Subterraneans

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"Subterraneans" is a mostly instrumental song by David Bowie for his album Low from 1977.

The final of several portrait pieces on the b-side of Low, this song is specifically meant to invoke the misery of those in East Berlin. According to Bowie, they "got caught in East Berlin after the separation - hence the faint jazz saxophones representing the memory of what it was."

The lyrics are amongst Bowie's most inaccessible; Bowie barely forms sentences in his song which has received more lyrical confusion than in any other piece he wrote. As written in the liner notes to the 1999 rerelease of Low, the lyrics are simply "Share bride failing star, care-line care-line care-line care-line driving me Shirley, Shirley, Shirley, own." However, it is debated that the lyric "care-line" is in fact the woman's name "Caroline," or that "Shirley" is not a name, but the word "surely." Due to varying sources and questionable reliability, the lyrics remain unverified, however, this may ultimately be an intentional move on Bowie's part to have the message essentially lost, in effort to capture the feeling of those in East Berlin.

The music contains a synthesiser motif identical to that of Edward Elgar's Nimrod, the 9th Enigma Variation.

Together with "Ian Fish, U.K. Heir" and "The Mysteries" from The Buddha of Suburbia, this is one of Bowie's most ambient songs. With the help of Brian Eno and his use of synthesizers, this piece was ultimately the most heavily edited, with the presence of reversed instrument sounds, numerous orchestral synthesizer patches, and a heavy layering of Bowie's voice singing in a monk-like fashion.

The piece was rumoured to be originally intended for use in the soundtrack to The Man Who Fell to Earth. Though this rumour was false, the reversed track used as the bass-line in this piece was actually the only remaining intact part of the soundtrack that Bowie used on the Low album.

[edit] Live versions

The song was used as an introduction to Bowie's set during the 1995 Outside tour. It was different from the album version in that it had it's lyrics and musical themes merged from the song Scary Monsters (which would follow Subterraneans on the setlists). This version was performed alongside their co-headliners, Nine Inch Nails.