6. Let's Just Pretend that David Bowie Wrote this Song

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Let's just pretend
That David Bowie wrote this song
And so its slicker than it is
And maybe half as long
And everything is English
With American infused
And your car cost half as much
As all the instruments he used

He wrote the song for Iman
In the middle of the night
As she dozed, after they'd made love
They had had an awful fight
And he worried that he'd wake her
As he sang it to himself
As the moonlight glittered goldly
Off the Grammy on his shelf

And this is what sang:

There's something writing all my songs
It's hidden in the darkness
And it's been there all along
Yes there something writing all my songs
It's hidden in the dark
And god
It's been there

And then he sang:

It's alright

He sang it again:

It's alright

And then he sang:

Let's just pretend
That David Bowie wrote this song.

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Notebook:

It's worth pointing out that I'm a big fan of David Bowie, but not that big of a fan. This song isn't a strained admission of fawning adoration or a peek into a hidden fanfic hobby. I like the guy's music—Ziggy Stardust is a great old album, and I've liked a lot of things he's done since—but as much as anything I like the idea of his music and his creative ventures in general. He's done some genuinely weird things, and that tends to catch my favor.

This was a joke when I started in on it, but then the song grew on me. The idea of subverting the typical gossip-column, People Magazine, talk-show-circuit picture of American pop-culture fame with a bizarrely personalized but unquestionably fictional caricature of vulnerability and humanity and doubt and confusion, all rendered in the quiet pre-dawn intimacy of the bedroom—that grew on me as I wrote the song. It's a song full of details I'd have no reason to know and no desire to test or verify. The title could be trimmed down to three words and work just as well: "Pretend David Bowie." The David Bowie made out of pretend.

In a documentary that I saw a year or two ago, there was a brief segment about Bowie, and his creative process, and the visuals of the segment were mostly of some video project he was working on that involved the projection of his singing or speaking face onto various objects in a dark room. It was such a simple, ridiculous, random thing to be doing, and I was charmed. I've never really wanted to be a rock star—the sex, drugs, fuckitall thing doesn't appeal to me—but I'd love to be doing that sort of thing as, essentially, my job.

So it's with folks like Laurie Anderson and David Byrne and Cripsin Glover that I think of Bowie, really—weird, charming, experimental people who at least seem to go at creative stuff with a weird but fiercely intelligent bent. The sort of people who would probably appreciate a song about a fictionalized famous person singing about how something else is writing their songs, or so I like to imagine.

And I think that the original version of The Man Who Sold The World is better than the Nirvana cover, dammit, and it was a pretty good cover.