The following was originally written for Tor.com, who are kicking off a whole week of David Bowie love in honor of the great man's birthday. Unfortunately, due to me misinterpreting my instructions, I had written this whole thing before discovering that a couple other writers had basically covered all this and made it redundant, so it will not, alas, be part of the Bowie fawning (I gotta say, I love working for people who are even bigger Bowie fans than I am). But, rather than just let this gather virtual dust sitting on my hard drive, I figured, what the hell. Here, then, is a brief piece about David Bowie's music as relates to science fiction:
From the very beginning of his career, David Bowie's career has had close ties to science fiction. His first commercially successful single, “Space Oddity,” a sprawling, haunting tale of the doomed astronaut Major Tom (on the literal level, at least; there were heavily metaphorical undercurrents of drug addiction as well, but that's Bowie for you, he's rarely if ever only doing one thing.)
Bowie's penchant for both vivid visuals and science-fictional themes and allusions in his lyrics was at its most consistent in the first few years of his fame, spanning multiple stage personae. After Major Tom, and a few references here and there on The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bowie wrote two explicitly SF-inspired songs for his extraordinary album Hunky Dory: “Oh! You Pretty Things,” which looks forward to an apocalyptic shift from the human race as it currently exists to the next stage in evolution (while also simultaneously, and more overtly, being a middle finger to homophobes), and the epic drama “Life On Mars?”, another portrait of (general and sexual) otherness where Bowie first employed the metaphor of an alien world to illuminate the separation that kind of otherness causes with the rest of society.
He proceeded to extrapolate this metaphor, most obviously and famously in his Ziggy Stardust alter ego. His next album, The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, over the course of whose 12 songs—peppered with a number of oblique non sequiturs—tells the titular story. Whether or not Ziggy and the other spiders were literally from Mars was a bit beside the point; they were sufficiently not of this earth that only an SF metaphor would do do describe them. Much, it should be noted, like Bowie himself.
The strange and, in more ways than one, alien sexuality of Ziggy combined with perfect timing and the fact that the album was really good made Ziggy Stardust a massive success. It put Bowie in a position where he was forced to either stay Ziggy forever or evolve. He chose the latter, subtly at first. His follow-up album, Aladdin Sane, featured a logical continuation of many of Ziggy's musical ideas, but with the overt SF imagery confined almost exclusively to the title track; “Aladdin Sane” being a play on the phrase “a lad, insane.” Inspired by the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies, the characters in which Bowie saw as consumed by a meaningless, doomed lifestyle that was both caused by imminent global catastrophe and at the same time the cause thereof, “Aladdin Sane” looked forward to World War III both lyrically and in its spooky, furtively experimental music, that managed to evoke both Berlin cabarets and the apocalyptic future.
For his followup, Bowie—a bit addled by drug use and the pressures of the commercial music industry—wanted to write, and worked out a few rough sketches of songs for a stage musical of George Orwell's 1984, but was denied the rights by Orwell's estate. Then he planned a concept album set in and around a post-apocalyptic city. Upon completion, Diamond Dogs would be a combination of both ideas, featuring a good deal of SF in the lyrics and a couple killer singles.
Although he had not maintained his Ziggy persona throughout this initial period—which also featured covers album Pin-Ups—his shift to “blue-eyed soul” singer was a much more significant shift, and the first such that could be described as a reinvention. This period, consisting of the album Young Americans, didn't traffic in the same SF references as before, primarily because they'd always been a mark of Bowie's sense of his own otherness, and now he was trying to assimilate. That being said, the idea of Bowie co-writing songs with Luther Vandross was sufficiently (and awesomely) strange that it seemed like something out of parallel universe SF.
Bowie would not stray long from SF, as his very next studio album, Station to Station, originated in an attempt to write a song score for the SF movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie was playing the main character, the alien Thomas Jerome Newton. A combination of preparing for his first lead role as an actor and his debilitating drug regimen led to Bowie's arguably most fascinating—and least sustainable—persona: that of The Thin White Duke. The Thin White Duke was from another planet much like Ziggy Stardust, but rather than the former's relatively benign mission of sex, drugs, and rock n roll, The Thin White Duke was up to something far more sinister and mysterious. The music on Station to Station was forward-thinking and packed with spooky (and spooked) futurism. Everything about this iteration was less explicit, more elusive, which oddly made Station to Station and the following period—Bowie's “Berlin trilogy,” over the course of which he gradually weaned himself off cocaine and returned to relative sanity—nearly perfect soundtracks for SF cinema, both real and hypothetical.
A sane, sober Bowie was not much for the science-fiction imagery, even going so far, in “Ashes to Ashes,” to turn his back on the entire period with the line “We know Major Tom's a junkie.” Still, he didn't abandon SFF completely, turning in a haunting, beautifully rendered performance as a dying vampire in The Hunger (a movie otherwise only notable for being the feature directing debut of Tony Scott and for the legendary sex scene between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon; something's wrong when David Bowie isn't involved in the sexy parts of a movie) and his indelible turn as goblin king Jareth in Labyrinth, for which he also wrote the songs.
Labyrinth is an extremely important movie for reasons I'm sure I don't need to explain to anyone still reading at this point, and its soundtrack has its ups and downs, though those ups are very, very up indeed. “Magic Dance” is one of the greatest things to ever exist. Bowie takes elements of every one of his previous personae for his character and—to a lesser extent—songs in Labyrinth, ending up with a result that somehow manages to carry undertones of his old dangerous sexuality and yet still be (kind of) suitable for a kids' movie.
Still, fairly or not, the period in Bowie's career in which he made Labyrinth was one of his critically least successful. Almost a decade later, he was at a point at which his own career and shifting popular tastes in music required a “comeback” album, for which he reunited with producer Brian Eno. In trying to recapture his 70s glory, the album—written entirely in the studio—was linked by the overarching theme, detailed by Bowie in a short SF story that he included as liner notes, of a dystopian near future, with songs told from the perspectives of several different characters.
While regarding Outside as a “comeback” album slightly devalues the work Bowie had been doing at the time—among which were the under-appreciated album Black Tie, White Noise and the excellent, adventurous soundtrack to the BBC adaptation of Hanef Kureishi's novel The Buddha of Suburbia—it is nonetheless a return to Bowie's explicitly science-fictional lyrics. Being vastly more lucid than he was in the 70s (when he wasn't at all) makes Outside at once less thrilling an evocation of an SF universe than its predecessors and a far more coherent one. It's a big, long experience that evokes, far more clearly and consistently than any of Bowie's other concept albums, a science-fiction movie. The album isn't only the score but the script and cinematography as well.
Outside was Bowie's last grand statement in musical SF. His subsequent work has occasionally alluded to SF and related themes, but not to the extent Outside or his 70s period did. Still, Bowie's manifest, wondrous strangeness has led many a filmmaker, and specifically an SF filmmaker , to use one of his songs for the soundtrack, since there are certain situations where only David Bowie will do. Even in the non-SF comedy Zoolander, there was a point of debate about who was cooler than who, leading Bowie to step into frame and say “Perhaps I can be of assistance.” An expert consultant, if you will.
It was also a lovely touch in Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, set so far in the future that humans have interstellar travel (and are united under one highly fascistic planetary government), that the band playing the high school prom before all the 30 year old high school students go off to war is covering Bowie's “I Have Not Been To Oxford Town.” It's at least a century in the future, and Bowie's still cool. It warms the heart.
And last but not least, one use of a Bowie song that I think speaks volumes of his supremacy not only as the last word in cool but his status as the rock star laureate of science fiction, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which absolutely beyond any doubt qualifies as alternate history SF, even if it isn't immediately apparent as such. The movie is Tarantino's typically feverish blend of literary and cinematic pastiche, lengthy dialogue scenes, and extreme violence, assembled meticulously and with intelligence. It does, at the climax, take a turn from historical fiction to alternate history, a turn that satisfies the savage wish-fulfillment aspects of the story. It still requires something to grease the wheels a bit, to mask how implausible the climactic action is, to set a tone of ultimate cool, of seductive danger, of otherworldly strangeness. It is thus that, at the perfect moment to do so, the soundtrack starts playing David Bowie's “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” featuring, at the exact moment a plot involving incinerating the entire German high command is nearing completion, the line “Putting out fire with gasoline.” Watching that scene, the movie's already been great up to that point, and at the exact moment the thought “Wait . . . that's David Bowie!” enters one's mind, it becomes clear that the rest is going to be even better. Which, at long last, brings us to the point: there is nothing that David Bowie cannot make better. Nothing. At. All.
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