fame (1975)

david bowie/john lennon/carlos alomar. plastic soul, UK.

key: F blues
mode: F Ab Bb B C Eb
melody: Mə F S L TA d'
form: strophic with intro/interlude
meter: duple

English function names: tonic subdominant
Tagg (modified):        home  counterpoise (away)
Riemann:                T7    S7
Scale degrees:          I7    IV7
Chords:                 F7    Bb7

intro/interlude:
 Fm7    Cm7    Bb7
|/ / / |/ / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |
 F7
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |
 F7
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |
 F7
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |

verse:
 F7
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |
 F7
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |
 Bb7               F7
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |
 F7
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |
 F7
|/ / / / |/ / / / |

outro: vamp on F7

The "plastic soul" style designation is Bowie's own. Hey, why not.

The intro and interlude have other chords, which if you are a beginner you can skip. Why let a couple of other brief harmonies get in the way of our two-chordedness? Purism is a dead-end. Have I made enough excuses yet? Good.

File this song under "blues songs that do and do not follow a typical 12-bar pattern." Yes, that's an 18-bar blues up there. It absolutely tests how far one can stretch a concept without breaking it. Plastic soul, indeed. To review, we generally expect at the very least (in which T = tonic and ? is something other than the tonic):

TTTT
??TT
??TT

And usually the first set of question marks are the subdominant. And we've seen examples in which all the question marks are subdominant (Las Vegas Tango), we've seen examples in which we just get rid of the last phrase and have an 8-bar blues (Tol' My Captain, Keep A-Knockin', Rockin' Pneumonia, The Name Game), and we looked at an elongated version that reversed the functions (Memphis Tennessee).

Although it doesn't look like it the way I've notated it up there, Bowie and company have made us a nice counterpoise sandwich with a very thin layer of subdominant between the thick tonic bread slices. We can look at it this way:

T T T T T T T T
S S
T T T T T T T T

But I don't think we hear it that way. I certainly don't, and the drum fills support the way it's written up top, with the usual mostly four-measure phrases. In this way, with the four measure phrases, it feels like an elongated blues form, in which the first phrase is simply twice as long. Then the chord change comes in the place we expect it for the blues. But that's thwarted when the away harmony isn't also twice as long.

Is this brief counterpoise then mitigated by the symmetry of the counterpoise sandwich? Perhaps. Did Bowie and the gang even think this hard about it? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Theory does not necessarily elucidate the composer's secret intent. It really just reports on what is there and then one can take a guess about why that works. Humans like symmetry. But we also like the surprise when expectations are not filled in the way we thought they'd be. At least in art, we do. Art is the safe space for those kinds of things to happen.

---

other recordings:

1990 remix. The 1990s remix put Lennon's vocals more forward in the mix and added a rap by Queen Latifah. I'm sure this rankled a lot of purists. It has a place in my heart.