The Man Who Sold The World

One of my older kid’s hipster friends introduced him to “The Man Who Sold The World” and he is super into it at the moment. I have been a Bowie fan since forever, but this song was slow to win me over.

I have learned to love the song, but I struggle to connect to the weirdly airless original recording.

The song (and album) didn’t make much of an impact at first. A few years after its release, Bowie convinced Lulu that she should cover it. He produced her recording, and he played saxophone on it too. Lulu’s version is almost ska-like. It went to #4 in the UK.

Bowie continued to reinterpret the song himself. He performed a new arrangement on Saturday Night Live in 1979 with Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias, who are even alien-like than Bowie. That plastic tuxedo is really something.

My age cohort knows “The Man Who Sold The World” best from Nirvana’s cover of it their MTV Unplugged performance, recorded only six months before Kurt Cobain’s death.

Bowie was apparently a Nirvana fan and was flattered that they did this. Maybe hearing it motivated him to re-record the song in a stripped-down acoustic version in 1997, with bass and backing vocals by the great Gail Ann Dorsey.

I also like this “world jazz” version by Pachora.

What gives this tune its exotic mystery? It’s a combination of rhythm, harmony and form. Here’s my chart.

The harmonic profile of the song is vaguely Middle Eastern, but the groove is vaguely Latin. The central idea is tresillo, which you hear most clearly in the guitar strums on the “and” of two that hang across beat three. The drum pattern also consistently anticipates beat three. I assume that Bowie and company didn’t have any specific style of Latin music in mind here, they were just going for “exotic.” Drummer Mick Woodmansey is playing the güiro pattern backwards, as white musicians often do.

The song begins with a Middle Eastern sounding riff over an A7 chord, implying A Phrygian dominant mode. The riff is the root, seventh and flat second.

This is the scale you get when you play D harmonic minor starting on A.

The A7 resolves to Dm, implying D natural minor. Now the riff is acting as the fifth, fourth and flat sixth.

The next chord is F, the relative major chord to D minor. Over the F chord, the riff is now acting as the third, second and fourth.

The verse progression is a variant on the intro:

| A7 | % | Dm | % |
| A7 | % | F  | % |
| C7 | % | A7 | % | Dm |

There are some intriguing twists and turns here. The first time through, the A7 resolves to Dm as expected. The second time, it “resolves” to F instead, which involves a cool voice-leading effect. The active ingredient in the A7-Dm resolution is the leading tone C-sharp moving up to the tonic D. When A7 resolves to F, the C-sharp resolves down to C instead.

After the F, there’s C7, the V7 chord in F major, but it doesn’t resolve back to F. Instead, it shifts down a minor third to A7. This involves some more cool voice leading: C moves up to C-sharp, E stays on E, G stays on G, and B-flat moves down to A. Moving dominant seventh chords by minor thirds evokes the sound of diminished chords, and it’s a richly weird sound.

The chorus begins with the bass and guitar run up the F major scale from C to C, which you might think of as C Mixolydian mode. The chords are C7 and F, regular old V and I in F major. But then there’s that richly strange Bbm chord! It’s from parallel F natural minor. (The Bbm has D-flat in the bass, so you could call it a Db6 chord, but I hear it as Bbm/Db.)

When you play F natural minor starting on B-flat, you get B-flat Dorian mode.

Bowie moves from Bbm to A7, shifting the implied mode from B-flat Dorian to A Phrygian dominant. This involves a nifty enharmonic pivot from the D-flat in the Bbm chord to the C-sharp in the A7 chord. The rest of the voice leading is nice too: B-flat moves down to A and F moves down to E. 

So the harmony is interesting, but that doesn’t explain the song’s full mystery. The really distinctive thing is the hypermeter, the phrase lengths. Those are wildly asymmetrical and ambiguous. I hear the intro as being made up of two phrases.

• The first phrase (guitars only) is four bars long.
• The second phrase (with the bass and drums) is three and a half bars long, in a twist on the standard symmetrical eight-bar rock song intro.

I hear the verse as having four phrases.

• The first phrase (“We passed upon the path…”) is four bars long.
• The second phrase (“He said I was his friend…”) is only two bars, and is interrupted by the key change to F major.
• The third phrase (“which came as some surprise…”) is five and a half bars long.
• The fourth phrase (“a long long time ago”) is only two bars long.

I also hear the chorus as having three phrases.

• The first phrase, the guitar running up the scale, is two bars long. Maybe it’s completing the truncated ending of the verse. Or maybe this is supposed to be the prechorus? It doesn’t feel separate from what follows, though, though because the scale run continues identically into the next phrase.
• The second phrase (“Oh no, not me…”) is a more normal four bars long.
• The third phrase (“You’re face to face…”) is only three bars long and is interrupted by the instrumental break.

The outtro groove does settle down into standard four-bar phrases, but by then your expectations have been set.

As with the last Bowie tune I wrote about, there is a 12tone analysis of this one too.

I hear the harmony a bit differently than Corey does, once again. But I really appreciate Corey’s read on the lyrics. When Bowie sings about the man who sold “the world”, I take it to mean “the planet Earth.” Corey understands Bowie to be referring to his inner world. As an artist, his job is literally to sell his ideas, but that entails selling off pieces of his emotions, his memories, and his identity. This is a hard thing to do! Plenty of other artists have struggled with this, and in the case of someone like Kurt Cobain, they don’t always come out victorious. This would certainly explain why Kurt chose this particular Bowie song to do on MTV.