The Man Who Sold the World (14 page)

BOWIE AND THE
HOMO SUPERIOR

B
owie was twenty-three years old when he wrote “The Supermen” [19], which, he explained the following year, “was about the
homo superior
race.” The phrase has been traced back to
Odd John
, a 1935 novel by science fiction author Olaf Stapledon, in which
Homo sapiens
does not make way for
Homo superior
, but attacks him. It was subsequently used by many other sci-fi authors, though Bowie himself was responsible for widening its circulation. In “The Supermen,” however, he was using
Homo superior
as a translation of one of the most misunderstood concepts in the history of philosophy: the
Übermensch
described by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Academics are still debating the implications and meaning of Nietzsche's noun, often translated into English as “superman” or, more literally, “over-man.” Bowie subsequently admitted that he had skimmed Nietzsche's work at the start of the seventies, and pretended to understand it—intrigued, it seems, by the influence that Nietzsche had on the philosophy of the Nazi Party. In that 1971 interview, Bowie made the connection explicit, before burbling unintelligibly about Hitler
*
and “the Magic Wine,” and the risk that modern man might “have given birth to
Homo superior
prematurely.”

So it's not surprising that Bowie's grasp of the
Übermensch
was partial and confused: that he missed Nietzsche's contrast between two avenues that mankind could follow now that God was dead—the
letzte Mensch
, or “last man,” a mediocrity brought to a state of apathy and exhaustion by the mirage of democratic equality, and
Übermensch
, a flash of lightning strong enough to exist beyond the comforting illusion of equality and ethics, who will illuminate the truth for those bold enough to follow him. Nietzsche animated this choice in
Also Sprach Zarathustra
,
*
in which the prophet's warnings are ignored by weak humans who prefer the “last man” to the “over-man.” It was much easier for Bowie to gloss over the philosophical debate and hold firm to the attraction of the
Übermensch
—or, in sci-fi terms, the
Homo superior
—as a superior species with powers excelling our own. Hence the link with the Nazi Party, and its dream of Aryan storm troopers and maidens, who could populate an ideal Reich that would last a thousand years.

By toying with Nietzsche's terminology, Bowie was indirectly reflecting a surge of interest in the philosopher's work that pervaded the work of French theorists in the decade ahead. There were new editions of the philosopher's works; a collection of his letters; a sense that, twenty-five years after the end of World War II, the core of Nietzsche could be retrieved from the Nazis' deliberate perversion of his writings.

This enthusiasm somewhat incongruously tumbled into the field of rock music, where it became a commonplace for artists and critics with a smattering of education to talk knowledgeably about the gulf between Dionysian and Apollonian qualities, again using terms employed by Nietzsche. Foremost among these philosophical pretenders was Jim Morrison of the Doors, who quite deliberately fashioned his public persona as an embodiment of Dionysian frenzy and spontaneity. The same tag was soon applied to Bowie's future friend Iggy Pop of the Stooges.

Imagine, then, the confusion in Bowie's head at the end of the sixties, with a dangerous smattering of Nietzschean knowledge colliding with a (perennially) fashionable obsession with Hitler and the Nazis, a sense of disillusionment about the hippie movement, and a feeling of drift in his own life. Beyond his personal experience, the daily newspapers reported on Britain's economic and political lethargy, alongside summaries of the rabble-rousing speeches given by maverick Tory MP Enoch Powell. This was a time when, as historian Andy Beckett has indicated, “a certain feverishness seized some of those involved in British right-wing politics . . . [with] the belief that British decline had worsened into national crisis; the need for a strong, quite possibly authoritarian right-wing government to stop the slide.”

So it was that Bowie, attempting to condense these vague ideas into a philosophy, could utter these comments in a December 1969 interview aimed at a teenage pop audience: “This country is crying out for a leader. God knows what it is looking for, but if it's not careful it's going to end up with a Hitler. This place is so ready to be picked up by anybody who has a strong enough personality to lead. The only person who is coming through with any strength is Enoch Powell. He is the only one with a following.”

Bowie didn't imagine that Enoch Powell was the
Homo superior
; nor Hitler, for that matter. But like his infatuation with the occult, his fascination with Nietzsche and the Nazis tapped into his nagging belief that there was more to life (and his life) than the daily obsessions of the media and the herd; that there was an additional dimension beyond the everyday; that the people needed to be led by a “superman,” whatever that might entail. Later in the decade, these elements would combine with extreme cocaine paranoia to send Bowie's political thinking into a state of crisis. Before then, they would congeal in his mind and help to create the conditions whereby he would seek to portray that “superman”—not as a political dictator but as a rock star.

 

[30] OH! YOU PRETTY THINGS

(Bowie)

Demo recorded January 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded June/July 1971;
Hunky Dory
LP

Bowie had spent years attempting to craft hit singles for other performers, his failure a cause of much frustration for his loyal publishers. As part of Tony Defries's “new broom” approach to his client's career, Bowie signed a five-year publishing deal with Chrysalis Music in October 1970, thereby removing his new songs from David Platz's Essex Music and assigning them to a newly formed Chrysalis affiliate Titanic Music. Under the contract, Bowie was given an advance of five thousand pounds (20 percent of which went straight to his managers), a very substantial sum for the time. He was now freed from the necessity to scrape a living on the road, and was able to concentrate on his songwriting.

“All of a sudden, all these great songs started appearing,” recalled Chrysalis executive Bob Grace. “We used to do all his demos at the Radio Luxembourg studios in London, which was cheap, and that suited us, because David was writing so much stuff.” “Oh! You Pretty Things” was one of the first songs Bowie completed under the new deal, and Grace took the demo tape to the Midem music business gathering, where he gave it to producer Mickie Most. Within a matter of weeks, Bowie had finally achieved his aim of writing a hit for another artist, with a song that was vividly personal. The recipient of this attractive but lyrically unwieldy gift was Peter Noone, whose boy-next-door looks and voice had brought him fame in the 1960s as the lead singer of Herman's Hermits.
*
His approach to the song involved a total lack of engagement with its darker, occult-inspired themes, altering the word
bitch
to
beast
, and, more significantly perhaps, beginning his record with the chorus.

For it was the descending diatonic major progression of the chorus (repeated by Bowie in “Changes” [48] and “All the Young Dudes” [62], and a familiar motif in the work of Paul McCartney) that undoubtedly sold this song, and has ensured its enduring popularity among those who have never grappled with its philosophical conceits, and probably assumed that Noone and Bowie were singing “gotta make way for the wholly superior.” Only the lyric sheet revealed that Bowie's fixation was actually the
Homo superior
, his conception of Nietzsche's
Übermensch
. Others have noted his references to
The Coming Race
(a prophetic nineteenth-century novel by Bulwer-Lytton), and the Golden Ones (probably inspired by the 1890s occult obsessives of the Temple of the Golden Dawn), while there was an H. G. Wells resonance to his concern about “the world to come.”

There was no doubting the extent of Bowie's interest in the occult, or his preoccupation with the fate of
Homo sapiens
. Yet, as journalist Michael Watts noted perceptively in 1972, “His other great inspiration is mythology . . . he has crafted a myth of the future.” It was derivative, and peopled with other people's characters, but its fatalism was entirely Bowie's own. So was the domestic scenario of the opening verse, in which Bowie either inherited or revisited a vision of the earth cracking open that had been experienced by his brother, Terry. In a 1976 BBC Radio interview, Bowie all but admitted that the vision had been his own: “According to Jung, to see cracks in the sky is not really quite on. . . . I thought I'd write my problems out.” But then Bowie has often been, by accident or quite consciously, his own least reliable chronicler.

Nor was he an infallible pianist, though the experiments he'd begun on “How Lucky You Are” [29] came to fruition on “Oh! You Pretty Things.” Having played piano on Noone's record (albeit proving unable to perform the song in its entirety without running aground), he had become sufficiently proficient by summer 1971 to prefix his own recording with a 2/4 introduction in F, feeling his way through some appropriate chord changes,
*
via a brief stop at 3/4 time, toward the final destination of G
b
in a 4/4 tempo. The results were charmingly naïve, if occasionally faltering, and quite free of the flourishes that a more accomplished musician might have provided. As if in keeping, Bowie's vocal was also quite unadorned, presented so starkly, in fact, that it was almost unsettling. He accentuated the evil word
bitch
as if to revenge himself for Peter Noone's timidity, and stretched himself to new levels by hitting a high B at the top of the chorus. That had unexpected consequences when he was unable to rise to the challenge at a BBC concert in June 1971, his voice cracking apart in an eerie replica of the ground in the opening verse. For subsequent performances—at a BBC TV studio in January 1972, for example—he would carefully avoid taking a similar risk, and aim low rather than high.

 

[31] HANG ONTO YOURSELF

(Bowie)

Demo recorded January 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded February 1971; Arnold Corns single. Re-recorded November 1971;
Ziggy Stardust
LP

“I didn't believe it till I came here, got off the plane,” Bowie commented on his first trip to the United States, in January 1971. “From England, America merely symbolizes something, it doesn't actually exist. And when you get off the plane and find that there actually is a country called America, it becomes very important then.” Like every British child of the rock'n'roll era in the years before cheap transatlantic flights, Bowie could barely imagine reaching the soil from which Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry had grown. America's streets were filled with pop poetry, its cities as resonant as the birthplace of any religion.

After a year of ennui bordering on depression at home, this semi-mythical landscape replenished Bowie's energy. “I think I've been in prison for the last 24 years,” he commented incredulously. “I think coming to America has opened one door.” Over the next few months, he would write as many songs as he had in the previous three years. “I got very sharp and very quick,” he explained in summer 1971. “Somehow or other I became very prolific. I wanted to write things that were more
immediate
.”

This surge of creativity was stimulated by the music he heard during his trip, especially the garage rock of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground. Before Bowie's dexterous rewriting transformed it into a key piece of
Ziggy Stardust
mythology, “Hang Onto Yourself” was born as an instant response to hearing the Velvets' final album with Lou Reed,
Loaded
. Extracting the spirit of Reed's “Rock and Roll,” Bowie combined it with a lyrical steal from the same album's “Sweet Jane” (although his narrator was on a radio show, not in a rock'n'roll band like Reed's protagonist) and some classic rock'n'roll reference points. The three-chord guitar opening was pure Eddie Cochran, while the insistent “come on” in the chorus brought back memories of Cochran's “C'mon Everybody,” Chuck Berry's “Come On,” and the chorus of the Beatles' “Please Please Me.”
*
With its attractively familiar chord changes and instantly accessible structure, “Hang Onto Yourself” fulfilled Bowie's desire of creating something “more immediate” than the songs he'd written in recent years.

Having taped a multi-instrumental demo in America, Bowie recorded the song with a band a week after his return, alongside “Moonage Daydream” [32]. His double-tracked vocal was an even clearer acknowledgment of his debt to Reed, but the performance lacked the velocity or punch to sell the song's undoubted commerciality.

Nine months later, it was a very different song that found its way into the repertoire of the Spiders from Mars. (This is a useful point at which to recall Jack Kerouac's “spiders across the stars” in the most memorable passage from
On the Road
.) Bowie had raised the melody by two semitones, and written two entirely new verses, excising the borrowed mythology and creating a legend of his own. There was a groupie and the object of her adoration, the Spiders themselves, who could move like “tigers on Vaseline”—conjuring the vision of magnificent cats sliding out of control on a newly varnished floor. The propulsive thrust of the band would be reproduced endlessly later in the decade as the prototypical British punk sound, but there was a swagger and arrogance to Bowie's performance (the chuckle as he announced his tiger simile, for example) that few in any genre could muster.