Today's post is a short one because of my busy week (as previously mentioned), so I'm just going to highlight one of my favourite Bowie songs: "Looking For Water". One day I'll do a longer post about the song and the film, but for now here's just a highlight!
This song is about the loss of spirituality and the desperation we have to find it - somewhere, anywhere. The refrain of "Looking for water; Lookin Lookin; I'm looking for water" is nicely contrasted with the few verses where Bowie deviates from the repeating mantra (reminiscent of his Earthling days), like "But I lost God in a New York minute/Don't know about you but my heart's not in it" and "I can't breathe the air/Can't raise the fight/'Cause all we've got left is a beat in the night/And I'm/Looking for water". Both of these lines showcase a speaker who is tired of looking for something to believe in - for something that would sustain his very life/soul ("my heart's not in it"), but despite this fact, the refrain emphasizes how he's forced to do so anyway. He's compelled by his own deeper desire to find spiritual freedom ("I can't live in this cage").
And this music video (above) was really the first thing that drew me to the song (it didn't stand out on the album against giants like "New Killer Star", "Never Get Old", "Days", and "Reality"). But this video made me finally get the themes discussed in the previous paragraph. So it totally surprised me when I discovered that the music video is actually fan-made rather than Bowie-made! The footage is from the amazing promotional short film "Reality", and the songs that accompany the images are actually "Never Get Old", "The Loneliest Guy", and "Bring Me the Disco King".
Which, speaking of, one of my greatest desires related to Bowie (along with the Bowie 1984 musical, Ziggy Stardust movie, the Thin White Duke autobiography, and the feature film directed by Bowie to name just a few) would be to have a full-length feature of the short. It's a positively brilliant and surreal piece - Bowie's interview with himself is interspersed with striking visual compositions and powerful songs. In particular, the image of Bowie in the woods, desperately trying to find water while decked out in a trim, chic suit, is my favourite scene. It's visually stunning and totally evocative (I could write at least a dozen stories based on the romantic, fantastic images). Here's a few of my favourite screen shots from the film I took a while ago. Feel free to add your own wonderful captions and imagination to the mix:
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