God Only Knows
29 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in 60's Music, 80's Music Tags: David Bowie, The Beach Boys
One the other end of the David Bowie spectrum, his eighties stuff, when he was suffering from being too popular and didn’t know what to do with himself. Granted, Bowie’s low points still rank above near everyone else’s peaks. But even I’ll admit that Tonight stands exactly where the critics put it – at the bottom of the pile. Bowie himself freely admitted that Tonight was little more than an attempt to duplicate the commercial success of Let’s Dance. For the first time in his life, Bowie made a desperate scrabble not to do anything weird or unexpected, lest he lose some of the garden-variety record buyers who’d glommed onto the Serious Moonlight juggernaut. Coming off a megatour, Bowie didn’t have time to write anything, so assembled a motley collection of hastily chosen covers, heavily leaning on his earlier collaborations with Iggy Pop. Sadly, the magic of China Girl didn’t strike again; the covers of Don’t Look Down, Tonight and Neighborhood Threat are singularly lifeless. That’s not to say Bowie didn’t strike gold even at his laziest. Blue Jean and Loving the Alien are both classics. God Only Knows, a Beach Boys cover, falls somewhere in between. It’s not exactly prime Bowie, but it’s not an embarrassment like the misbegotten I Keep Forgettin’. Bowie doesn’t make the mistake of trying to turn it into something slick. The original was, in typical Beach Boys fashion, a cheery melody belying a dark interior. It’s in fact a little disconcerting to realize that though the Boys’ harmonizing is all sunshine and lollipops, the lyrics are contemplating that life may not even be worth living. Bowie dispenses with any hint of sunshine and sings in a lugubrious deep voice, really bringing out how depressing Brian Wilson’s song really is. (A reminder that Brian Wilson that even in 1966, Wilson was not a healthy individual.) Though not about to be on anybody’s top 100 David Bowie songs, this is a good example of Bowie making surprisingly effective use of a source no one would expect him to even be interested in.
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