Though Bowie’s protagonist initially seems to be a role model in the mould of Apollo 11’s real-life astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, Space Oddity’s lyrics exert a darker gravitational pull on Major Tom’s fate. ![]() In contrast to Kubrick’s high-budget masterpiece, however, the song’s hero is pictured “sitting in my tin can” as he hurtles through space (“Low-tech space has always appealed,” Bowie later said). Punningly named after 2001 and the sort of “odd ditty” Bowie felt he had on his hands, Space Oddity also gave the world Major Tom, the first – and one of the most impactful – characters that Bowie would assume throughout his five-decade career. ![]() “I was very stoned when I went to see it, several times,” Bowie later admitted, adding, “and it was really a revelation to me. Released in the spring of 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s visionary sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was an existential meditation set to film, and chimed with some of the ideas Bowie was toying with as the utopian dream of the 60s showed signs of fading. “It was a good song that I wrote too early”
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