To Space with David Bowie and Major Tom

David Bowie is a fucking genius. Everything he does is golden, and man he does it all. He can sing, dance, stylize, produce, act, and hold audiences spellbound for decades. Today we're going to sample a small piece of that genius, and go to space with David Bowie and his legendary fictionally character Major Tom. While it's always tempting for an artist to re-visit a song or personal that initially launched their career, few have been able to pull it off. Usually it comes off as hokey, poorly planned, and taking away from the original. This can not be said of Bowie's Major Tom. He has visited the character on three different occasions, and each has been artistically and commercially sound. Let's take a closer look.

Inspired by the Rock legends of the 50s, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, etc., David Bowie set his sights on being a singer songwriter. Unfortunately, the 60s were rough on the British lad and his work with several different bands went nowhere. He soon went solo, and though he could find producers interested in him and his music, he could not break into the charts. That all changed with "Space Oddity". Written by Bowie in 1969, the song saga's the space flight of one Major Tom. The song was originally appeared in the film Love You Till Tuesday, a promotional film meant to showcase Bowie's talents. Rejected by many producers, including the Beatle's George Martin, Gus Dudgeon of Mercury Records. The song became an underground sensation, and because of its obvious lyrical content was featured in the UK's broadcast of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Broadcasted on millions of televisions, Bowie had his first hit single, reaching #5 in the UK (though only #124 in the US). While Bowie's solo career began to get legs, the single continued to aid his rise to fame, his second album was renamed Space Oddity upon reissue and would reland at #15 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1973, and #1 in the UK in 1975.

This the original video of the song shot for Love You Till Tuesday, you may notice the beat a little off from the later recorded version. Cool seeing Bowie actually wearing a space suite labeled Major Tom.

The video most people remember and associate with the song can be found here. This video was shot while Bowie was working on his sixth album Aladdin Sane, being why Bowie has the bright red hair and no eyebrows in the video. The video, and the album re-release, shot the single to the top of the charts. The song is really amazing. A haunting beginning, detailing the soon take off of one Major Tom, than the song shifts to a more upbeat and welcoming message from ground control explaining how proud everyone is of Tom. The song shifts back and forth between Tom and ground control, wonderfully taking the listener to outer space, and playing with some many of our emotions at once: discovery, anxiety, fear, adventure, awe, and the list goes on. We get attached to Major Tom cause we're right there with him on this voyage. Who doesn't like this song? Ending the chorus with a hard acoustic guitar strum and than a hand clap, before launching back into the space melodies; fucking genius. "Can you hear me Major Tom" yes David the whole world heard you, and thanks to Major Tom your career is about to take flight.

In 1980, eleven years after his first space journey, Major Tom returned. David had already strongly left his mark on the recording world in the 1970's, introducing listeners to Ziggy Stardust, wearing strange and gender challenging outfits, entertaining millions, and scoring a string of commercially and critically successful albums and singles. Skillfully looking back at a decade that defined him while still forging a new set of sounds and visuals, Bowie released Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). The lead off single, "Ashes to Ashes", was a number #1 UK single and revisited Bowie's Major Tom.

Bowie invokes Tom from the very start of this song, "Do you remember a guy's that been/In such and early song", and than begins the dark voyage of this piece following with "I've heard a rumor from ground control/Oh no, don't say it's true." Instead of the uplifting space odyssey Tom lead us on in 1969, here we are dealing with an inner destination. In the years following fame and notoriety, we find out that Major Tom, "The action man", is bald, broke, and most importantly, a junkie. Gone are ground control on the other end, giving encouragement and asking for status updates, Tom is alone now, with only the listener and Bowie aware of his plight; this adventure is not on the public's radio or television screens. The dry "I'm happy, hope your happy too" no doubt signals how unhappy and tortured Tom really is. The song undoubtedly is not just Tom though, Bowie is here too, and while listening to Major Tom's "all time low" he certainly must be reminded of his own drug fueled low only a few years prior. In the video, Bowie gets to be Tom as well as our conductor, wearing the operic clown Pierrot's costume, alluding to the tragic story we have on our hands. When Tom confesses "Time and again I tell myself/I'll stay clean tonite/But the little green wheels are following me/Oh no, not again" the words are delivered by Bowie in a mad house leaning against a padded wall.; this is the struggled mindset of a junkie, especially one that used to be somebody. He says he wants to be clean again, moans for it, but the exotic "Heaven's high" it brings holds him down, sinking lower and lower into addiction like the scene in the video where Bowie the clown sinks into the water. "I'm stuck with a valuable friend." Yes the famed reached by being a famous astronaut or musician can open a lot of doors and make us feel on top of the world, but it doesn't erase personal demons or subdue ramped addiction; if anything it makes it worse. The next verse seems to further emphasis the damage psyche "I never did good things/I never did bad things/ I never did anything out of the blue". He's looking at this past, hearing the voice of addiction near, and finding nothing; nothing good, bad, or extraordinary.He's morals are shot, and he can't recognize his own personal or artistic measures. "Want an axe to break the ice/Wanna come down right now," he wants to break this cycle, this addiction, this pain, this horrible low, but he's not taking the axe his head's still out in space. It's unclear what happens to Major Tom, in "Space Oddity" we leave him floating in space having lost contact with ground control. Did he make it to the moon, did he regain communications, did he make it home safely? We don't know, and the song ends with Tom saying "there's nothing I can do". He's accepted his fate, but in "Ashes to Ashes" simply accepting fate and not fighting against the water, the padded walls, the addiction, and your own self defeat will not end well. The end of the video, the back ground singers dressed in black, is this a funeral? Was there walk in front of the bulldozer a procession into a violent end for Tom? We don't know. An old woman is talking to the clown near the end, Tom's mom perhaps trying to figure out what's going on. The video ends with Tom back in space, on the ship, strung out;  not in control.

Most sequel songs, if this counts as one, are horrid, but with "Ashes to Ashes" Bowie crafts another thoughtful and musically challenging tune again centralised around Major Tom. But we're not done yet, because in 1995 Bowie again returned to Major Tom on the track "Hallo Spaceboy". The song appeared on his album Outside, this time the world is harsher and the emotions are more blatant, out in the open, raw; just floating in space. For an artist in this fourth decade, Bowie sounds completely modern here with pulsing amps, dark synthesizers, fade in on cue distorted guitars, and other 90's industrial bells and whistles layered into a comprehensive track hipsters might jive to at some Manhattan night club. Beyond "Space Oddity", Bowie only seems to bring up Tom when he's pointedly musing on his past. This time it's not drugs or outward addictions, it's an inner chaos; battling sexuality, personality, and self acceptance. Silhouette's are for past selves, dead men, and perhaps fictional characters unaffected by the waves of time, but Bowie shouldn't be one, the every changing camelon, unless he holds himself back lost in a mirrored reflection only his own mind's eye can see. Don't you wanna be free? He asks himself and other ask him, those who hold him in custody, fans, magazines, record exects, and they ask easy questions in a black and white world. Do you like boys or girls? A question Bowie has been asked again and again over his long career, largely thanks to the sometimes loud and bizarre outfits he's worn. But this is not any easy question for anyone who's truly had to ask themselves it, David's out in space he's not tied down to the 9 to 5 social cookie cutter lives and feelings the masses find themselves in, he's in circles and planets many can hardly fathom. As the years have rolled by, has the answer changed, has he changed, or can he just not get a good look at the silhouette on the wall. His world, the space inside, sadly is not simple, black and white, it's chaos, it's pulsing layers of sound filled with anxiety, exhaustion, ultimatums, and confused choices. If you can't get free, if you can't make a choice, than it's bye bye love. Bowie never says Major Tom by name, but we know who his space boy is, and the moon dust? Loneliness, it's not to crowded out in space, creativity, queer inclinations? Only the picture knows, and perhaps the artist that keeps looking back years at it.


As good as "Hallo Spaceboy" undoubtedly is, another in the long list of Bowie accomplishments, a remix he did with the Pet Shop Boys is the more popular version. Here the industrial sounds are swooped out for more of a techno feel. The Pet Shop Boys bring Tom back front and center in a new verse, though ground control seems to call Tom only to push him aside. The new band on this track are taking the self confusion and chaos and amplifying it beyond a simple space man; it's Earth now, the entire world. The video visuals only further the Pet Shop Boys new direction, only Bowie is concentrating more on 'chaos' and 'bye bye love' than he was before on moon dust and paintings. It's more upbeat, and yet bleaker, saying hello to a space man the chaotic future will bring; bye bye Tom.

So that's the chronicles of Major Tom and David Bowie. In recent decades, Bowie has slow down considerably not releasing any new music since 2003 and last touring in 2004. It's unclear what the future holds for Bowie, kinda always been that way, I wonder if he'll see Tom again someday; up in the stars.