The Best of Bowie (by Bowie)

In the chapter "Win" we looked at the psychological aspects of Bowie’s lyrics that determined the fans’ choice. What I said there was that differences between the top and bottom choices was not a reflection of anything psychological going on with Bowie but with the fans who made the choices. Whatever we learned about ourselves (i.e. us Bowie fans) there I think at the very least it was interesting because what got our votes was completely unrelated to the success of Bowie albums in the charts (at least it was for the BowieWonderWorld.com poll). In other words, chart success is not the same as the impact that Bowie’s albums have on those of us who call ourselves his fans.

But what about Bowie’s preferences? If we knew what they were then we might be able to say something about Bowie’s own psychology.

Now there are all sorts of means we could use to identify candidates for Bowie’s favourites.

We could look to see what songs Bowie performed on his last tour. After all, he had his entire history to pick from, all 26 studio albums, so whichever songs he chose he must have wanted to perform them. There are two problems with this. Firstly he was promoting Reality so, regardless of whether these songs would have made it into his set list in their own right, we can’t know whether they’re only there to promote the album or not. Secondly, the rest of the set is also not chosen purely on the basis of Bowie’s own tastes. Although Bowie can be confident that most of the crowd would be on his side whatever songs he performed, he is always trying to engage with new fans, people who know his recent work, perhaps only the more recent albums. He would always have to think about entertaining the audience, not just pleasing himself.

Another possibility is to pick out the songs that Bowie has included in his “best of” and “greatest hits” compilations. This also has problems because here Bowie is going to choose those songs that are most likely to sell which is those that have been hits or are well known through radio play or because others have covered them. In fact, it’s worse than that because Bowie’s input on these may not be that great – the decision process may be led by record company execs. (Actually, the more I think about it, the more it occurs to me that this might be a really interesting analysis to do – I’ll have to come back to this later, though)

However, on 28th June 2008 the Mail on Sunday gave away a compilation CD of 12 of Bowie’s song and asked Bowie to pick them (in fact this CD is being released in other territories as iSELECTBowie). Although some of them are very well known (e.g. “Life on Mars”) others are clearly too obscure to be included for their commercial appeal (e.g. “Some Are” was a collaboration with Brian Eno and doesn’t even appear on Bowie’s solo studio albums).

Bowie says: “For this CD compilation I've selected 12 of my songs that I don't seem to tire of. Few of them are well known, but many of them are still sung at my concerts. Usually by me.”

It’s unlikely that Bowie would ever give a definitive list of his favourite self-penned songs because I would imagine they change constantly (maybe he has already gone on record somewhere with his favourite tracks but I haven’t seen it … if anyone else has please can they let me know). But anyway, including these songs would seem to be at least a reasonable start. They certainly get a huge endorsement from Bowie in the sense that he never tires of them and that he acknowledges that many (most) are not well known and therefore his choice is not overly influenced by trying to appeal to existing preferences for hits but more so by how Bowie seems to want to be seen.

These are the tracks Bowie selected to go on the CD:

0. Life on Mars
0. Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise)
0. The Bewlay Brothers
0. Lady Grinning Soul
0. Win
0. Some Are
0. Teenage Wildlife
0. Repetition
0. Fantastic Voyage
0. Loving the Alien
0. Time Will Crawl
0. Hang On To Yourself (live)

I left out “Some Are” from the analysis because, as I said earlier, this didn’t appear on a Bowie album [Footnote 1]. But comparing the remaining tracks with all of his others does give some interesting results [Footnote 2].

Compared with tracks that didn’t make it onto this CD give-away, the tracks that did used twice as many discrepancy and future words and half as many “I”- words, communication words and “hearing” words. Although appearing relatively infrequently on the whole, death words were also substantially less common in the tracks that appeared on this give-away CD than those that didn’t, appearing seven times less often.

There is a form of analysis (it’s called logistic regression analysis) that allows us to find out which of these six word categories are required to predict whether a particular track appears on the give-away CD or not and which categories are redundant. Using this analysis we find that three of the word categories are essentially redundant and that the word categories reflecting discrepancy, “I” and future tense are all that is required to predict whether a song made it on to the give-away CD or not.

The strongest predictor was discrepancy words. These are words that indicate a discrepancy between what is and what should or could be. Words that reflect wanting, wishing or needing are included in this category, as are words indicating the conditional tense (such as “would”, “could” and “if”). These were followed by “I”-words such as “I”, “me”, “mine” and “myself” and then future words such as “tomorrow”, “shall” and “will”.

Between them, these three word categories correctly allocated 95% of Bowie’s songs to the Bowie picks and the Bowie non-picks.

So what does this mean? What is it about these tracks that made Bowie pick them for the Mail on Sunday give-away CD?

Essentially it looks like Bowie favours songs that are about the future, songs that focus on the difference between what is and what could be and songs that de-emphasise the self.

Of course, this analysis uses all of the songs on Bowie’s 26 studio albums, including his own material, co-written songs and covers. All the tracks Bowie picked are his own songs – no covers and no co-written songs. The only exception to this is “Some Are” (co-written with Eno) which, as I mentioned above, I didn’t include anyway because it doesn’t appear on his solo studio albums. Interestingly, when this analysis is re-run excluding covers and co-written material, the results are identical [Footnote 3].

So there we are; a future-oriented song that addresses the discrepancy between what is and what could be and that de-emphasises the self, that’s what Bowie seems to like. I wonder if he’s aware of that.

So there you go.

Now you know something about David Bowie that David Bowie probably doesn’t know.

But is there one song from the 12 that Bowie picked that has all three qualities at once? Unfortunately not. But of these songs, “Repetition” has the most discrepancy words, “Lady Grinning Soul” has the most future words and “Loving the Alien” has the fewest “I”-words.

Footnotes

Footnote 1:
If I were to include this then I’d also have to start digging out every song that Bowie wrote/co-wrote that was recorded outside of his solo work or by other artists (e.g. “All the Young Dudes”, “Pretty Pink Rose”, “Wagon Wheel”, the “Life on Mars” that Mick Ronson Recorded … the list goes on). I will probably do that some time but that’s a whole other set of analyses.

Footnote 2:
Differences between Bowie picks and non-picks: t-values range from 2.14 to 5.89 (p-values < .05).

Footnote 3:
Actually there were some minor differences on the t-tests. Differences in the use of future words becomes only marginally significant while differences in the use of sport and causal reasoning words becomes significant (t-values are 2.81 [p < .01] and t = 2.02 [p < .05] respectively) with means for picked versus non-picked songs being .054% and .265% for Sport words and .762% and .395% for causal reasoning words. Nevertheless, the results of the logistic regression analysis are identical.]