I couldn't not write about this song since Ethan has blogged about it. I will try to resist the general temptation to write about patterns of modal mutation in Bowie songs and start with an observation that is apt to slip up many a theory analysis that has been predicated on a century or so of being steeped in instrumental music.
Rule #1: when you're analyzing a song never simply assume the first chord that shows up in a song is actually the root chord of the tonal system the song is written in.
Does the song start on B flat? Yes, and a lovely B flat chord it is. It moves to F. As I know Ethan knows in groove-based harmonies a chord could be a I or a IV depending on context so it's possible for B flat to be the "start" chord but for F to be the resolution chord.
In this case decades of Bowie performing the song love and consistently ending the last chorus on F tells us that the song is in the key of F. So it's absolutely in F major.
Tokyo, 1990
Glastonbury 2000
Australia, 2004
But even if we settle that the song is in F major why did Bowie so rarely affirm F as the "home" chord or tonic? As a matter of fact the C7 to F progressions are plain as can be but the genius of the song is that Bowie does two very simple things to warp our sense of the harmonic stability of the song.
The first thing he does is have his ii-V-I jazz chord sequences show up in turnaround or transition passages rather than at the start of or end of the structural blocks of the song. The second thing he does is that he substantially weakens the ii-V-I cadence patterns by alternately having the groove shift abruptly to modal mutations using chromatic mediants and borrowed chords and by having those borrowed chord interruption passages split the seams of the V7-I resolutions. The C7 to F progression will happen but not before chords like A major and G major get in the middle of them, or the C7 to F resolution happens and is immediately upset within the same measure by an A flat to B flat modal mutation riff.
The proliferation of ii-V-V7 progressions that don't always lead to I is another significant tell. The outro passage obviously starts on B flat. This is where Bowie has prepared us to accept B flat as a phrase-starting sonority so he can blithely ignore having to go to F when he wants the song to launch into a song-ending fade-out groove.
ii-V-I progressions are legion in jazz but that doesn't mean they can't show up in pop songs. Yet Ethan is right to point out that G minor seems to be the strongest entry point chord. Even though I'm convinced the song is in F major I am just as convinced Ethan is right to hear G minor as the chord Bowie keeps coming back to. Yes, when he plans on continuing things. I think I've successfully shown from live performances that when Bowie wanted the band to end the song it ended firmly in F.
So why the B flat to F progression at the beginning? It's a simple trick but a wonderful one, you simply don't start your song on the tonic chord. Most of the time a rock song will tend to start with a I-IV progression rather than a IV-I but we should not assume that will always be so. In verses in blues there's a precedent for starting with a IV-I pattern in something like John Lee Hooker's take on "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel". Don't let the oblique motion in the open chord tuning fool you, there's a very strong chord change in that verse but Hooker still opens with a pretty solid tonic chord groove before he gets to his IV-I verse pattern. I mention that establish that just because we're dealing with a rock song doesn't mean we shouldn't draw on the precedents of jazz and blues or Gospel to show that there are songwriting traditions in which the first chord of the verse, or even the first chord of the song, don't oblige us to regard that chord as the root chord of the key. Neither does that mean, however, that a song in the key of F has to be insistent about F major being the tonic chord for much of the length of a song.
So Bowie starts off with a IV-I alternative groove. The "Amen cadence" is how you may have heard of the progression and it's normally presented as a textbook cadence or closing gesture. But Bowie, not entirely unlike Haydn in his day, had no problem taking what people would've expected to be a closing gesture and making it an opening gesture.
Why would a IV-I alternation matter? Precisely because in usual diatonic major keys the ii is considered a IV substitute. Bowie can start every verse with a ii chord because he'd laid down the foundation of some kind of subdominant sonority at the start of the song and yet can simultaneously establish B flat and G minor chords as expected arrival chords because he started on the IV rather than the I. Even though the song is in F major and there's plenty of G minor to C to C7 progressions that "should" go to F if he were following 18th century conventions as prescribed by 19th century pedagogues he clearly didn't have to ... and so he didn't, exactly.
But the firmest ii-V-V7-I progression we get and it's a firm and conventional one indeed, is in the turnaround between the end of Verse 1a and the start of Verse 1b. If we consider the interrupting A major and G major chords as actual interruptions then the C7 that eventually leads to F between Verse 1b and the chorus counts as another ii-V-I progression with an interrupting break.
I want to comment briefly on the interruption breaks because they're transitional passages but also because the first one is F to A flat and B flat while the second is F to A major and then G major. The first is a I leaping to a flat III chord that rises by step to IV while the second is a I leaping by minor third to what is literally a chromatic mediant (A major instead of the expected A minor) before falling down to G, still a whole step but a step down instead of up. There's modal mutation all over the place by way of borrowed chords. The A chord introduces the C#/D flat that will come back in the B flat minor chord in the B flat to B flat minor ascending cadential pattern near the end of the chorus. Despite the fact that the song is consistently in F major Bowie uses two types of chromatic mediants and a variety of subdominant substitutions (B flat major can be substituted with B flat minor, G minor and in the linear resolution even G major can have a supertonic equivalency in a modally mutated context that serves as a linear connection between the C7 and the arrival of the F major for the chorus "Starman ... . "
The brilliance of the harmony is that Bowie uses plain as plain can be chord changes that would be typical of a jazz standard but steadily interrupts them with borrowed chord riffs that modally mutate the F major so as to include chords from F minor and chromatic mediants.
It's a wonderful song, of course and it is mysterious but in many ways the song is profoundly conventional and uses some of the most trite and hackneyed chord formulas available in jazz and pop. So why does it seem so mysterious and effective? I would say it's because Bowie didn't just use conventions or have his music delimited by conventions, he knew when to use conventions and when to manipulate them. Actually, not entirely unlike Haydn Bowie had mastered the art of knowingly manipulating the formulas, norms and expectations of the musical styles of his time to give us something we'd expect but not quite in the way we might have expected it from another sort of songwriter more directly beholden to musical conventions. The contrast I've implicitly set up between Bowie's musical materials and Dylan's materials can now come more to the fore--Dylan has been an unconventional lyricist but his musical structures have often been fairly conventional; Bowie's lyrics are often more conventional compared to Dylan's but he offset that with musical innovation in his use of musical ideas and Stevie Wonder, of course, never met a lyrical cliche he didn't love but anyone who could float chromatic mediant chord changes above a descending octatonic bass line can be forgiven all kinds of lyrical cliches!
Ah, it's fun to be blogging about music again.
POSTSCRIPT 12-20-2021
I just realized that the sing-along "outro" passage is what Robert Gjerdingen would probably say corresponds to a galant era musical schema called the "Prinner". Right down to the 6, 5, 4, 3 melodic descending line! What Bowie does with the Prinner is cycle it across a IV-I-V-I that can theoretically go on indefinitely but which can also be stopped at any time he decides sing-along time has run its course, as witnessed in the live performances. I've appreciate Gjerdingen's work on the galant style and partimento traditions in Neapolitan music education for a few reasons but one of the big ones is that for me it holds some promise in helping to bridge the gap between classical music theory and popular music theory by demonstrating that classical music pedagogy based on student improvisation over stock chord changes has been (or was!) an important part in musical education even if Anglo-American music theory tended to go down a more Schenkerian or A. B. Marxian path.
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