À la Bowie

For his latest album, Outside, David Bowie and Reeves Gabrel wrote 100 songs. In only a few weeks. Of course, you’ll say, “These people are geniuses!” And they are. Bowie is most likely the greatest musical genius since Beethoven.

Go through his 35-year career and you’ll see that he’s touched everything. Pop, Dance, Electronic, Progressive, Classical, Jazz, Glam, Punk-Metal. Several of these style he invented.

Something else he invented is a random way of writing song lyrics.

Back in the early seventies, Bowie experimented a lot with lyrics-among other things. One of the things he did was rather original. He put together song lyrics without actually writing them.

What he would do was to cut out sentences from magazines and newspapers. Once he had enough to put a song together, say one sentence per line at around 25 lines per song, he would put them into a paper bag and draw them out one by one.

The first sentence he would draw would become the first line of the song. The second would follow it, and so on.

Of course, I’m sure you realize the first implication: the lines don’t have anything in common. The second is that you obviously won’t have the right amount of syllables to make it work. But that’s OK, what you do is adjust the lines, without actually changing words (you can take some out) to make them fit. Then you play around with them to make them work together.

Have I lost you? I think I’ve lost myself… But, if you listen to my girlfriend, she’ll tell you that’s not too hard…

Suppose the first sentence you’d draw was: “Children playing near the fountain” and that the second were “The crime rate rises”, followed by “35 died in the crash” and finally, “He never did get any respect during his time in the parliament”.

Of course, these are just sentences off the top of my head. What you’d get is this:

Children playing near the fountain
The crime rate rises
35 died in the crash
He never did get any respect during his time in the parliament

How can we associate these lines?

What are our elements?

Who: children, he
What: playing, crime rate, crash, respect
When: time in parliament
Where: near the fountain
Why: No specifics
How: No specifics

So we have children and an unspecified person who are playing, while the crime rate is important, we know of a crash and there is something about respect. We know of only one location, hence our story must take place near a fountain. The when is not really important. At least not at this time.

Our story now involves a group of children and another as yet unspecified person. Can we associate playing with the crime rate? Yes. Depending on the games, of course, but at this point it is something we must leave to the listener’s imagination, as we have no specifics. Is the matter of respect important? What if the unspecified “He” were one of the children?

As we analyze this, we see that it becomes easy to see links between unrelated events and people. Let’s look at it again:

Children playing near the fountain
The crime rate rises
35 died in the crash
He never did get any respect during his time in the parliament

That last sentence is much too long. As we decided that the time frame is irrelevant at this… time… let’s drop that reference, making the last line: He never did get any respect.

We now have:

Children playing near the fountain
The crime rate rises
35 died in the crash
He never did get any respect

Let’s play with the words a little:

Children play by the fountain
Crimes rise (note: let’s drag this vocally)
35 dead from the crash
He never gained respect

It’s obviously still not quite clear. But don’t forget that we’ve only one verse here. As we’ve seen in the past, you shouldn’t tell everything from the start.

Of course, like everything else, this will get easier as you do it more often. If you don’t want to get a paper bag (they are a rare commodity these days), you can try this electronically. Bowie had a friend write a little program for him. I’m not a programmer, but I can do a few things with a spreadsheet.

If you download the following file and open it with Microsoft Excel, you’ll get a spreadsheet with 40 rows of numbers in the first column and nothing else. What you do is type in your random sentences, preferably taken from newspapers, magazines, websites, etc, into the second (or “B”) column. You’ll notice that the every time you press enter, the numbers will change. It’s supposed to do that. These are randomly generated numbers that keep changing.

Once you’re done (you don’t have to use 40), press the “Sort Ascending” icon. That’s the one with the blue “A” over the red “Z” with an arrow pointing down beside it. Or, press: Data, Sort, OK.

The sentences will sort themselves according to the randomly generated number in column “A”.

You can use this file as many times as you wish. Have fun!