#DownTheSciFiRabbitHole #HashtagGames
Jareth Bowie now has a clear line to talk to Major Tom
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Digging up David Bowie led me to a fork in said rabbithole via which I found out he lived in Berlin for a spell. He said he sang a particular song every morning and I discovered that he and Jim Morrison (The Doors) revived a 1920s German stage play from whence the song comes....
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany.
And it's a weird-ass song, too, which raises the question as to why in the world any German playwrite would write even one damn thing about Alabama. But that's exactly what happened, and David Bowie confesses to have sung it every morning in Berlin.
That weird-ass song goes by 3 different names, too, and the weird-ass music it's sung to can be credited (?) to Kurt Weil, whose wife sung the first rendition of the thing, and her rendition is certainly more legible than David's despite the accent. But the meaning remains inextricable from the opera's context, and so as it stands alone, remains a weird-ass song.
The track that this link goes to is still not as weird as the original 1930 track, but you go ahead down that rabbithole if you wish.
https://youtu.be/x-5ata4jDyk