Bruna. 28. Bisexual. Brazil. I've got a film degree.
Sometimes I post mature content, so I'll ask to only follow me if you're 18+.
This is a multifandom blog. Expect lots of Hannibal and Star Trek. Also Vampire Chronicles. Lots of movies. There will be on occasion rock bands and singers. Also books and TV shows and random stuff.
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Track 87: Life on Mars? (album version; single [June ‘73])
Life on Mars? is often called cinematic – but if it is cinematic it is not so simply because of the lyrical references to the cinema; nor due to the wonderful widescreen musicality created through the synthesis of Rick Wakeman’s grand piano with Mick Ronson’s epic orchestration. Rather, it is cinematic in the sense of having something in common with what the early Soviet filmmakers and film theorists Dziga Vertov called the Kino-Eye (or camera-eye) or Sergei Eisenstein the collision of shots. Montage. Yet while most films attempt to hide cutting and editing, to create a seamless flow from image to image, the Soviet’s foregrounded montage. Disparate images could be brought together to generate affects and inspire action in the world. Accordingly, it is not the images themselves that matter so much as the way in which they are formally composed: as a collage, or a mosaic. The girl with the mousy hair enters the cinema and encounters the escapism of the film – but it is a pale shadow of life. The song then bombards us with a cascade of disparate iconic cinematic images, in fastmo, hyper-rapid montage. The images of classic cinema are disrupted, torn-up and scattered in the wind. Is there Life on Mars? – the song reveals – is the wrong question. Is there life in you? One of Bowie’s most iconic tracks, it is easy to forget it languished as an album track until it became a single around the time of the Aladdin Sane album, when it was released as a single with an accompanying Mick Rock video, an elegantly and eccentrically besuited Bowie bleached out against a white background. The song started life as a take on My Way, a French song Bowie had unsuccessfully written lyrics for a few years previously (see trackbytrack 39) – the Hunky Dory sleeve notes say ‘inspired by Frankie’ after Frank Sinatra. There is a demo, but I cannot get hold of it (there is snippet online, see more stuff below). The song would go on to be played live on TV and at concert in many different ways – as we will see – in the years to come….
‘Life on Mars?’: Track 4 of the Hunky Dory album. Released 17 December
1971.
The A Side to the
Life on Mars?
Single. Released 22 June 1973.
Written
by David Bowie. Available on Hunky Dory (1971).
David Bowie as Count Robert Lecter Mads Mikkelsen as Dr. Hannibal Lecter
“Since our timeline is a little more present, there’s a little bit of JJ Abrams-style alternate universe storytelling where [Robert Lecter] could still be alive.” - Bryan Fuller
Eight Line Poem is a kind of tonal companion piece to Oh! You Pretty Things – and when the latter is played the former most usually follows. Such is the situation with the Bowpromo disk (see trackbytrack 83 – which has an alternative vocal); with the radio session in September of ’71 (see trackbytrack 82); and – as we’ll see – live. One song leads into the other – and while Oh! You Pretty Things is sci-fi Nietzsche and bouncy chorus, Eight Line Poem is the most quiet and gentle moment of Hunky Dory, with the most enigmatic of lyrics. An under furnished room in the city, a cactus and a cat. The piano shimmers with a trippy chorus effect and Ronson’s country guitar introduces the song before Bowie’s voice enters the frame. Often overlooked or passed by, Eight Line Poem has one of the most wonderful of Bowie’s vocal performances ever – fragile, affected, weird. A fragment… composed of fragments. A scattering of images…
‘Eight Line Poem’: Track 3 of the Hunky Dory album. Released 17 December
1971. Written
by David Bowie. Available on Hunky Dory (1971).
