Understanding Life on Mars by David Bowie.
Originally published at www.seermag.com on September 7, 2017.
In music, there are some songs that speak to some people, and some speak to every one of us. This is a song that makes us think of escapism and disillusionment with the world: Life on Mars by David Bowie.
The song is a career-defining one for Bowie, and one of his most-covered songs. Originally appearing on his Hunky Dory album , it isn’t your standard rock ballad by any means. Bowie could have easily made a four-chord hit out of this one, but instead, this song contains about twenty chords, with unusual scale and tempo changes.
With a minimalist use of the electric guitar used in between verse transitions, and a primary use of the piano and slow drums, this narrates the story of a girl going out for a movie, with her mother refusing and ‘daddy telling her to go’. Her friend doesn’t show up, so she goes on to watch it on her own. As the verse progresses, we learn that the film is actually a ‘saddening bore’ and that she has watched it ‘ten times or more’. ‘She could spit in the eyes of fools’(the filmmakers) as they ‘ask her to focus’ on the generic, escapist tropes seen in a number of films.
The lyrics of this song are written in a manner that is vague enough for people to derive their own meanings from it, and clear enough as to make the listeners understand certain underlying messages. One could see the girl as disillusioned with her life and maybe even slightly frustrated with it’s limitations(‘mummy is yelling no’) and clearly, even after watching the movie ten times and even hating it, she makes a plan with her friend just to escape reality. Her friend not showing up and the film being a ‘saddening bore’ adds up to this frustration, which leads her to ask , ‘Is there Life on Mars’?
There are two things that we should think about at this point in the song. One, extreme commercialization of Art, making it a mass produced, boring, repetitive commodity and two, the limits of escapism. In the chorus, Bowie describes the usual tropes found in commercial films. Who is complicit in watering down of art? Is it just the big studios or the people looking for a quick escape who demand such content? The girl is so intent on escaping reality that she is ready to watch a bad, boring film alone. When she is fed up of the film, she even asks if there is life on Mars. Ironically, the very tropes found in the supposedly escapist films also reflect some real situations. Can we actually escape reality? Is our escapism but a reflection of the real world, whether we like it or not?
Bowie expands upon such questions in the next verse, in his signature vague-but-clear lyrical style: It’s on America’s tortured brow/ That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow. Here, Bowie takes a dig on American commercialism and ‘cow’ could mean two things: one, a ‘sacred cow’, a cultural icon so ingrained that it’s above all criticism and two, a ‘cash cow’, a piece of beautiful art commercialized and trivialized. He goes on to offer a critique of the so-called ‘counterculture’ of the 60s by implying that the ‘workers’(which in this context could mean the hippies and young people who identified with the working class) have ‘struck for fame’, meaning that the working-class socialist philosophy has actually become a brand, something ‘cool’ to identify with, as he says ‘Lennon’s on sale again’(a reference to John Lennon’s song, ‘Working Class Hero’).
He critiques mass tourism, another form of escapism popular among the working classes. By saying ‘mice in their million hordes’, Bowie implies that it is hardly an escape if hordes of people travel to the same places together. This is another example of how our intentions of ‘escapism’ lead us back into the real world, and there is no real escape, according to Bowie. He also takes a momentary dig at ‘ nationalism’, something that is supposed to bind people and create a common identity, but how the nationalist phrase ‘ Rule Britannia ‘ in reality only panders to the ruling class. Ordinary mothers, dogs, or clowns don’t rule anything.
In the final pre-chorus, Bowie changes the narrative from third-person to first-person, with the first-person implying either the filmmaker or Bowie himself. In the context of the narrative, the filmmaker actually admits that the film is a ‘saddening bore’ as he has written it multiple times, and that it is about to be written again. In the larger context of the song, this could imply that however diverse art is, an artist may intentionally or unintentionally convey the same tropes or themes that mean the most to him. When the creator asks the audience to focus on his message again, at this point this song could imply that there is no true escape and the audience must focus on those anxiety-provoking images(‘Lawman beating up the wrong guy’) as these are real-life problems that we engage in.
In a song with a duration of about four minutes, David Bowie made us think of life, a sense of purpose versus a tendency to escape the real world, and commercialism with vivid imagery and a beautiful melody. No wonder his genius lives on even after his death: Among the generic and commercial tropes within pop music , David Bowie managed to cut through the clutter and redefine songwriting musically and lyrically. In this spirit, we pay tribute to his genius.
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