Over the weekend I went with the family to see the newly remastered 1973 David Bowie concert film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The picture and sound quality are uneven at best, but Bowie is such a spellbinding performer that it doesn’t matter. One of the high points is his performance of this banger.
Like all the great Bowie songs of the era, this superficially sounds like a regular rock song, but it has a lot of peculiar songwriting and arrangement touches. Bowie plays acoustic guitar, but also saxophone and pennywhistle. Mick Ronson plays electric guitar and piano, and also wrote the string arrangement. Trevor Bolder plays bass and Woody Woodmansey plays drums.
The Ziggy Stardust version was actually the second recording that Bowie made of the song. He had already released a version with his earlier band, Arnold Corns. It had different lyrics and different chords, and it was nowhere near as good.
Here’s the performance from the movie. It ends with a long Mick Ronson guitar solo that covers one of Bowie’s many costume changes. I like how during the bridge, Bowie and Ronson do an exaggeratedly square and corny dance to mimic the exaggeratedly square and corny rhythm.
Here’s my chart.
Like a lot of Bowie tunes, the harmony here is not complicated, but it is unconventional. Here are the verse chords:
| D | F# | Bm Bm/A | E |
| G | D | F# | Bm Bm/A | E |
We start in D major. The second chord is from outside the key; it’s a secondary dominant, the V chord in the relative minor key of B minor. The E chord is not part of D major or B minor. You might hear it as another secondary dominant, the V chord in A major. A conventional songwriter would follow it with A7, the V chord in D major, and that would lead back to D to start the cycle over. But Bowie doesn’t do this, he follows it with G. Maybe the E chord is the IV in B Dorian? Or maybe it just doesn’t, like, function at all? Anyway, G is the IV chord in D major, and then the progression repeats, but shifted a bar later. Bowie loves odd hypermeter. I also want to point out something cool in the melody: in measure seven, Bowie sings a few F-naturals on top of the F# chord, which is a very “wrong” note, but it’s well within the conventions of the blues.
Here are the chorus chords:
| G D | E Esus4 E | G D | E Esus4 E |
| G D | E Esus4 E | D | E |
Which of these chords is the tonic? Bowie sometimes ends the melodic phrases on F-sharp over the E, which suggests that we are really in D, but sometimes he ends on G-sharp, which suggests that we are really in E. Meanwhile, the G chord is in the metrically strongest position. My first instinct was to say that D is the tonic because G to D is the standard plagal cadence in rock. But then the E is hard to parse; the move from there up to G makes no particular harmonic sense at all. After playing the song a few times, I started feeling E as the tonic, with the shift back and forth from Esus4 as a kind of resolution. That makes G and D the blues-derived bIII and bVII chords. Yet another possibility is that the G and the D are bIII and bVII in E minor, but then instead of Em itself, you get a kind of Picardy third? I really can’t say for sure.
The bridge is much more harmonically straightforward, a classic Andalusian cadence.
||: Bm | A | G | F# :||
The first time through the loop, F# resolves to Bm the way it would in classical music. The second time, it resolves deceptively to the G at the beginning of the third chorus. It’s so satisfying. At the end of the song, the loop never resolves at all, it fades out in a way that implies that it could go on forever. In the movie version, it feels like it does go forever, though it does eventually end on Bm.
Ken Stephenson’s book What To Listen For In Rock offers some ideas for understanding that chorus. He argues that rock harmony works differently from European classical tradition, not so much because the chords themselves are different, but because of their placement in musical time and the resulting difference in how we feel them working. Stephenson defines a conventional rock hypermeasure as being four bars long. The downbeats of these four measures have the same relationship as the beats in a bar of 4/4 time: the first is the strongest, the third is the next strongest, and the second and fourth are weaker. In classical music, melodic cadences typically fall on weak downbeats, but in rock, they fall on strong downbeats. Why does this matter?
What I have been calling traditional phrase structure, which by the way is only about four hundred years old, mirrors the typical modern belief in progress: the last event in a chain of events—the final measure of a phrase, for instance—should conclude a pattern, satisfy a need, solve a problem. In rock, however, what sound to the traditional ear like endings (melodic rest and V-I harmonic motion) often occur at points of beginning; a chain of events leads not to resolution but simply to the inception of another chain of events. The musical situation, in other words, shares postmodernism’s rejection of progress toward a goal (p. 27).
Stephenson asks us to understand chord changes in rock as “continually leading away from the hypermetrically accented tonic harmony that normally begins each four-measure unit” (p. 28). In the verses in “Moonage Daydream”, the D chord gets the hypermetrical accent, and then the other chords lead away from it before the D reasserts itself at the beginning of the next phrase. Stephenson suggests that a better term for D in this situation is an “initiating harmony” or a “persistently initiating harmony” (p. 35). It’s important that the “home base” in a rock phrase is usually its beginning, not at its conclusion like in a classical phrase. Even when rock uses V-I root movements, their timing doesn’t support that feeling of finality that such progressions produce in classical.
Although resolution is not necessary in rock, it is not uncommon to find closed cadences employing the I chord. The V-I cadence, however, with all its traditional features, almost never occurs. Although V-I motion does occur, it most often involves the V at the end of one phrase and the I at the beginning of the next, that is, between two phrases rather than at the end of one (p. 61).
Stephenson argues that this is not an arbitrary difference, that it carries symbolic meaning.
This common avoidance of cadential closure, when viewed with several other features of rock style, presents a clearly nonteleological message. These songs do not seem static; they move. But the movement is less often progression—that is, motion toward a goal—than it is cyclical motion. If this music follows a path, the path does not start at one point and end at another (p. 69).
Naturally, a repetitive groove like the end section of “Moonage Daydream” is not going to feel goal-oriented. The movie version of the song cycles through that Andalusian cadence about a thousand times. But Stephenson would also argue that all the parts of “Moonage Daydream” are deliberately not goal-directed. The chords change, but they don’t progress, they just create a series of states, places to be. A classical composition is like an adventure or a journey with a beginning, a middle and an end, but a rock song is more like your daily life, a few locations that you visit over and over, spending some time in each one before moving on. Does this make rock dumber or less interesting than classical? Maybe. But is “interesting” necessarily a virtue in music?