Expert: Jamie Soule - 7/23/2001

Question
Bush tributes Bowie's "Life on Mars" in "Everything Zen".  Although I can pretty much piece together what they are both getting at, is there a more concreate understanding of the "Micky Mouse has grown up a cow" lyric?

Thank you!  

Answer

Hi Lauren

The whole album Hunky Dory is ripe with references to religion. Bowie had a practising Buddhist and had seriously considered becoming a novice monk before Lindsay Kemp talked him out of it. It was a book that Bowie read when attending school at Bromley Technical High that first got him interested and also he was influenced by Tony Visconti who was a practising Buddhist at the time.

The overall theme of some of the tracks on Hunky Dory are similar to parts of Station To Station and that is the search for truth and a "Higher Power."  He has stated in many of his lyrics that society is a false hope and there is no truth in "the logic of Homo Sapiens."

The truth as we see it can change because as we grow up and learn more. The things we believed in as children such as Santa Clause, magic and a beautiful peaceful world were corrupted as we grew up. Santa Clause was a lie, magic turned out to be slight of hand trickery and the world was anything but a peaceful utopia. The book Catcher In The Rye is about when we discover that the things, or the people, that we look up to and admire turn out to be anything but admirable when we get a close look inside. They turned out to be phoney. Unfortunately Mark David Chapman used the ideas from this book to have a delusion in his mind that John Lennon was a "phoney" and shot him to death. The lyric you ask about is the same cojecture as the book. The line, "Micky Mouse has grown up a cow," is a clever way to say that the things we thought were real can change leaving one disappointed. Micky was not a mouse after all. This is true Bowie slight of words. More idols than realities, Uh,Uh up the hill backwards it will be alright. Uh! Uh!

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Jamie