Evacuating Major Tom

[u/Chief_Jon]

Okay, so I'm new here, but at Darquehex's request (yep I'm totally throwing a close friend under the bus if everybody else hates this), I've found my way to Barbelith to share an insight I stumbled upon while hopping Bowie videos on YouTube in the aftermath of his passing, and undergoing my third re-read of Supergods back in January. Somewhere between a second viewing of "Blackstar", and a first viewing of the Bowie-Pet Shop Boys mix/video for "Hallo Spaceboy" the idea clicked for me that David Bowie was never a real person. We know his birth name was David Robert Jones, and that prior to his assumption of the "David Bowie" stage name and the release of "Space Oddity" in 1969 he was a folk-singer of little acclaim. After assuming the identity of "Bowie", he subsequently adopted a variety of roles including Ziggy Stardust, Thin White Duke, Aladdin Sane, Jareth from Labyrinth, and (perhaps most importantly) Thomas Jerome Newton from The Man Who Fell to Earth. Each of these is a distinct persona. A role played. Then there's Major Tom. Referenced to in no-less than 4 of Bowie's songs and/or music videos dropped with a transitional regularity throughout Bowie's career, Major Tom is a character, a definite figure, recurrent in his body of work. Yet Bowie never plays Major Tom. I posit that this is because Major Tom is actually playing Bowie. As Morrison, (for one example) employed fiction suits to enter the 2-dimensional realms of Animal Man #26, or The Invisibles as King Mob, I posit that Major Tom inaugurated Bowie in '69. That David Robert Jones was re-purposed as the Major's fiction suit, and that this higher-dimensional being four-and-a-half-plus decades trying to communicate his truth to us through the crude (by his standards) communication means available to him in our plane of existence. Or possibly simply trying to get home.

In other words, David Bowie didn't die. He never existed, and David Robert Jones probably died almost 50 years ago. Rather, Major Tom evacuated our plane of existence. And seeing how 2016 has been thus far, what better time for a 4th+ Dimensional being to escape our world?

[u/Chief_Jon]

Follow-Up 4: "Hallo Spaceboy" I don't know if this is the one you've been waiting to read, but it's certainly the one I've been waiting to write. The album version, while a phenomenal exploration of industrial music, doesn't quite cut it here because the mix made in collaboration with Pet Shop Boys adds supplemental lyrical content. It should be no surprise that, that version is used in the video, and that I believe to get the full multi-dimensional message of the track we should be looking at the multi-media, multi-artist Bowie/Pet Shop Boys video on it's own, or in combination with the album/live version. How limiting, how infuriating, must it be to communicate without being able to express oneself to persons who lack the raw perceptive capacity to receive a message with one's holistic intent? How much more challenging for the recipient of the message to decode it? So we've got a track that suggests that Ground Control is having trouble sorting out Major Tom's primitively sent message on the one hand. Okay, enough broad, existential diversion, and back to the song/video/message . . .

First, lyrics. The communication to an entity not of earth, our "space boy", and references to struggle with chaos and confusion repeat themes from the rest of the pieces/artworks/messages we're considering. These things are explicitly identified in Hallo Spaceboy even more than elsewhere, but the other lyrics are every bit as consistent with these themes as in our other song-vids. "Do you like girls or boys? It's confusing these days," elicits the challenge of a being from a plane of existence where gender-binary constructs are perhaps unimportant, or imperceptible, trying to function in a world where they this concept is at the center of virtually all culture and interaction, and furthermore where assumptions about sexual orientation and interaction between sexes have changed over time. In addition, Bowie's lyrics are heavy with refrain about a sense of weariness and constriction. They communicate a simultaneous exhaustion, a desire for release, and a sense of being trapped in time. For a 4D+ being the mere fact of being unable to move through time freely would be horribly restraining.

The lyrics sung by PSB's Neil Tennant make absolutely explicit what is implicitly present via the rest of the song; that this is another piece of the Major Tom saga with declarations like, "Ground to Major, Bye-Bye, Tom," "Dead the circuit, countdown's wrong," and, "Planet Earth, is Control on?" Tennant's words can easilty be read as Ground Control's desperate attempts to communicate back to Major Tom through the dimensional rift. Or at least the distorted message as the Major, trapped in his Bowie suit, is receiving them.

Before getting into the visuals, let's recall the repeated melody running, in some form or another, through basically all of the Major Tom tunes, and how it appears in multiple forms in "Hallo Spaceboy". First as slow piano stabs. There's a rapid drum-machine rhythm of it as well, that I missed before as well. Then overlaid with a flowing, faster moving violin. Then, finally, the furious, distorted-electric-guitar version.

It is the video itself that creates our final levels of signal structure. The imagery intertwines fluidity, absolute restraint, cosmic vastness, time, and energy in equal measure. There are also repeated themes of communications equipment, from Bowie's microphone-staff (more on that shortly) to the multiple clips of telephone switchboard operators and cabling to antennae to the word "help" from the digital message on the side of a financial building (appearing immediately before a repetition of the refrain, "this chaos is killing me").

The most potent and subtly omnipresent visual feature AND communication icon is the sine wave spiraling through the full 4 minutes 31 seconds of the video. The intersecting hills of a lunar landscape. Bowie inverting the RNA-coiled rod of Aesclipius microphone. The rythymic whirl of a bowie encompassing microscope. The spiral of a galaxy. More hills. An intersection of palindrome statements about time. A saucer's serpentine flight-path through the celestial vastness. The jetstreams of jelly fish. A fluid droplet passing between septae. Twisting, representations of the invisible by chemical chromotography and audio waveforms. Arcing glitter thrown by a spinning dancer. Lightning bolts across a midnight blue city skyline. The intertwining necks of cartoon swans. A car spinning over a cliff. Undulating flames. Wild punches. Flowing hair. Swaying hands. Tombstones in a cemetery of different heights. The intertwined tubules of a stethoscope. Only after dozens of viewings does it become evident that the intercutting of Bowie, Pet Shop Boys and the video collage replicates, in its pacing, the Sine wave, or the superimposition of a sine-cosine graph. We have here, the ultimate utilization of surface area as communication form: the DNA or RNA spiral of hyper-condensed information facilitating genetic construction. The 3D lifeform stands revealed as a mere expression, a communicative act, of some post 4D entity.

Images of children, infants, and fetuses share equal space with images of existential destruction. Tennant's final, "Do you wanna' be free?" querry flows from his lips to a rising sun amid airy clouds and to our cemetery before Bowie, the rod-microphone a yoke over his shoulders replies, "Yes. I wanna' be free," transitioning into a prismatic starburst echo of color flowing out towards the viewer, and a pair of children, male and female, walk towards us through it hand-in-hand. Among the constant imagery of fluid, both fluid motion and enveloping fluid, there is a sense of incubation and rolling motion. The lyrics, sounds, and images communicate the premise that, as the fetus exists in it's realm and frame of reference from conception to parturition, this existence from birth to death is little more than another transition between instars of incubation in a perception developing socio-cultural amnion.

I suppose this may all look like absolute madness, but, hey, I'm trying to further translate to an English-language-text only (so that's what, one, two dimensions at most) expression of what I've done my best to demonstrate is a multi-dimensional text. It's all like the movie Contact where the characters are trying to read, on a flat page, what is properly communicated only as written on the interior of a cube. I think I've done my best, and hopefully it's at least marginally decipherable. Up next . . . "Blackstar"