The Man Who Sold The World
I’m listening to all of David Bowie’s studio albums while we’re all mostly staying inside. My thoughts about David Bowie and Space Oddity are here.
The first thing that jumps out at me when the first notes of “The Width of a Circle” start playing from The Man Who Sold The World is that this is going to be a big 70s rock record. The opening track is much stronger than “Cygnet Committee” from Space Oddity. It’s a big long rock song that doesn’t get boring. There’s a sense of self-loathing from the lyrics I can make out, which I suppose is not surprising given the album is called The Man Who Sold The World.
Only about halfway through the second track, “All The Madmen”, I can’t help but think how much better this album already is than Bowie’s debut. If you told me that the same person that performed “Love You Till Tuesday” is the same guy who did “All The Madmen,” I would never believe you. (On a side note, I’m still flabbergasted at how bad “Love You Till Tuesday” is, and I’m still tortured at how I can’t get the fucking song out of my head).
There’s a lot more sonically interesting things going on. “After All” is a somber break after getting pummeled with the first three tracks. Here the gazing into the abyss gets heightened (“We’re nobody’s children at all, after all”). This leads into a song that starts with Bowie doning a character that has killed 23 people since Friday. “Running Gun Blues” seems to be about a soldier who never stopped fighting a war. It leads into “Saviour Machine”’s dystopian nightmare. Given the overall themes I’m sensing about halfway through the album, I’m wondering where Bowie’s headspace was at while writing these songs. Space Oddity seemed looser and brighter compared to this record. Maybe it was Vietnam, or the Cold War. Bowie was about 22 or 23 when this record came out, so maybe it’s just a growing awareness of the precariousness of the world.
“She Shook Me Cold” is just straight up, forgettable stupid heavy blues rock. A palate cleanse from the darkness of the first six songs, but not really a good one.
My first introduction to the title track was Nirvana’s cover on MTV Unplugged. I think it may have been the first Bowie song I was ever conscious of hearing, and I enjoyed it a lot. Not that I actually went out and sought out more Bowie songs after that. I also liked Korn at the time too, for some reason. I don’t think I would recognize 12-year old me and my dumb music choices now.
As for Bowie’s version here, it is very different from the rest of the album. It’s not grounded in heavy guitars, and it’s better for it. The other dystopias and psychosis in the other songs needed to be loud. The internal navel-gazing of “The Man Who Sold The World” is better for being relatively quieter. I see the song as about searching for meaning, trying to reconcile one’s integrity in the face of a reality that perpetually challenges it. Given a world filled soldiers who keep fighting wars and false Saviour Machines, it’s a thought that needed to be explored.
The Man Who Sold The World is a good 1970s hard rock record, but the only song that’s transcendent is it’s title track. Like David Bowie before it, this album is intrinsically linked with its time. There are going to be some songs that aren’t aesthetically aligned with people’s tastes, but there’s many more actual good songs here than on previous albums. You can feel the confidence and growth as a performer with Bowie in The Man Who Sold The World.