West Midlands of England, so called because of its black earth, caused by the early industrialization of the place. Bowie, then, is not returning to nature, but rather turning to a land that is even more artificial. Furthermore, the word "black" may hint at his fascination with the black arts, which is also prevalent in this album. That puts him closer to heavy metal, another form of rock music that was beginning to fledge at the time and drew a lot from black magic, but Bowie doesn't align himself with heavy metal any more than he does with country rock. "Black Country Rock" is his own mountain, his own unique style, combining the power of metal guitars and the industrial sounds of the synthesizer, and lyrics that take us into obscure and dark regions. This track serves mainly as a showcase to it, while inviting us along for the ride.

All the Madmen

In my analysis of 'Black Country Rock', I conjecture that the track serves as an invitation to the entire album, to a unique new space that Bowie is going to explore. But he cautions us that it isn't for everyone, and that "some say the view is crazy", warning us that it is mad to get into these places. If we are still willing to come along for the ride, it means that we must be prepared to face madness. 'All the Madmen' takes us into the realm of the crazy people.

Again, Bowie is far from being the first to take this trip. There were always those who romanticized the insane, and in the Modern Age, when rationality and science reign supreme, madness is perceived as a form of rebellion against it. Some believe that rationality and science, which attempt to portray the universe in exact mathematical terms, are suppressing the spiritual sides of human existence, and leading us on a path that robs humanity of its soul. And for the latter, the mad people represent a closer link to reality, one that isn't twisted by rational concepts. So while science attempted to find the causes of insanity and cure it, there were those who actually saw science as the "disease" that we must be cured from.

This battle reached its apex in the nineteen-fifties, when the science of psychology was at the height of its renown, and pretended to have a cure for every mental problem. It was part and parcel of the stifling conformism of those years: anyone who was slightly deviated from the norm was seen to have a mental disorder, and sent to be examined by psychiatrists, who prescribed cures such as shock-treatments and lobotomies. For those who thought there was something wrong with the scientific way, this of course seemed like the worse form of oppression, and their reactions, naturally, were equally extreme.

One of the most extreme examples to the latter was Carl Solomon, an intellectual prodigy who was expected to become a brilliant scientist, but he didn't believe in science. Instead, he believed that the way to connect to the truth is to free oneself from the rational side, so he started to behave erratically and got himself committed to an asylum, where he demanded to be lobotomized. The doctors, instead, prescribed shock-treatments, and kept him in the mental ward. There, he met someone else who had himself willfully committed, a young poet called Allen Ginsberg, who came there in hope to be "cured" from his homosexuality. Solomon dissuaded Ginsberg from his attempt to conform to "normality", and instead helped him find his spiritual path. When Ginsberg was released from the ward, he went to San Francisco to try and make it as a poet, and eventually succeeded, breaking through with a poem that was dedicated to Solomon. 'Howl', the poem that effectively kick-started the Beatnik era in poetry, is a damning portrayal of contemporary society, accusing it of being a technocratic-industrial-militaristic-capitalistic system that drives its "best minds" to madness, and destroys their souls. It also offers a way to salvation from it, and it is Carl Solomon's way: passing through madness, to destroy the logic imposed on your brain by this society, and releasing the soul.

This became one of the myths that the Beatniks bequeathed to the counter-culture of the sixties. The Beatniks regarded Western society as an oppressive society that uses psychiatry to subjugate the spirituality of its citizens, and aspired to break free from it. It designated several techniques to do so, one of them being to commit yourself to a loony-bin, mingle with mad people, get some electric shocks to the brain, and find the joy that society is trying to deny.

The myth was still around in 1970, when Bowie wrote his own version of it in 'All the Madmen'. But Bowie was no stranger to insanity himself, coming face-to-face with it through his half-brother Terry, and he knew it isn't that romantic. His song, as usual, reflects the subject with a whole different light.

Day after day
They send my friends away
To mansions cold and grey
To the far side of town
Where the thin men stalk the streets
While the sane stay underground

The singer is expressing one of the main tenets of the Beatnik philosophy: the ones who are truly insane are not those locked in madhouses, but actually the "normal" people, those who lead their grey lives and go on a daily routine of work and home. They think that they are normal, but actually they are letting themselves be programmed by a system that uses them for its own means, and prevents them from reaching true happiness. In his ironic tongue, the singer uses the same terms usually used to talk about the insane to talk about the "normal": they don't "go to" their homes, they are "being sent to" their homes. And in this reversed picture, the truly sane are naturally those who live underground, those who refuse to be part of this system.

Day after day
They tell me I can go
They tell me I can blow
To the far side of town
Where it's pointless to be high
'Cause it's such a long way down

The hero, we begin to realize, is hospitalized in a mental ward, but he isn't held there forcibly. The doctors tell him he is sane, and want to send him back to the world of "normality". But he sees no point in being part of this world, because you cannot reach a "high" in it, and if you occasionally do, the disparity between that and the rest of your life is so great that it makes you feel even worse. He wants constant high, an existence of permanent joy.

So I tell them that
I can fly, I will scream, I will break my arm
I will do me harm
Here I stand, foot in hand, talking to my wall
I'm not quite right at all...am I?

Don't set me free, I'm as heavy as can be
Just my librium and me
And my E.S.T. makes three

'Cause I'd rather stay here
With all the madmen
Than perish with the sadmen roaming free
And I'd rather play here
With all the madmen
For I'm quite content they're all as sane as me

So our hero feigns madness, in order to be kept in the ward, where regular doses of drugs and electro-shock-treatments keep him on a constant high. The reversed picture is complete: while the "normal" are being "sent to" their homes, he, the one who is seemingly hospitalized away from home, is actually the one who lives in the place of his choice. And he is convinced that the other patients are doing the same, faking insanity to remain there. Together, they form a secret society, much happier than that of the "free" people.

(Where can the horizon lie
When a nation hides its organic minds in a cellar...dark and grim
They must be very dim)

From his "higher" vantage point, the hero muses about the future of Humanity, and concludes that it is very grim. We hear echoes of Ginsberg's 'Howl' here, in the perception that society is destroying its best minds and tags them as "crazy". The hero bemoans the dimness of the masses, who cannot see what he sees, and let themselves slide towards this dark future. But while he is lost in these thoughts, we hear another voice - a little boy is saying "he followed me home, mommy, can I keep him?" - and we realize that something else is going on here: while he thinks he got everybody fooled, while he believes he found the formula for a happy life, while he is busy with lofty thoughts about the state of the world, our hero is slowly, but surely, going really and truly insane.

And so we are reintroduced to the Bowie-knife, the knife that cuts both sides of a debate. Bowie accepts the counter-culture's claim that there is something "insane" about conformed society, but he rejects the solution it proposes. The Beatnik myth of finding happiness through madness is also wrong, and Bowie's attack is aimed at the counter-culture as well. The hero thinks everything's perfect with his life, and doesn't realize that the drugs and E.S.T's have turned him into a zombie, a mad dog who roams the streets and wanders into people's homes. We need the unbiased eye of a little boy to see the truth.

Day after day
They take some brain away
Then turn my face around
To the far side of town
And tell me that it's real
Then ask me how I feel

Here I stand, foot in hand, talking to my wall
I'm not quite right at all
Don't set me free, I'm as helpless as can be
My libido's split on me
Gimme some good 'ole lobotomy

'Cause I'd rather stay here
With all the madmen
Than perish with the sadmen roaming free
And I'd rather play here
With all the madmen
For I'm quite content
They're all as sane as me

His condition is slowly being revealed. He keeps on repeating his same mantras, but we see that he is no longer the self-assured person he was in the first verse. After the treatment gradually ate at his brain, he lost his ability to function. It is no longer someone feigning madness that is speaking – it is someone who is simply mad. He thought he was saving his mind and soul from being destroyed by the system, but actually, he was only destroying them faster. And that is how the story ends… oh yeah, there's one more thing…

Zane, Zane, Zane
Ouvre le Chien…

Huh?

What the hell does that mean?

Alright, I'll give you two options:

1. In 'Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud', the people of the village are "pronouncing gross diversions as the label for the dog" – in other words, they are proclaiming the boy a "mad dog", that should be executed. Something similar might be happening here: the doctors finally determine that our hero is mad (zane = zany), and decide to open him up (ouvre le chien = open the dog), to see what's inside his brain. Instead of being sad that they failed to cure a patient, they are rejoicing in the fact that they have another case to analyze, and so they sing: "he's crazy, let's dissect him!"

2. Or, more simply, that this piece of disconcerting gibberish marks the descent of our hero into complete madness. In this crazy world we live in, "zane" means what "sane" would mean in a healthy world.

My preferred interpretation is of course the combination of both. "Zane, zane, zane, ouvre le chien" is the descent of the whole world of the song into dementia, which engulfs both society and the non-conformist individual. The doctors are crazy, and the patient is crazy. Bowie is damning conformed society and the counter-culture alike, and blaming them both for creating a mad world. If we want to regain our sanity and save the world, a new way must be found.

Width of a Circle

Let's begin with the title. What does "Width of a Circle" mean? Well, it is obviously a paraphrase on "Depth of a Circle", the George Underwood painting that comprised the back cover of the Space Oddity album. It is possible that the title doesn't mean anything at all, and is just an abstract phrase that sounded good to Bowie. If we do try to make sense of it, then we should remember that the Underwood painting was an Escher-like maze of different perspectives, which give you different ways to understand the reality of what you see. So perhaps this is the circle that Bowie is thinking about: whenever you think you figured out the true way to view the world, you find that you are merely the creation of another worldview, and if you adopt that worldview, you find out that it too relies on another worldview, and so forth until you go all the way back to the original worldview. Is there a way to break out of this circle and reach the ultimate truth? Maybe. But for that, you have to find a place that is not part of the circle - you have to find another dimension, through which you can enter the width, or the depth, of the circle. But how can that other dimension be reached?

One traditional answer is the mystical one. The mystics, by employing certain techniques, presumably transcend the human dimension, and unify with God. Bowie was into mysticism for a while now, at least since his 1967 fling with Buddhism, but by this point, he was into a darker kind of mysticism, coming from the Occult. He was, therefore, affected by the idea that the Christian God is a false one, so any attempt to unify with it would not bring you the truth and joy you seek. This "God", according to some Occult teachings, is masking the true divinity and hinders our way to it, so you must go beyond it if you want to unify with the true god. How? Well, along with this false God, Christianity also created a false negative image. It divides the metaphysical world into the world of God, the world of light and good, and the world of Satan, the world of darkness and evil. If you want to transcend this picture, you have to walk the path between the light and dark, go all the way through it, and get to what lies beyond. That means you have to open yourself to the darkness, immerse yourself in it for a while, and then overcome it. It's a dangerous path, but it will take you out of the circle. Or will it? Let's find out.

In the corner of the morning in the past
I would sit and blame the master first and last
All the roads were straight and narrow
And the prayers were small and yellow
And the rumour spread that I was aging fast
Then I ran across a monster who was sleeping by a tree.
And I looked and frowned and the monster was me

The protagonist opens by describing how he was in the past. He could find no meaning to his life, as all the paved roads in front of him seemed to be leading to a straight and boring existence, with no options to divert; and all the prayers were old, pertaining to a God that doesn't answer. But instead of doing something to try and change his condition, he would "blame the master" for it, demanding that the system be changed rather than demand anything from himself. All his attention, then, was focused at the monsters outside of him, which he believed must be killed before anything could be done. Until one day he came face to face with himself, and realized that he is one of those monsters. By focusing on outer enemies, he neglected his own spirit, which became dormant and started to decay, and as a result, he is aging fast and becoming part of the system he despises. He must find his own way out.

Well, I said hello and I said hello
And I asked "Why not?" and I replied "I don't know"
So we asked a simple black bird, who was happy as can be
And he laughed insane and quipped "KAHLIL GIBRAN"
So I cried for all the others till the day was nearly through
For I realized that God's a young man too

Our hero's being is split. There's the spiritual side of him that is searching in vain for the truth, while his physical side is grounded to earth, and slowly decaying. The two sides have become strangers to one another, and he must find a way to bring them together again to be whole and happy, but he doesn't know how. Seeking illumination, he asks the blackbird what makes it so happy, but the latter laughs at him, and gives him a sort of a Zen reply, naming the poet Kahlil Gibran. What is the blackbird trying to say? I believe it tells him to stop looking for an answer beyond this world, and instead learn how to become part of it – in other words, learn to enjoy being part of the circle instead of trying to transcend it. This, basically, is what Gibran preached. The blackbird is laughing at him for believing that there is an answer to the question "what is happiness?", when it should be obvious that there isn't one answer to this question, because happiness is not something concrete, but something that comes out of living in the way that is right for you.

But our hero, it seems, understands something else. He does get illuminated by the reply, but he reaches a different conclusion. He realizes that "God's a young man too". What does that mean? I think it means that he realizes that God is not the all-knowing, infallible being that the monotheistic religions describe, but is rather like a curious young man, trying out stuff, and his creation is therefore rather mixed-up, transient and chaotic. But in that case, it means that in order to reach a mystical union with this God, you should do what young people do. Instead of trying to find the permanent order of creation, you should immerse yourself in its transience, and live a life of danger and change.

So I said "So long" and I waved "Bye-bye"
And I smashed my soul and traded my mind
Got laid by a young bordello
I was vaguely half asleep
For which my reputation swept back home in drag

Transience, then, is the answer, so our hero waves bye-bye to his old life and looks for a different lifestyle. Not just looking: he actively tries to destroy his old personality, to free himself from it. We can sense the influence of Beatnik philosophy here: the Beatniks believed that our mind is shaped by a technocratic society, which represses the spiritual side of man and thus prevents him from reaching happiness. The road to happiness, they claimed, should therefore begin by "beating" your technocratically-shaped-mind, destroying it and setting yourself free from it. There were several techniques they designated to obtain this self-destruction, among them drug abuse, hobo life and shock treatments, and we can find traces of them elsewhere on the album. Here, however, we get another one of the ways to "smash your soul and trade your mind": wild sex.

And here is where we also connect with Occult mysticism. Sex is one of the things that Christianity related to the Devil, thus infusing it with strong mystical power. Sex, therefore, was one of the ways to pass through the darkness, and transcend the Christian God. For Aleister Crowley, the main influence on Bowie's mystical quest, sex was a key to the worlds beyond. We see this fusion of wild sex and the supernatural in 'She Shook Me Cold', but there we also find that he has his own take on what it does: the act of copulating with an out-of-this-world being releases an inner force within the hero's soul, a force that smashes his old identity and transforms his mind. So for Bowie, sex is important not because it is "evil", as Crowley would have it, but because it is something that is alien to the Victorian-minded society he grew up in, and can take him out of it. Bowie, then, blends Beatnik and Crowlian mysticism, to create something of his own. Therefore, it is not just sex that the hero of this record craves, but "perverted" sex, something that is unacceptable to society. In this passage we find the first hint at Bowie's dalliance with homosexuality and drag.

And the moral of this magic spell negotiates my hide
When God did take my logic for a ride

In 'She Shook Me Cold', we are told that his sexual partner "sucked his dormant will"; meaning, that his spirit was dormant before he met her, and she awakened it through her erotic powers and took it to higher grounds. We get something very similar here: he was "vaguely half asleep", but then, when he gives himself up to some fiendish sexual power, God takes his logic for a ride, and the mystical journey begins.

Now we have a long musical break, and when he performed this number on stage, Bowie used to do a mime routine that dramatized what happens in our hero's mind at this moment. It starts with him running his hands against an imaginary wall, trying to find an opening in it, trying to find a way out of the circle. He finds the opening, steps through it, and right away gets swept up to the heavens, where he flies with the gods, riding high on a mystical experience. Ronson's guitar soars along with him, and keeps him afloat for a while, but then the music changes again, as we reach another twist in the plot.

He swallowed his pride and puckered his lips
And showed me the leather belt round his hips
My knees were shaking my cheeks aflame
He said "You'll never go down to the Gods again"
(Turn around, go back!)

The deity he's been having intercourse with is beginning to show its face. It wants our hero to submit to it, and threatens him that if he doesn't, he will never have that experience again. The back of his mind is warning him to break off and go back to his old life, but he is so engrossed in the ecstasy of the experience that he can't help himself – he must carry on.

He struck the ground a cavern appeared
And I smelt the burning pit of fear
We crashed a thousand yards below
I said "Do it again, do it again"
(Turn around, go back!)

Now it is obvious that this deity is actually the devil, who wants him to be his sex-slave in hell. The back of his mind is still screaming, telling him to escape before it is too late, but he cannot help himself. He wants more and more.

His nebulous body swayed above
His tongue swollen with devil's love
The snake and I, a venom high
I said "Do it again, do it again"
(Turn around, go back!)

Breathe, breathe, breathe deeply
And I was seething, breathing deeply
Spitting sentry, horned and tailed
Waiting for you

And so the story ends, with our hero stuck in hell, as Satan's plaything.

We opened our exploration by recalling that Bowie, at the time he wrote this song, was influenced by Aleister Crowley and Occult mysticism. Here we find him writing a mystical song that deals with good and evil, showing them not as totally separate, as Christianity would have it, but blended together in a more Crowlian way. However, it is a different story than the Occult tells. Instead of passing through hell to get to the heaven that lies beyond, Bowie shows us that this mysticism leads to something else: there's a short period of heaven at the beginning of the ride, and you think you are on the right path, but then you lose control and get carried away, and end up in hell.

It is, actually, the same story as in 'Space Oddity'. There too we see the hero leaving his world and initially floating in heaven, but eventually surrendering control and getting carried away into oblivion. But here, Bowie expands the story some more, and for the first time, he presents the full version of what I call "Bowie's main story", the story that is the central theme in his seventies work: it starts with the hero stuck in a meaningless existence; continues with him hooking up with an alien being, which takes him out of his old life and into an existence of joy; but then the joy drives him too far and makes him lose contact with reality, and he is so absorbed in it that he can't stop; and ultimately he ends up in an existence that is even worse than the one he started out from.

A little more than a year later, this will become the storyline of an entire album.