Listening to My Death from the Ziggy Stardust Soundtrack this morning reminded me of a question. In his version of Brel’s My Death and Amsterdam , David Bowie used two phrases that are, to me, uniquely American. Weird for an Englishman translating a French song.
In My Death the phrase is “Throw him a dime / For the passing time”. AFAIK, the “dime” has never been a unit of English (or French) currency. I guess the question here would be if that phrase sounds “foreign” to English ears? Would it identify the “voice” of the song to be an American? Or does it just make for a good rhyme? I know if an American act used “farthing” or “pence” in a song it would sound strange to me.
In Amsterdam the phrase is “By the dawn’s early light”. This is from the American national anthem. Is that phrase well known? I mean, I’m pretty sure I could identify parts of God Save The Queen , although only the Eddie Izzard version comes to mind right now.
Any thoughts? Or am I reading way too much into this?
Those songs were covered first by Bowie’s great inspiration and one of my favorite things about this planet, Scott Walker. He was an American working in Europe, but yes as BtES points out the outrageously campy lyrics were by Mort Schuman, the man who gave us “Viva Las Vegas.” Bowie did the songs as covers of Scott Walker songs, so he’d’ve likely kept the lyrics as they were, silly as they are.
OK, shame on me for not checking that. I seem to remember reading somewhere about one of the lines having been “mistranslated” by Bowie, and just assumed that he had done the translations.