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Est 4 life lyrics genius6/20/2023 ![]() ![]() Inspired by the ongoing cold war and its attendant nuclear paranoia, its combination of anger and fatalism still sounds pertinent. ![]() The album Lodger opened with that rarest of things in the Bowie canon, a protest song. A stark, brass- and woodwind-assisted depiction of those – like Bowie himself – left with their noses pressed against the glass of the Swinging London party, it feels like a monochrome kitchen-sink drama compressed into three minutes. Tellingly, Bowie’s first great song centred on outsiders. Jittery but commercial funk is undercut by a dark lyric that returned to the subject of Bowie’s mentally ill half-brother Terry, this time brooding on his 1985 suicide. Hailed as a return to peak form on release, Black Tie White Noise was nothing of the sort, but its first single was authentically fantastic. The demo version – much talked up by Bowie in later years – remains unheard. A 2018 remix helps matters a little, and the stripped-back 00s live versions available online are better yet. A strange, genuinely great song about religion smothered by overproduction. The solitary moment that sparked on 1984’s inspiration-free Tonight. The melody is beautiful, the arrangement – very Visconti strings over electronic beats – perfectly poised. Its highlight sits somewhere between: ostensibly a love song that gradually reveals itself to be about God. Uniformly strong, the songwriting on Heathen stretched from the prosaic – the letter-to-adult-son of Everyone Says Hi – to the baffling.
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