Cities Made of Song, 1969

Cities Made of Song, 1969 - Space Oddity by David Bowie

The 1960s were an extraordinary decade for music. What opened with a cultural world still in the early days of rock 'n' roll blossomed over a very few short years into a world of popular music that was more stylistically diverse than ever. Jazz became more avant-garde, searching for new avenues in a realm increasingly dominated by rock. Country flourished under the aegis of artists like Johnny Cash. And rock, of course, developed into numerous different styles. The seeds of punk rock were sewn by the early "garage rock" acts, while the emerging counterculture pushed the overall trend of the genre into psychedelia, progressive rock, and heavy metal.

It's easy to tie this into the general tumult of the Sixties, the social movements and everything else. Don McLean memorably called this "a generation lost in space", which is fitting in more ways than one. After all, the Summer of Love ended, and in many places, the counterculture movement of this decade dispersed, or at least fell out of prominence, leaving many former hippies adrift. Or he might have just meant the drugs. Hard to say. It's also fitting in a more literal sense, because this was the time of the Space Race.

I haven't mentioned it as much as I might have intended to, going through the Troughton era, but it's safe to say that everyone was a little bit Moon-mad from 1966-1969. We visit the lunar surface twice during this period of the show, and aside from those visits see or hear of rocket ships being operated many more times. Here I think of the eponymous pirates spacewalking in The Space Pirates. Doctor Who, I'm sure, was far from the only TV show doing this at the time. It was the sort of zeitgeist that I, a Millennial baby, can't quite imagine. Maybe the early part of the Internet boom would have been comparable, when "cyberspace" featured heavily as either a MacGuffin or an existential threat, in both contemporary fiction and science fiction of the 1990s.

We'll be rounding out this thread's musical posts with a look at an artist who very cleverly seized upon this zeitgeist, and in so doing launched a remarkable career. "Space Oddity" was obviously not Bowie's first single, but it was undoubtedly the one that saw his star rising. It's absolutely draped in that Space Age atmosphere, recounting astronaut Major Tom's ascent into the heavens, and then descent into stupor. The astronaut, beloved by the press and people, but perhaps not understood by them, finds himself dwarfed by the cosmos surrounding him and untethers himself from the capsule, drifting away. Not exactly the most romantic depiction of spaceflight in this epoch!

Just the way that the lush strings and mellotron of the middle sections of this song, evoking the grandeur of space, melt away into uncertain and almost atonal instrumentals at the very end, drenches this song in an atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty. But why choose such a dark spin on this subject when the optimism for the first Moon landing was still in full swing? I think it's fitting to emphasize that the space race was only a backdrop and an aesthetic for this song. It's really about alienation, isolation, and loneliness.

Just thinking about being where Major Tom is, farther away from another person than anyone has ever been, is enough to give me chills. The adulation of fans on Earth doesn't mean anything to him when he's drifting alone in space. If I didn't know better, I'd think it was written later in Bowie's career, once he became really famous, because this sounds like the sort of metaphor that would be used by someone jaded by their own success.

There's really only so many ways to say it's an exceptional track. It captures the spirit of the decade we've just seen come and go in a very thought-provoking way, but also suggests the type of trends we'd continue to see in rock in the Seventies. If you haven't heard it in a while, give it another go.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 20 March 2021.)