A Recommendation A Week (A-RAW) #4
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture
Frank Zappa
Here’s a case of an imitation being more famous than the original, so much so that most mistake the imitation for the original. Admittedly, Nirvana’s cover of David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World would have turned few onto the original, but, and here’s the kicker, the song is not even the best in the Bowie album of same name. That, I believe, has to be the strong album opener ‘The Width of a Circle’.
Coming hard on the heels of Space Oddity – an album that launched David Bowie into superstardom – The Man Who Sold The World is the prolific, versatile & eccentric musician’s 3rd album, which saw him veer away from folk, psychedelic rock towards hard rock with heavy blues influences. The 9-track album begins strongly with a 8-min blues rock stomper ‘The Width of a Circle‘, with particularly impressive guitar flair of Mick Ronson and romping drum-work of Mick Woodmansey worthy of being in any Led Zeppelin or Cream album.
Lyrically, Bowie grapples with darker themes on this album – matched probably only by his curtain-closer Blackstar – topics like madness, fragmented identity & the human condition. In ’All The Madmen’, eluding to his brother’s battle with mental illness in asylums, Bowie burns caustic, delivering scathing lines “‘Cause I’d rather stay here / With all the madmen / Than perish with the sad men roaming free / And I’d rather play here / With all the madmen / For I’m quite content they’re all as sane as me / (Where can the horizon lie / When a nation hides / Its organic minds / In a cellar / Dark and grim / They must be very dim)”
The 2nd half of the LP deals with paranoid dystopian tales through songs ’Saviour Machine’ and the title track, with Asimov-esque critique of reliance on manmade machines in the former, and a critique of corrupting power in the later. Bowie waxes poetic plumbing literary influences from Nietzche and Lovecraft to build an unsettling environment in the listener’s mind, and demanding answers to uncomfortable questions, in the album closer ’The Supermen’.
All in all, even though the album lacks a clear career-defining hit per se, The Man Who Sold The World collectively is one of the most cohesive David Bowie albums in his large pantheon of work.