Five Years, That's All We've Got

If I’m being honest, I’ve been waiting to write about this song since the beginning of first semester when Mr. Heidkamp mentioned we’d be arguing for a song as poetry: David Bowie’s “Five Years” from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. The album revolves around this persona that Bowie created for himself (called Ziggy Stardust). Ziggy represents the definitive rock and roll character: sexual promiscuity, drug intake, peace, and of course, love. He is supposedly the human manifestation of an alien-type being that is attempting to present humanity with some message of hope in the last five years of its existence – which brings us to the song.

“Five Years” is about the end of the world. Bowie came up with the idea for it as a result of a dream he had where his dead father told him he had five years left to live. The song sends the message that with the knowledge that everything is going to end, the Earth is doomed to destruction.

In the song, Bowie describes various scenes of chaos: the news anchor crying on the television, sad images, people everywhere. I think something that makes it somewhat poetic is his use of irony. We have all these images of fear and then suddenly there’s a girl sitting calmly with a milkshake:

I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlor,
Drinking milkshakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine,
Don’t think you knew you were in this song.

Bowie also uses repetition to show humanity’s inability to function at the knowledge that the world is going to end. The continued use of the phrase “Five years, stuck on my eyes,” kind of gives off the impression that when the world ends, the only thing people with be able to pay attention to is the fact that they have a limited amount of time left. They will refuse to live their lives happily and will instead live the next five years crying.

Another interesting thing about this song is that it is from Ziggy Stardust’s point of view. The way it is written, we get the idea that he starts off trying to cope by filling his mind with all these material things that fascinate him, and then realizes that he actually needs people in order to cope with knowledge that the world is doomed to destruction:

I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies
I saw boys, toys, electric irons and T.V.'s
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there
And all the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people
And all the nobody people, and all the somebody people
I never thought I'd need so many people

As the song begins to end, we see that Ziggy is starting to fall into this less alien-like and more human-like sense of fear; he becomes absorbed by the idea of only having five years (again with the repetition).

I have also provided the video because I think everyone should go listen to “Five Years” right now thanks.