DB Music challenge Day 3: Again I have chosen a quite unusual track from the 80s resp. the album Scary Monsters and Super Creeps: Scream like a baby (what? - why this track?? ;-) 1) Vocals: Throughout his incredibly long career Bowie has experimented with different vocal styles - ranging from his early TMWSTW/Ziggy voice to a crooner voice (would be interesting to categorize his different vocal styles). Especially on the Heroes album there are songs whose vocal style remind me of a harmonic manic depression (Blackout, Joe the Lion, Heroes). However I think that he brought this new vocal style to perfection on the album Scary Monsters. There are songs with an extremely broad vocal range and the way he sings songs like Kingdom Come, Teenage Wildlife, It´s no game is everything but usual. Scream like a baby hasn´t got this extreme vocal range, but there are vocal experiments (should the lines No atheletice programe, no dicipline, no books,..... show a bipolar disorder?) on it too and the song is extremely dynamic 2) Lyrics: The song focuses on a protagonist called Sam who is evidently being held, along with the tracks narrator, in a political prison. Though set in the future, the story is related in the past tense, in a fashion Bowie has described as future nostalgia... A past look at something that hasnt happened yet. Bowie has used this narrator´s perspective in lots of songs and this future nostalgia is one of Bowie´s trademarks and I like this perspective a lot. 3) Good artists steal, bad artists imitate: Actually Scream like a baby was not written by Bowie himself but it is a cover of the Astronettes´song I am a laser (1973). However Bowie changed this song completely and turned it into something new. And maybe this ability - to absorb music genres, art, literature and turn them into something completely new - is Bowie´s biggest strenght. In my opinion some of Bowie´s covers are pretty weak, but he is amazing when it comes to transforming something that exists already (this could be a book too) into something completely new. Just think of the history of Life on Mars whose origin can by found in the song Comme d´habitude. Bowie was asked to write the English lyrics for this song (which later became My way) and his version was originally called Only fools fall in love. As the song was rejected by the records company he said to himself OK, then Í am gonna write my own My way) :-) So here it is: Scream like a Bowie - a great song and probably a good example of Bowie´s virtues listed above.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 09:48:39 +0000
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