Absolute Beginners

As my older kid’s Bowie obsession continues, he is digging deeper into the corners of the catalog and finding songs that I hadn’t even heard of. This week we’re learning “Absolute Beginners”, which Bowie wrote for the movie of the same name.

The song is as richly weird as all Bowie songs are. The instrumentation is mostly standard eighties rock, except for the horn section, which is one trumpeter and six (!) saxophonists. I learned from the Bowie Bible that Bowie wanted a backing vocalist who sounded “like a shopgirl”. Session guitarist Kevin Armstrong recommended his younger sister Janet, who had never sung professionally in a studio before. Knowing that makes me feel a little warmer toward her fairly awkward performance.

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What goes on neurologically when a song gets stuck in your head?

The phenomenon of annoyingly persistent earworms is a great introduction to the meme theory: the idea that songs (and all other forms of cultural expression) are self-replicating informational “viruses” that use the mind as their host, the way DNA viruses use living cells and software viruses use computers. The best overview of this theory is Susan Blackmore’s book The Meme Machine.

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