Turn and face the strange.

I'm a little dazed and confused... but maybe that's just Hunky Dory.

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That's where I've been these past couple of weeks. I'd like to describe to you what it looks like, feels like, and sounds like... I really would. But just when I think I get it, it changes and slips away, like a dream. But this dream is not mine. I'm floating through the deep waters of someone else's dreams, trying to find my way to the surface. It's not entirely dark, though the light only filters through fleetingly. I swim toward it only to find that I'm swimming toward something on the bottom that is merely reflecting.

The only way I have been able to begin to grasp Bowie's Hunky Dory (and my grasp is precarious at best) has been to shuffle the songs. I am aware that songs are arranged on an album in a specific way, for a specific reason. But in this case, each song is it's own complete whole; one is not dependent on another. It's as if they were written and sung by different people. It's quite hard to believe that the glammy Oh! You Pretty Things is sung by the same person belting out Life on Mars?, and then flouncing along to Fill Your Heart. Throwing the songs out of order each time I listen seems to impose a kind of order onto the experience, giving me a greater sense of comfort, alleviating the disorientation to some degree.

(May I just say that I admit skipping from 1967's David Bowie to 1972's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was a mistake, and is probably the reason why I'm so desperately searching for cohesion among the tracks on 1971's Hunky Dory. I did it wrong. I get it. I take full responsibility.)

Now let me do my best to replay the dream sequence for you. It's disjointed, but there are many wonderful moments, beginning with Life On Mars?.

Not only am I convinced that this is probably the best song ever composed and recorded, but I'm deeply in love with the ethereal creature in the video. You know what? I despise the word video. This is a short art film. Anyway, I can't stop singing it. Loudly. I sing it about eight times a day. That is not an exaggeration. I think my neighbours are probably plotting my death, which is fine with me because if I were to die while singing Life On Mars?, at least I'd meet my end while doing something wonderful and worthwhile, instead of choking to death on a piece of chicken or something.

I hate when Life On Mars? is over. I do enjoy when Eight Line Poem follows:

Tactful cactus by your window

Surveys the prairie of your room

Mobile spins to its collision

Clara puts her head between her paws

They've opened shops down west side

Will all the cacti find a home?

But the key to the city

Is in the sun that pins the branches to the sky

My sister is currently in Tucson, Arizona for a work conference, and today she sent me this photograph of this blatantly "untactful cactus". Look at it, smugly giving the world the finger.

When that's over, I'm very much ready to rock out. Song for Bob Dylan works, but if you've been reading this blog you might have learned that I am impatient and I kind of want to... well... blow my proverbial load RIGHT FUCKING NOW (dear me, where did that come from?!) So I go to Queen Bitch.

This is really the one song on Hunky Dory that hints at what's to come with Ziggy waiting just offstage. According to the Queen Bitch wikipedia page, this song was the inspiration for the Killers' Mr. Brightside. As I'm also a big fan of the Killers (they are brilliant live, by the way), I of course did a lyrical as well as an aural comparison and I do in fact detect a few similarities in structure, lyrics, and theme (a man who has fallen for a lady-of-the-night and is jealous of the time she spends with her johns, even more so when his own friend gets a date with her - at least, that's my interpretation).

When I'm listening to Hunky Dory on shuffle, inevitably things take a nightmarish turn when Andy Warhol begins. I love Warhol's work. I want to love this song. I simply don't. There, I've said it. I have made myself listen to it a number of times, to try and find one element of it that I can enjoy, and it continues to elude me. Sorry. This is thankfully one nightmare from which I can pull myself out. 

If there is one song on this album that is what I would refer to as a "skip-to" it's Changes. I can handle Changes anytime. I don't care what I'm listening to. If I need to skip a song, any song, Changes will always be accepted and enjoyed. Changes is like that part of a dream sequence where you are suddenly someplace familiar and cherished, and there is a large plate of brownies in front of you, and you can eat as many of them as you want because it's a dream after all, and dream brownies don't make you fat. 

This is the wrong album cover. It's wrong. I don't like it when things are wrong. Please just ignore it and listen to the song.

From grandma's brownies to aliens. It made sense in the dream. This is the glory that is Oh! You Pretty Things.

Only one person could write a song this brilliant about aliens coming down to take over Earth. The History Channel should really think about adopting this song as for their main theme and getting some of their credibility back.

After this I like to brain out to the philosophical Quicksand, chill out with the ghostly Bewlay Brothers, and then maybe prance about to the light and fluffy Fill Your Heart. Finally, like any good dream, things sometimes end on a kooky note.

This song is pretty adorable. I read something somewhere on the interwebs that David Bowie was listening to Neil Young when his son was born, and this song was the result. I definitely hear a Neil Young influence in the bass line and the chorus melody, though I'm having trouble pinning it to a specific song. Do you hear it, too? If anyone out there can verify that a Neil Young song inspired Kooks and identify the song I'd love to hear from you.

So. Cacti... prostitutes... aliens... babies... jealousy... disenfranchisement... love... art... Ultimately, the Hunky Dory dream is exactly that... it's a good dream, albeit a strange one, with layers upon layers of surreal images, many very beautiful, floating in a vast sea of ideas and musings. Despite my ongoing bewilderment, it is a dream that I find myself falling into and out of easily, even if it does leave me wondering who exactly this David Bowie creature really is. And so the journey continues...