Music and Lyrics
According to co-producer Tony Visconti, "Fashion" was the last song completed in the Scary Monsters sessions, its bassline and some of the melody taking inspiration from Bowie's 1975 hit "Golden Years". Guest guitarist Robert Fripp contributed a series of harsh, mechanical riffs to complement the band's funk/reggae arrangement.
The track was noted for its emotionally vacant choir effect, and the recurring onomatopoeia "beep beep" that Bowie had first used in an unreleased 1970 song called "Rupert the Riley". Another phrase in the lyrics that Bowie borrowed from his past was "People from Bad Homes", the title track of a 1973 album he recorded with his protégés The Astronettes, which went unreleased until 1995.
References to a "goon squad" coming to town provoked theories that the song actually concerns fascism ("the National Front invade the discos", inferred NME critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray). However Bowie played down this interpretation in an interview shortly before the release of Scary Monsters, saying that what he was trying to do was "move on a little from that Ray Davies concept of fashion, to suggest more of a gritted teeth determination and an unsuredness about why one's doing it". Biographer David Buckley believed the song "poked fun at the banality of the dance-floor and the style fascists" of the New Romantic movement.
Read more about this topic: Fashion (David Bowie Song)
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