Don’t Forget the Songs-365: Mach Dos: Day 360
Fri, Jan 10, 2013
“A Better Future [Air remix]”
David Bowie
2002
“♫ Don’t
worry, baby/
it goes right
through me/
I’m like the
wind and my
anger will
disperse ♫”
Ever since December 21st’s doomsday came and went, there’s been this feeling that some people are at a loss, dealing with an emotional hangover of the anti climatic passing of the so called Mayan apocalypse. For those of you wandering aimlessly in confused delight, I am reminded of something David Bowie once said at the height of his Ziggy stardom, “There was a distinct feeling that ‘nothing was true’ anymore and that the future was not as clear-cut as it had seemed. Nor, for that matter, was the past. Therefore, everything was up for grabs. If we needed any truths we could construct them ourselves. The main platform would be, other than shoes, ‘We are the future, now.’ And the way of celebrating that was to create it by the only means at our disposal. With, of course, a rock’n’roll band.”
Solely because our civilization has survived [sic] we are being treated with the resurrected gift of a new David Bowie album, due out in March 2013. [And the word on the street or from producer Tony Visconti is that Bowie’s new LP rocks!] Now what usually happens when I hear of a new Bowie album on the horizon, I after dig and go back to the past to reinvestigate some of DB’s electrically eclectic and occasionally electronic flavored catalog of song classics. One album that I have been rediscovering lately is the 9/11 and NYC influenced— 2002’s Heathen. My choice cut, that’s been spinning endlessly on my most played, playlists, is French electro mastermind’s Air’s futuristic freak out remix of “A Better Future.”
In Nicholas Pegg’s The Complete David Bowie, The Thin White Duke described my favorite Heathen bonus track as, “A Better Future was really for my daughter. It’s a very simple song that says, “God, if you don’t change things, I’m not going to love you anymore.” There’s no skirting around the issue—it’s like, ‘What are you doing to us? Why have you allowed my daughter to come into a world of such chaos and despair? I demand a better future or I’m not gonna like you any more.’ It’s a threat to God. There are a few threats to God on this album. Actually, a lot of them sound like they could be… love songs.” Bowie’s song is from the mindset of a new father feeling helpless of shielding his daughter from the evils surrounding her innocent world. Air takes this desperation and twists it by mixing some chaotic and more paranoid beats that takes Bowie’s “A Better Future” into an addictive sounding dance floor dystopia— and I’m already hooked.
David Bowie has the perfect cure for your Doomsday hangover. Why not celebrate surviving tomorrow with Air’s freaky remix? Don’t fear mañana, while waiting for David Bowie’s new album A New Day in March, it’s time to return to the glorious Heathen past of The Thin White Duke; there’s nothing better than passing the time today with a freshly remixed Air of “A Better Future.”
Don't Forget The Songs 365 