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.
“'Cause love’s such an old fashioned word And love dares you to care for The people on the edge of the night And loves dares you to change our way of Caring about ourselves”
Shadow Man is a fragile folk ballad concerned with a haunting – the haunting of the I by the self, the person you are now by its shadow. Bowie’s voice is tortured, and always on the edge of breaking: ‘He’ll show you tomorrow / He’ll show you the sorrows / Of what you did today’. There is thus an essential Bowie twist here: it is not the past which haunts you – but rather the future. The consequences of your actions now will necessarily impact the times to come and it is this indistinct doppelgänger of possible outcomes from tomorrow that haunts you. It is – although apparently an unfinished cut – really an acoustic track, but one accompanied by the band with a certain country-style. In this way it feels more akin to the Space Oddity period (which – as some claim – is when it was originally composed). Accordingly, it is hard to see how it would have fitted – musically at least – with the Ziggy album form which it was dropped. Though before the concept of Ziggy was guiding the selection of tracks and the later writing, the new record was looking very different if the out-takes we know of are considered: remakes from the past, covers of Brel and Berry, not to mention the other out-takes we have encountered of new compositions and those that are either lost or still in the archive (One Paper Left; It’s Gonna Rain; and even a new version of Looking For A Friend – see trackbytrack 81 and more stuff below). This version of Shadow Man would never be officially released; however, the song was re-recorded by Bowie around 2000 for the ultimately abandoned Toy project.
‘Shadow Man’: Out-take from the The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album. Unreleased. Written
by David Bowie. Available onbootlegs.
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.
