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.
Check my About Me and the links in the navigation page to see more info.
Some of you know this already. Some of you don’t. But this song was almost the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation.
No, I am not kidding. I’m serious. It really was. They almost used this as the theme to TNG. It’s even on the first soundtrack, the one with the music from the pilot “Encounter at Farpoint” if you don’t believe me.
Yes, this song was almost the TNG theme.
Seriously.
I mean it’s not horrible horrible, right? But it’s… it’s not the TNG theme, you know?
It really is very 1980s though. I mean, you’d have to do 80s visuals with it, you know? Not just text. Picard would have to come on horseback galloping over the top of a hill. Riker would have to do one of those half-turn-and-smile manuvers. Troi would have shake her hair like a shampoo commercial. Worf would have to do a toothy growl as he chopped wood with a bat'leth. Beverly would have to be fixing Wesley’s uniform collar or something before turning to the camera. Geordi would do the two-handed point-and-grin like Guy in the end opening credits from “Galaxy Quest” and Data would totally be painting a portrait of spot before spot knocked over the paints…
Allusive but affecting, bizarre but beautiful, uplifting but unsettling – The Bewlay Brothers is the tour de force that concludes Hunky Dory. From the gentle strum of the almost intangible acoustic verses to the weird, uncanny and complex choruses to the coda which feels as if it – and we – falling into the abyss in slow-mo, the song is musically inventive and lyrically elusive. A gay hymn utilizing polari (‘real cool traders’)? A drugged up nightmare (‘Shooting up pie in the sky’)? Identity shifts (‘chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature’)? An ode to schizophrenia? Bowie himself has been somewhat evasive, saying, at different times, many different things. It is ‘another vaguely anecdotal piece about my feelings about myself and my bother’ Terry Burns. That ‘it’s so personal… I inflicted myself upon other people with that track’. That it is named after a tobacconists David knew of: ‘I used “Bewlay” as a cognomen – in place of my own’; and that ‘It’s possible I may have smoked something in my Bewlay pipe’. Even that the song is ‘Star Trek in a leather jacket’. The swirl of words are probably best seen as a collage or mosaic of unconscious thoughts rising to the surface: ‘I had a whole wad of words that I had been writing all day’. The basic track was cut late at night after everyone but Ken Scott, producer, had gone home – it was a new song, its first performance delivered that night of 30 June 1971. Scott remembers Bowie telling him at the time that ‘the lyrics make absolutely no sense’. Bowie has said ‘I wouldn’t know how to interpret the lyric of this song other than suggesting that there are layers of ghosts within them. It’s a palimpsest’; that ‘I can’t imagine what the person who wrote that had on his mind at the time’; and that people can ‘read whatever in hell they want to read into it’. And while in keeping with the album, in many ways it is the one track that looks back toward The Man Who Sold the World; yet at the same time looks forwards, way forwards, towards Scary Monsters: the speeded up / slowed down mockney vocal. It was not performed again in any way till a BBC session in 2002…
‘The Bewlay Brothers’: Track 11 of the Hunky Dory album. Released 17 December
1971. Written
by David Bowie. Available on Hunky Dory (1971).
Queen Bitch is the brassy rocker of Hunky Dory – overflowing with glamour and seediness, guts and camp. The track kicks off with an acoustic guitar riff for four bars; and is then mirrored with Ronson’s electric fuzz chords; before drums and bass tumble into the fray along with a second electric guitar double-tracking the first. It’s rough-hewn and utterly glorious. A foot-stomping Lou Reed / Velvet Unground inspired mise-en-scene of cheap hotels, prostitution, gay love and righteous jealousy. The penultimate track of the album, it’s the hurricane before the eye of the storm (Hunky Dory’s incredible final cut); and a sign towards of the musical direction of the Ziggy period coming hot on its heels. Queen Bitch was first previewed at the BBC live session in June ’71 (trackbytrack 80); included on the Bowpromo disk (trackbytrack 83) and played at Aylesbury Friars Club live (trackbytrack 90). And it’s gonna be – as mentioned, and as we’ll see – a mainstay in the early Ziggy era: performed on both radio and TV. And one day, in the far future, Reed will join Bowie on stage for a version…
‘Queen Bitch’: Track 10 of the Hunky Dory album. Released 17 December
1971. Written
by David Bowie. Available on Hunky Dory (1971).
La Vie En Rose playing from another room Edith Piaf
Me standing on a gorgeous stone balcony outside of a grand ballroom, breathing in some fresh air because the fumes of the champagne and the loud joyous noise gave me slight sensory overload. The wind gorgeously moves my gown.
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).
Often described as the “saddest classical work ever”, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has an almost inexorable quality in the slow, steady upward movement of the haunting melody towards the hair-raising climax, before finally settling back to the subdued sorrow of the opening. The piece was famously featured in the film Platoon, and was played at the funerals of Albert Einstein, Princess Grace of Monaco and during the announcements of the deaths of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
