I was never a great fan of David Bowie. In the 1970s, I liked some of the songs – Rebel, Rebel for example – but not the glam rock clothes, the make-up, or the hair. And I never understood what that eye-patch he wore was all about. In the 1980s, he began wearing stylish suits which were more to my taste, but then his music was sounding too close to disco. In retrospect, I appreciate his status as a significant influence on modern musical culture rather more than I appreciate the music itself: I do not dislike it, but still, I am not a fan. My other favourite of his early songs is Life on Mars, and I recently discovered a wonderful cover version by Gail Ann Dorsey, who played bass guitar in Bowie’s band for many years. He wrote this song in 1971, two years after Apollo 11 had landed on the moon, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had become the first humans to walk on the lunar surface.
The year before the Apollo 11 mission, Stanley Kubrick released the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a futuristic space mission to Jupiter is disrupted by HAL, the on-board computer, leading to multiple deaths among the crew, both human and machine. One of the movie’s great themes is that technological advancement does not of itself suppress human violence, but merely allows it to manifest itself in more compelling ways. In the opening scene, among a group of early hominids, a large bone from a dead animal is transformed into a tool for killing, and this instrumentally violent act is replicated, millions of years later, by HAL’s calculated, digital murder. Weapons evolve, but if our moral code does not then the outcomes will remain the same. Kubrick seems to be reminding us that wherever we go in the universe we take our failings with us.
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