# What's Major Tom about **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 15, 2002, 6:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-major-tom-about/98429 "2002-03-15T06:13:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Big\_Kahuna\_Burger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Big\_Kahuna\_Burger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Big_Kahuna_Burger)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2002, 6:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-major-tom-about/98429/1 "2002-03-15T06:13:02Z")
Well, what is it about? Is it an allusion of some sort? ---
**Author:** ![Crunchy\_Frog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ebca7d/32.png) [@Crunchy\_Frog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crunchy_Frog)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2002, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-major-tom-about/98429/2 "2002-03-15T06:23:23Z")
Not really to nitpick, but are you referring to David Bowie’s song “A Space Oddity” or Peter Schilling’s song “Major Tom (Coming Home)”? Here’s a bit I got from [this site](http://www.postalnauts.com/newwave/96-11-16/schilling.html): > [@](#): > > There are a number of takes on this early Bowie classic. One is that this is a song about self-destruction, a theme Bowie would return to in “Rock and Roll Suicide” and on his “Station to Station” album. Clearly Major Tom’s demise seems to have been less an accident than a conscious decision to detach himself from the planet below. His circuit abruptly goes dead after his cryptic message to his wife, though there is little doubt that he is still conscious and in some degree of control. > > Bowie himself may have shed light on the meaning of the song in 1980 with his follow-up, “Ashes to Ashes.” It seems that some time after the disappearance of Major Tom ground control receives a message from the wayward astronaut: “I’m happy, hope you’re happy too… I’ve loved all I’ve needed to love…” The opinion on earth seems to be that Major Tom is a “junkie, strung out in heaven’s high,” but hittting “an all-time low.” The song is telling in the wake of Bowie’s own battle with drugs, a struggle which saw him losing in the mid '70s as his body - like that of Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger, and other contemporaries - was showing clear signs of abuse. In the light of this later song, it would seem that Major Tom is a man who has made the painful transtition from a feel-no-pain drug-cowboy to a strung-out junkie desperate to come back down to earth. ---
**Author:** ![Big\_Kahuna\_Burger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Big\_Kahuna\_Burger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Big_Kahuna_Burger)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2002, 6:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-major-tom-about/98429/3 "2002-03-15T06:26:02Z")
Space Oddity, I didn’t know there was another Major Tom out there (rather, a real Major Tom).