Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

child, most of it via eight-track tapes played through
the side speakers of a white plastic Weltron 2001
ball. Even today when I hear “Betcha By Golly Wow”
by the Stylistics or “Games People Play” by the
Spinners (who started out in the sixties as a Detroitbased
Motown act and having had a hit with the
Stevie Wonder–cowritten “It’s a Shame” but
became a bona fide Philly soul phenomenon in the
seventies), I am taken back to the summer of ’75, a
certain time in American life when gloom, terror,
anger and despair (exemplified by the Nixon
resignation, which I watched on television with my
babysitter the year before) seemed to be waning
and Americans began hoping for a better way
again. “Young Americans,” the Bowie song that
shared radio space with much of the
abovementioned soul songs on “black” radio,
spoke to this hope. “Do you remember your
President Nixon,” he asks. It’s one of Bowie’s least
detached vocal performances throughout, and
listening to it now makes me believe that his hope
and love for America, his spiritual country since
childhood, was painfully sincere as well. Bowie
wonders, “We live for just these twenty years, Do we
have to die for the fifty more?” It’s the sound of the
seventies finding its better angels. Even today, as
we in the twenty-first century search again for those
angels, “Young Americans” has the power to erase
some dead, hopeless feelings inside. Like every
damn song I’ve mentioned in this section, it can still
make me break down and cry.