Unease and identity in David Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold the World’

The song, memorably covered by Nirvana, has the same mixture of tragedy and thrill that marks Bowie’s best work

Jan 8 is the birthday of English musician David Bowie, whose multi-faceted songs and persona captivated fans over multiple decades. 

A profound fusion of tragedy and thrill marks the best songs of David Bowie, sometimes even when he’s not the one performing them. 

Now considered one of Bowie’s most famous compositions, The Man Who Sold the World exploded into popularity after Nirvana’s famous performance on MTV Unplugged.

With its slinky rhythm and ringing riff, the song may seem full of swagger, something to vibe to when you are headed back home after a long day. But, a closer look at the lyrics reveals a much darker and more ambiguous meaning. 

As the downbeat melody hints, the song is about the unease one feels when confronting another aspect of yourself. In an interview for BBC Radio 1, Bowie says, "I guess I wrote it because there was a part of myself that I was looking for". 

The first stanza talks about how the narrator stumbles across a part of himself that he thought had died long ago as if he has trouble contemplating and comprehending it. Though it has an affinity with him, he rejects it. In this way, the song lays out its central idea of a crisis of identity.  

Bowie, who made use of androgyny, cross-dressing, and other queer visual signifiers in his work, had a complicated, often contradictory relationship with sexuality. He claimed, at different times in his life, that he was gay, bisexual, and ‘a closet heterosexual’ who used aspects of homosexual and bisexual culture for his own promotion.

Throughout his musical career, he also indulged in a wide variety of personas such as Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, and the Thin White Duke, each with their own aesthetic and sensibility, often emerging around the release of an album or the start of a tour. 

Though it comes early in his career, The Man Who Sold the World seems to grapple with the difficulties of this shifting identity and the struggle to change and evolve that identity. The commercial aspect of this morphing identity seems to come under his own scrutiny when he describes himself as the man who sold out to the world. In the song, worldly fame and its responsibilities are pushing the persona to reject his own essence and embrace something different. The melancholy tone of the song is reflected in how the persona lets go of his own identity. 

Later on, after confronting the old self, the narrator keeps looking for his true identity, hoping he will eventually come across his familiar self again. But he fails and concludes "I must have died alone, a long, long time ago". But even that conclusion is tinged with his identity crisis. After all, the very next line is "Who knows? Not me."  

Throughout the song, repeated phrases change. The line "I never lost control" in the first chorus becomes "We never lost control" in a desperate attempt to convince the self that everything is alright. 

The song ends on an ambiguous note, with the narrator telling his audience that the one before them is the ‘man who sold the world’. Though it seemed unfamiliar at first, the narrator comes to recognise that this strange aspect is part of him. 

Another interpretation is that the narrator is initially running away from an identity he is disgusted with. But later, when it became apparent that this awful self was, in fact, the only true identity he had, he decided to accept that unsatisfying idea. 

No matter which interpretation one prefers, the song is a great illustration of how people desperately seek individual identity, and how difficult but perhaps necessary it is to embrace all the different aspects of the self. 

Through the lyrics, the music, the mood, and the rhythm, Bowie captures the horror, discomfort, and ambiguity of this experience.

This article was written for Stripe, bdnews24.com's special publication with a focus on culture and society from a youth perspective.