Please convince me: What are the words following “Strange fascination…” (around 2:27 in studio version in above clip) in the break in David Bowie’s “Changes”? Before any of you nerds look it up and spit some nonsense back at me, please hear me out.
I’ve been listening to this song since it came out, when I was a boy. I’ve always had trouble understanding whatever it is Bowie’s singing in almost all of his songs, but this couplet is especially troubling. For years I assumed the first half was “Strange fascination is killing me…” The second half of the couplet I may now know, but the sense of it never helps me fill in the blanks of that first half of the couplet.
I thought I’d try the live version from that old Ziggy Stardust concert movie. Seeing Bowie’s lips move would probably help, right? Take a look at this clip, around 2:24. Maybe the lipstick’s obscuring my ability to read his lips.
This week I asked two diehard Bowie fans as well as my wife, who is completely comfortable liking Bowie as much as any rock fan should love the guy. (I’m working hard on embracing this artist, who’s made probably 30 songs I like a lot or love yet who, as an artist, I still have serious troubles being a fan of.) All three of them said, “Sure, it’s ‘Strange fascination is killing me…’.” I went back and listened to that couplet a few more times. “Where’s the ‘k’ sound?” I asked them that night at dinner. “Not even Bowie can swallow a k.”
Then my wife had another suggestion, which got around the k sound, but she introduced a word that began with “th,” a sound that’s easier to swallow but another sound I don’t think exists in this line.
“Look it up on the Internet!” one of my Bowie-loving friend said. I hope I kept my sense of betrayal and disappointment in check at this suggestion. This friend and I have had numerous deeply personal and stimulating arguments over Bowie through the years. He’s my go-to guy for reasonably heated disagreements over the guy. Despite rejecting as much of what he has to say as possible, I secretly walk away with a slightly improved understanding and perspective on the man and his work. Now, when I call on his expertise, he tells me to look it up on the Internet! I wanted to question his love for Bowie. He should have known this lyric to Bowie’s most lasting song by heart and shared it with me with authority.
So I found a clip of Thin White Duke-era Bowie performing the song in a rehearsal. No lipstick. This version should do the trick. I’ve viewed the segment beginning around 3:02 into the clip with no success. It still sounds like gobbledygook.
You may think you can simply look up the lyrics and spit them back at me, but that’s not going to do the trick. First, I have ways of knowing if you’ve first looked up the lyrics on the Web. Second, I doubt simply seeing the words on screen will convince me. I ask that you point out key consonant sounds and dipthongs that might ensure my hearing these mysterious lyrics properly. To the person who clarifies these lyrics based on what he or she knows to be true, I will prepare a special reward. And thank you.
Boy, I just don’t usually work that hard at this stuff! I always thouht it was “strange fascinations frustrating me,” and that was good enough for me. It’s utter gobbledygook on the studio version, but from the movie it sounded like “strange fascination, fascinating.”
I like mine better, and I think 70’s Bowie is an artist everyone should get behind.
I think if you ‘like a lot or love’ 30 of any artist’s songs, that qualifies you as a fan, no matter what serious troubles you may have with him/her/it/them.
Without listening to the song, watching any of the above clips or looking up the words, I’ve always heard it as “strange fascinations fascinate me,” which is admittedly not his finest lyrical moment, but I can’t argue with the notion.
And I continue to agree with Steve’s sentiment that liking/loving 30 songs from an artist – all in the same period, too – is plenty to consider yourself a fan, though I think by now I’ve gotten a sense of what your specific obstacles are for Bowie.
Don’t tell me what my heart feels, BigSteve. I know there’s no reasonable rationale for my heart’s reactions to the guy’s music, but that’s not the heart’s business, is it? How about some help with this confusing middle eighth? Real help, not just some words copied from a Website. Thanks!
Similarly to 2000 Man, I’ve always heard the line as “forsaking me” (though “frustrating me” is also good), but I’m comfortable with the idea that it’s just babble. It’s not like I’ve ever expected Bowie’s lyrics to make sense.
My favorite story of this time came up when Colin Blunstone of the Zombies explained the second chorus of “Tell Her No” during an interview with Terry Gross when that ZOMBIE HEAVEN box set came out: he had fallen asleep in the studio while waiting to record his lead vocal and had just been woken up and stuck in front of a microphone. The complete incomprehensibility of the second chorus is due to the fact that he sang it while trying to stifle a yawn.
Thanks to those of you who’ve shared what your ears tell you he’s singing. This is exactly what I’m looking for – with the hope of eventually finding someone who’s so confident in what he or she hears that that person demonstrates, almost scientifically, what I should be hearing.
Believe me, guys, I’ve been working very hard at coming to terms with those 30 great Bowie songs and how they conflict with my underlying beefs with the guy.
I thought it was “killing me” too. But I suck at hearing lyrics
It’s “vaselining me”
“Strange fascination fascinating me.”
it’s hard to decipher because the is on an unnatural syllable (the second syllable of “fascinating”).
but it’s “strange fascination fascINating me”.
that’s also how it’s listed in most of the websites you find if you google “changes david bowie lyrics” or some combo of those words.
that should say “it’s hard to decipher because the *accent* is on an unnatural syllable…”.
Saturnismine, first off, thanks for admitting that you browsed the InterWeb for this suggestion. Second, a big RTH Raspberry to you for doing so, especially with such an unconvincing explanation! Is anyone else buying this?
I must say that if these are actually the lyrics is there now any question why even 30 great Bowie songs do not necessarily make an artist I can love?
Please, someone, tell me Bowie was capable of wrapping up the break in his most memorable song with something better than “strange fascination fascINating me.” That would be most disappointing!
There are only a couple of decent lines in Changes. The line following the one is question is almost as stupid: “Changes are taking the pace I’m going through.”
And the printed lyrics you find online all say “Turn and face the strain.” I always through it was “strange” not “strain.” I guess Bowie thought his ‘poetry’ was immune to our consultations.
sorry mod, but it’s the truth. and apparently….you can’t handle the truth!
BigSteve (I shan’t acknowledge my man Sat’s taunts just now), these “printed lyrics” you speak of – are they printed with the album? I own Hunky Dory on CD, but the copy I picked up for $3.00 had no cover/booklet, just a back tray. So I’ve been wrong about the second half of the couplet. I agree there are a few great lines in that song, but this break is shaping up to be a major letdown. Thanks for sticking with this.
May I call bullshit? Mr. Mod appears to be looking for a minor lyrical lapse to keep Bowie off the Great mantle. Trouble is, whenever someone points out the occasional lyrical stinker by one of Mr. Mod’s favorite artists, that’s when we hear “oh, I don’t pay attention to lyrics.”
Oats, you’re a lover of Bowie. Can you a) confirm the lyrics to that couplet and b) try to show me how I might hear them for what they are? THEN you may call bullshit on me:) Remember, it’s you guys who’ve gotten distracted by my Bowie Problem. Let’s keep focused on the real point of this thread. Thanks.
I just looked at my CD copy, and it reads “Strange fascination, fascinating me.”
What?
It’s “…Strange fascination farzelling me…”
Farzelling — an obscure Yiddish word meaning “fascinating to the point of obsession,” as in:
“Oy, did you see the way he looked at that krasavitse vaybl? He’s got a wife at home, he has… with two beautiful kinderlech. And now he’s farzelling over that woman. It’s a shlekhts, pure and simple, I tell you.”
Who knows what Bowie was farzelling over, but, in a sense, Sat is right. He’s basically repeating himself, albeit in typical multicultural Bowie fashion.
HVB
Hrrundi, so far you have been most helpful and convincing in this quest. You lost a few points by saying “Sat is right,” but nice job. Oats, thanks for confirming that the lyric sheet actually says what BigSteve reported. I cannot in any way hear the second “fascinating,” so that’s what I meant by what you reacted to with a What? I’ll try listening to it again with the emphasis on the “IN,” as Sat put it. Weird.
Man, awkward phrasing and all, Bowie still can’t make that lyric fit properly, if that’s indeed what he meant to be singing. Why he’d sing that line is another matter. That ranks up there with some of Costello’s laziest couplets.
I admit that from previous casual listening I would have said “killing me” too. I only got faCINating after listening closely today. And I was trying to imagine if he was playing on the word ‘sin,’ but I don’t think so, I think he’s just got the scansion all screwed up.
This is why I generally don’t get involved with early Bowie. He had some interesting ideas, but he just didn’t have the skill to bring them to fruition. My Bowie collection begins with Station to Station.
Interesting, BigSteve. Station to Station was the fourth full Bowie album I decided to buy and the one I listen to most after Hunky Dory. (To date, I’ve stopped at four, the tuneful Ziggy Stardust and the horrible-except-for-the-title-track Heroes being the other two I own beside the classic Changes greatest hits album I bought when I was 16.) I like the best parts of that album a lot. The other half of it leaves me scratching my head respectfully.
It’s “Turn and face the strain”?
Like, as in “Look in the bowl after you’ve taken a giant dump”?
That song has lost a lot of its already thinning luster.
Regarding the original question, since I always heard it as “strange fascinations fascinate me” and it’s one of those songs I thought I had down pretty well, I never consulted the lyrics prior to this topic. So I have no problem, of course, hearing the “fascinate” part, it’s only the “-ing” that throws me off. Bowie, clearly, set musical precedent for how to sing the variations of the word: I offer up The Human League, who also stress the same syllable. “Keep feeling fasCINation…”
All that said, I also thought it was “turn and face the strange (ch-ch-changes)” not “turn and face the strain…ch-ch-changes”, which would tie back to the “strange fascinations” that so fascinated Bowie. So I don’t know, man, I’m not from Mars.
Mod, going back to your emotionally-rewarding “30 Bowie Songs” post, I remembered that you actually finished with 29, consigning “Life On Mars” to a second Bowie tier. I also forgot that “Kooks” made your list, which is nice. I now understand why a song like “Rock ‘n Roll Suicide” didn’t make your list, and I think, with some examination, your Bowie stumbling blocks reside in that song. But if you’re up for it, I’d like to get your take on two should-be contenders from the album before Hunky Dory: “The Man Who Sold The World” and “Black Country Rock,” the latter of which seems like it would be a perfect #30.
Great One, you are eloquent, as always!
Alexmagic, I’d forgotten that I’d already shared some of my specific thoughts on Bowie’s Top 29 tracks. For anyone who’s curious in what I had to say – a brave exercise to conduct in public, if I do say so myself – you can find the link here:
https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/index.php/2007/11/29/mr_mod_releases_the_list_of_30_bowie_son
To your question, Alexmagic, is “Black Country Rock” also from The Man Who Sold the World? Maybe it was the pressing that a friend used to play me, but I always thought that album was the only major label album from the late-60s through early-70s that sounded worse than a badly produced Move album. (And you know I like The Move a lot despite their often atrocious productions.) The title track, by the way, has its merits, but for its cool riffs it doesn’t gel for me as a song. I don’t care in the slightest about what Bowie might be getting at. Frequently, that’s a stumbling block for me, especially on his more ethereal songs.
“Rock ‘n Roll Suicide” has its moments, but it seems like a weaker rewrite of the almost-great “5 Years”, a song that probably didn’t make my Top 29 because of my short attention span for its long intro and outro.
I’m not particularly surprised whenever I hear that Bowie isn’t saying much because it never occurred to me that he was. He’s about style, Mod. Style. Urban party-hopping moneyed gender-bending style. Cool, risque, rule-breaking, but not really, you know? I mean, if you were really breaking the rules, you wouldn’t be raking it in quite so consistently. I always thought the line was “Strange fascination in my martini.” But what do I know?
Mod, have you ever considered that your inability to embrace Bowie might come from a lingering sense that the party he’s hosting might not really be for a guy like you? I mean, somebody might look at you and say, “You’re the bouncer, yes?” but I doubt that you’re getting much further into the inside circle than that.
By the way, this “I’m not into lyrics” thing that comes up around here from time to time needs further exploration. I think most of us tend to be most interested in the part of a song that connects closely to what we feel is our own contribution. Is it any accident that bakshi cares so much about guitar, or that lyrics mean more to me than to some people here? A bad line in a song can really irk me. Is it any accident that you tend to examine songs from the perspective of the coach who wants the team to play together?
There’s a thread in that somewhere, maybe.
Yeah, mwall. Mockcarr needs to chime in on this one — more than enybody I know, he’s a dude who will decide he *hates* a song because one of the lines in the lyric has a bad rhyme in it. As I recall, one of his cardinal sins is songs that lazily “rhyme” one word with the same basic word.
“Black Country Rock” is indeed a The Man Who Sold The World song. The version I have seems to sound pretty good, and it’s pretty straight ahead and relies on the band bringing it.
I think mwall is zeroing in on what I perceive to be the Mod’s Bowie problem. There’s a certain kind of theatricality that Bowie projects, especially on the “Rock ‘n Roll Suicide” type of song, which is why I singled that out. Mwall mentioned the coach/teamwork thing, and I’m also thinking of the recent stage formations thread. Many of Bowie’s songs are numbers designed to be performed with Bowie front and center, maybe in the spotlight with his band in the background, if there at all. He shoots for the big, dramatic stage moment where it all collapses on him, like the pause and then the “You’re not alone!” climax on Suicide.
On lyrics in general, I almost think February – being the shortest month and all – should have been set aside as Lyrics Month on RTH. I definitely fall in the interested-in-lyrics camp, but I was also thinking about certain bands and/or songs I really like that either aren’t in English or are singing in broken English, where the specific appeal is often just the sound of the words. There are a couple Super Furry Animals songs that made me think of this, along with Caetano Veloso’s “Lost In The Paradise”.
Concentrating on the sounds of the words seems just fine to me, Alex. Sound and image and meaning are what words have going for them. The idea of the broken or non-standard English isn’t a problem either.
The danger for me is when the words really do fall into meaning, whether through trying to say something or just saying it accidentally. I don’t know about other people, but for me the stupid or wrong or what have you word can really make me wince, and whatever other virtues a song might have, whenever the song comes on I remember that I’m going to wince, and so the wince becomes central to my experience of the song. And believe me, wincing and getting into it do not go hand in hand. Still, it’s hard to define in any given instance what makes the real clunkers clunk so much. All I know is they make my teeth hurt.
Mwall, you can get into this if you want, but know that when that momentous day arrives, you’re going to have to answer for Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy and a few other bands where the lyrical content alone would probably drive you batty as an English professor!
Alexmagic, I almost posted some Bowie promo film for “Golden Years” that is staged, with his band behind him, as he sits on a chair, almost exactly as you describe his general stance in songs. Yes, this irks me.
It’s funny that the value of lyrics has come up. I go both ways on the matter. If lyrics are especially bad or ring especially hollow, I’m instantly bugged. If the lyrics don’t necessarily make sense to me but sound good, I’m often fine with them. If the lyrics end up meaning a lot to me, I’m thrilled. I still depend on good music to get me going 99% of the time.
I hear what you’re saying, bakshi, but actually it’s not that much of an issue for me. I have no problems going with a stupid lyric. It’s the stupid moment in a song that’s otherwise trying to be a serious lyric–and maybe even succeeding–that gets my goat.
The Priest’s stupid songs are just that, stupid songs with a catchy chorus and tasty guitar. Their more serious songs, of which there are more than a few, sometimes work for me but can certainly clunk. “YOu’ve Got Another Thing Comin’,” essentially a powerful and rocking FM hit, and not a serious song by any means, still has that bit “the answer now is don’t give in/aim for a new tomorrow” that certainly causes teeth gritting on my part. I wish it wasn’t there, but it is. Besides, they were my favorite band when I was 14. I like them so much because of what they meant to me then, and what that means to me now. I would feel differently if I was only encountering them for the first time now. I think it’s important not to put down our own youthful excesses. Rock and roll is about our youthful excesses, yes?
Our man Phil is a complicated story. He cuts back and forth between a generalized macho (the cowboy song) and more specific urban (black) macho thing, like the one that involves leaving the woman and her and his baby. Close to Sprinsteen, but with a difference. He can be pretty good sometimes, but the generic stuff doesn’t really affect me. Yeah yeah, he’s a cowboy, sure, who cares?
I think if you like the song before you realize how bad the lyrics are you will care less and forgive it. I’d agree the sound of them is probably just as important. The third verse is often the stickler. Better to repeat the first two most times. The trouble for me is bothering to even rhyme so much if it’s gonna suck. How bout just rhyming the last word of each verse. See, then it’s likely the writer will be exposed as even worse when freed of that restriction. One person’s wordplay is another’s cacophany of improper downbeats. I don’t understand why a singer would want to sing something stupid over and over again, though.
I read that fake rhymes are a pet peeve of Tom Petty’s too, but he readily admits that he’s as guilty of it as anyone.
I think the problem Mod is having with “Changes” is that this is one of Bowie’s more singer-songwriter moments, where it seems like he’s putting in a lot of effort to deliver these words, but we’re not sure of the meaning. Often, though, repetition can suggest an uneasiness or anxiety–maybe Bowie’s questioning the whole idea behind the song. So it kind of feels like a letdown–like he’s not really sure of what he’s singing.
Drr. John, I’ve missed you! Hope all is well. I don’t really have a problem iwth the song. It’s great. I have been listening to it about 6 times a car ride of late because it’s now my youngest boy’s favorite song. I was just amazed at how impossible it was to hear what he was singing and then more amazed at how lousy that couplet is when seen written out. I should have kept my mouth shut and just enjoyed singing along the “wrong” lyrics.