Absolute Beginners

As my older kid’s Bowie obsession continues, he is digging deeper into the corners of the catalog and finding songs that I hadn’t even heard of. This week we’re learning “Absolute Beginners”, which Bowie wrote for the movie of the same name.

The song is as richly weird as all Bowie songs are. The instrumentation is mostly standard eighties rock, except for the horn section, which is one trumpeter and six (!) saxophonists. I learned from the Bowie Bible that Bowie wanted a backing vocalist who sounded “like a shopgirl”. Session guitarist Kevin Armstrong recommended his younger sister Janet, who had never sung professionally in a studio before. Knowing that makes me feel a little warmer toward her fairly awkward performance.

While horsing around in the studio, Bowie recorded some musical impressions: Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Lou Reed and Tom Petty. His Bruce in particular is uncanny, and he even wrote a bunch of parodic lyrics.

Anyway, here’s my chart of “Absolute Beginners.”

The song begins with a metal-ish riff in B Phrygian dominant. This riff then shifts up a minor third to D Phrygian dominant and then back down to B. None of this bears any relationship to anything else in the song. Bowie!

| B7(b9) | % | % | % |
| D7(b9) | % | % | % |
| B7(b9) | % | % | % |

The second part of the intro is a 1950s-sounding D major doo-wop riff that goes on for what feels like twenty minutes before the first verse finally starts. The first part of the intro was twelve bars long, and this second part is eighteen bars long, making for a very atypical thirty bars total.

| D | G/D | D | G/D |
| A | G/A | A | G/A |
| D | G/D | D | G/D |
| A | G/A | A | G/A |
| D |  %  |

The first verse feels like it’s an hour and a quarter long, full of harmonic twists and turns. The first chord is Bm, the relative minor in D, no big surprise. But then the second chord is Amaj7. That chord makes no sense at all! It sounds like a jazzy tonic chord in A major, which nothing up until now has prepared you for. That chord is followed by an inexplicable G°7 chord. This then leads to an equally inexplicable G chord. Was Bowie pulling chord names out of a hat? Or was he trying to support a rising chromatic melody from the G-sharp and A in the Amaj7 chord to the B-flat in the G°7 chord to the B-natural in the G chord? That’s an appealing idea, but if you don’t voice these chords exactly right, then they just kind of thud. There is so much empty space in the melody, entire measures of silence, vast stretches of it. Also, the phrasing is weird; you think it’s going to be a pair of sixteen bar units, but the second one cuts off two bars early.

| Bm  | %    | Amaj7 | % |
| G°7 | %    | G     | % |
| D   | %    | C     | % |
| Bm  | Em A | D     | % |

| Bm  | %    | Amaj7 | % |
| G°7 | %    | G     | % |
| D   | %    | C     | % |
| Bm  | %    |

The prechorus flows seamlessly out of the verse. The F#7 leading to A rather than the expected Bm is a real Bowie-ism; he does the same thing in “As The World Falls Down.” This is the first section of the song that’s a conventional length.

| G   | % | D | %    |
| F#7 | % | A | Em A |

In the chorus, the phrase lengths and chords continue to be conventional (by Bowie standards.) The repeated C-sharps in the melody make nice jazzy extensions against the D, G and Bm chords. There’s another F#7 resolving to the “wrong” chord. 

| D  | Dmaj7 | G   | G(#11) |
| Bm | Bm9   | F#7 | Em A   |

| D  | Dmaj7 | G   | G(#11) |
| Bm | Bm9   | A   | G/A    |

The chorus melody is weirdly similar to “Memory” from Cats.

The end of the chorus returns to the second half of the intro. There’s another verse, prechorus and chorus, same as the first, followed by two choruses worth of Don Weller saxophone solos. And then there’s a short bridge that isn’t in my chart, with a cool percussion groove underneath. It’s harmonically kind of like the first part of the intro? I guess?

| Bm | % | D7 | % | Bm | % |

Finally, there’s yet more bop-bop-ba-ooooh to fade out. 

As with any David Bowie hit, there are a lot of covers out there, mostly faithful. Here’s a mildly interesting synth-pop version by Saint Etienne, over a loop of “South Bronx” by Boogie Down Productions for some reason.

I’m interested in the ways that the song combines conventional pop and rock gestures with Bowie’s more artsy impulses. You’ve got a throwback to 1950s doo-wop, a big schmaltzy 80s power ballad chorus, these mysterious art-song-like verse, the almost metal-sounding first part of the intro, and the Afro-Latin percussion in the bridge. I don’t know if it all hangs together, but it has certainly got a distinctive vibe.