Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits released “Oh! You Pretty Things” as his debut single in 1971. David Bowie wrote the song and also played piano on Noone’s version.
Videos by American Songwriter
Bowie then recorded his version which appears on Hunky Dory and features future members of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust band, The Spiders From Mars. But it’s fitting for a member of Herman’s Hermits to release the song first. “Oh! You Pretty Things” finds its philosophical roots in a nineteenth-century fictional hermit.
Noone’s cover became Bowie’s highest-charting single as a songwriter since “Space Oddity”. While “Oh! You Pretty Things” offers a theory on improving Homo sapiens, Bowie himself was transforming. He’d return the following year with his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust—the androgynous alien rock star who comes to Earth as a savior.
Superman
Bowie’s song borrows a concept from Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s protagonist Zarathustra is a hermit who addresses a crowd after living on a mountain for 10 years.
He says humans must create a superior form, an improved human called Übermensch—“overman” or “superman.” To make room for Übermensch, current humans must accept their own destruction.
“What are we coming to?
No room for me, no fun for you
I think about a world to come
Where the books were found by the golden ones
Written in pain, written in awe
By a puzzled man who questioned what we were here for.”
Nietzsche wrote that “after such vistas and with such a burning hunger in our conscience and science, how could we still be satisfied with present-day man?”
Meanwhile, David Bowie finishes his chorus with how one must clear the path for Homo superior.
“Oh, you pretty things (oh, you pretty things)
Don’t you know you’re driving your mamas and papas insane?
Let me make it plain
Gotta make way for the Homo superior.”
Artificial Intelligence
“Oh! You Pretty Things” remains timeless as humans struggle with problems that have confounded generations. Often, youth provides a new kind of wisdom to clean up the perceived messes of “mamas and papas.” Bowie’s song might be interpreted as the older generation stepping aside in place of the young.
However, when the next generation makes the same mistakes as their parents, one must find a different fix. A new “superman.” How about artificial intelligence?
The rise of AI might guarantee that “Oh! You Pretty Things”, recorded by Bowie in 1971, stays relevant.
Ziggy Stardust Rises and Falls
Remember how Ziggy Stardust was ultimately bested by his ego. He fell as quickly as he rose to stardom, revealing an all too human fallibility to his extraterrestrial origins.
David Bowie’s piano in “Oh! You Pretty Things” feels playful. It’s a guess whether he was being ironic. Maybe the human desire to improve itself is just novel destruction. Something else we can’t fix.
“Oh! You Pretty Things” might be the song and the story of Ziggy Stardust, the chaser.
Photo by Dezo Hoffman/Shutterstock
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