6/12/2023 0 Comments Quicksand song![]() ![]() I’m always very suspicious of anybody who says they’re into Crowley because they’d better have a pretty fair handle on Greek and Latin otherwise they’re talking bullshitīrett Anderson: You mention him in ‘Quicksand’.īowie: Yes… Haha! Caught out! Well, that’s before I tried reading him. None were new to Bowie – he had touched upon Buddhism and the occult on ‘After All’ Nietzsche on ‘The Supermen’ and ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ – but here was his most explicit exploration, with namechecks for Aleister Crowley, Heinrich Himmler, Winston Churchill, and wartime spy Juan Pujol (codenamed Garbo by the British).īowie: I didn’t get into Crowley by the way, because he uses too much Greek. The lyrics make reference to several of Bowie’s interests of the time: the occult, World War Two, Buddhism, and Nietzche’s concept of the Übermensch. His time as a cultural figurehead was to follow, but here he took a giant step forward. Bowie knew – or at least suspected – that he had “the potential of a superman”, and ‘Quicksand’ – as with ‘Changes’, ‘Life On Mars?’, and ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ – shows him pushing through beyond his previous capabilities to discover newfound powers and realise his potency as a songwriter and performer. It is delicious irony, then, that a song lamenting a lack of inspiration serves as one of Hunky Dory’s most inspired moments. The titular quicksand is the arena where his inspiration and songwriting skills might flounder and fail. The song is, at its heart, a moment of self-doubt for the 24-year-old Bowie, who fears his powers of creativity rested on unstable ground. No, "Quicksand" most certainly isn't a dance song.Kooks, Queen Bitches And Andy Warhol, Ken Sharp The actual implications of that possible truth are severe. In between good and evil is "divine symmetry," and you can't get rid of one without getting rid of the other. Therefore, it may be the moral, ethical thing to inflict hardship on humanity in order to provoke its next stage of development. ![]() For example, sometimes from the flames of hardship, strength and resilience are born. ![]() Also, in the pursuit of that morality, what seems to be good may actually be bad, and vice versa. The "occult" is a broad word, but a relatively consistent idea across the Golden Dawn and theosophist types is that humanity needs to evolve into its next form, and that form has a set of morality completely foreign to our current one. These lyrics start to get into some real strangeness, but they tie into the occult beliefs that Bowie seems to be grappling with (and losing his mind to). I'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought In the same year Hunky Dory was made, a book about Garbo was published under the title The Counterfeit Spy. Rebel Rebel author Chris O'Leary suggests this reference may actually be to a World War II British double-agent spy named Juan Pujol García, codename Garbo. Garbo was also a theosophist and occultist, bringing us back to that familiar theme.Īccording to author Nicholas Pegg in The Complete David Bowie, Garbo was one of Bowie's influences for the pose he strikes on the cover of Hunky Dory. If so, he never mentioned it to anyone on record, but it would make sense because he did say that this song is a combination of "narrative and surrealism." Maybe Bowie was sparked by a specific silent film of hers. She started as a silent film star, so this line harks back to the ones about Himmler. ![]() She had weary eyes that stand out even today in still pictures, particularly for the way they seem to contradict the soft, graceful beauty of her other features. Greta Garbo was an American actress (though born in Sweden) very popular in the 1930s and '40s. ![]()
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