Mixtape Mania Returns! Bowie's Back! In A Ton Of Different Languages!

And the enunciations continue! Stop the press! Hot from the mixing desk! That's Right! Can't Stop Won't Stop!

O.k., enough of this nonsense. But yeah, holiday pastime Bowie mixing is back. It might not have seemed that way, because I spread out my little Bowie mixtapes/megamixes over a year and a half of One Buck Records time, but these were all done in summer 2023, along with the 2.Downtown continuation of the Nathan Adler diaries. And by the end of the summer, I was very well mixed out and Bowie'd out, so I bowed out of Bowie mixing endeavors for a good long while.  But while sorting through my music folders a month or so ago, I realized that at the time I had put a bunch of songs aside for two further mixes, including one with a thematic hook that I really wanted to do. 

And wouldn't you know it, it's the first week of holidays for me, so I could get to work right away, and Bowie mixtape no. 5, fresh from OBG's mixing desk, is here. And if the name of the mix, Babel, hasn't tipped you off yet - it's the first one with a clearly defined theme: Bowie has dabbled, for most of his career, in recording in different languages to cater to his fans worldwide. No one can accuse Bowie of not being a cunning linguist...   

Sometimes he cut a foreign language version because he loved the coutry or the language, as in his two Indonesian-language songs, and sometimes as a career move, such as trying to catch the attention of German schlager listeners in 1967 with a 'German version' (basically one German verse followed by most of the song in English) of "Love You 'Till Tuesday". The same idea is essentially true for the Italian adaptation of "Space Odyssey". Bowie was told that Italians wouldn't get the whole spaceship astronaut thing, so the song was turned into "Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola" - lonely boy, lonely girl. How do you say 'lost in translation' in Italian? 

Some of these tracks went nowhere, such as a barely released Spanish version of "Day-In, Day-Out", others were little gifts to fans, such as the Japanese version of "Girls" as Bowie's habitual bonus track for the Japanese album version of Never Let Me Down, or the French and German adaptations of "Heroes" on those countries' versions of the album of the same name. I also went back to his Berlin trilogy for the Turkish-flavored parts of "Yassassin" and the wordless vaguely Eastern-inspired wailing of"Warszawa", as well as the African rhythms of "African Night Flight" and a snatch of Japanese from "It's No Game". The atmosphere of "Abdulmajid" seemed to fit, so that instrumental track got mixed in as well. This is not supposed to be an 'all non-English music of Bowie, ever' thing, but pretty much everything of significance that isn't English should be here. 

Here's the tally of Bowie's Babel: 2x German, 2x Italian, 2x Indonesian, 1x Spanish, 1x French, 1x Mandarin, plus the above mentioned bits and bops, for the usual 30 minutes of Bowie. 

Bowie the chameleon is one of those easy catchphrases for the genre-hopping artist, but he is also - and definitely -  a chameleon in terms of dealing with these foreign languages. I obviously can't speak for how well he pulls off Indonesian, Japanse and Mandarin, but the Spanish sounds okay. He clearly doesn't speak German and manages with phonetics, while Italian seems to come naturally to him. His accent in French is pretty atrocious, though. But these versions are often more than pure gimmicks, and seem to have been important for Bowie, at one stage or another of his career. Now they can all be enjoyed in one easily digestable 30 minute package which I hope you will enjoy. In any language.