There was no chance that anyone would get a look at the true David Bowie throughout his lifetime. While he may have been able to show the world different musical shapes that no one had thought of, Bowie was looking to keep the pieces of his personal life a secret, always keeping the more introspective pieces of his personality reasonably close to the chest. While many tried to get to the bottom of who ‘The Starman’ was during his lifetime, he hinted that any chance of finding him out was futile on ‘The Man Who Sold the World’.
Before going into the song, it’s easy to look at where Bowie was while making the album it accompanies. After becoming a fanciful songwriter in the late 1960s with his debut album, Bowie’s actual arrival on the pop charts came with his single ‘Space Oddity’, giving fans a look at the starcrossed saviour he would turn himself into on later projects.
Once he got a taste for fame for the first time, The Man Who Sold the World seemed like a caustic reaction to those looking to figure him out. Outside of the odd folk-tinged number here and there, many of the best moments on the record come from the band indulging in heavy metal leanings, sounding like a glam-rock answer to contemporary artists like Black Sabbath.
Towards the end of the record, Bowie lays everything on the table for the title track, where he takes the listener with him on a journey with a mysterious man who claims to have taken the world for a ride. Although Bowie converses with the man and wonders if the rumours were true that he had died, he admitted later that the song may have been self-directed.
Despite never giving a straight answer, Bowie alluded to the fact that the song may have been about him, telling BBC Radio 1, “I guess I wrote it because there was a part of myself that I was looking for … that song for me always exemplified kind of how you feel when you’re young, when you know there’s a piece of yourself that you haven’t really put together yet”.
Even though Bowie would eventually give the song to Lulu to sing, it wasn’t until the next generation caught up with it that it began to take on its classic form. After becoming one of the biggest acts on the planet, Nirvana would eventually resurrect the song as part of their setlist when working on the series MTV Unplugged.
What did Bowie think of Nirvana’s version?
While Bowie’s music was solidified as classic well before Nirvana created their version of the song, he admitted that he was blown away by what they had done with it. When talking about the song after Cobain passed away, Bowie remembered just how special it was hearing it, saying, “I was simply blown away when I found that Kurt Cobain liked my work, and have always wanted to talk to him about his reasons for covering ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. It was a good straightforward rendition and sounded somehow very honest”.
Compared to what Bowie had originally envisioned for the song, Cobain took his words to another level. Since he had been known as one of the most in-demand artists of his generation, the Nirvana version could be an attempt from Cobain to make peace with the version of himself that no one else gets to see. Bowie’s alter ego may have claimed to have sold the world back in the early 1970s, but in the age of alternative rock, everything had been bought and sold yet again.
