It's No Game (Pt. 2)

Album: Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980)
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Songfacts®:

  • "It's No Game (Pt. 2)" is the last song on David Bowie's 1980 Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) album. It's a reprise of the opening track ("It's No Game (Pt. 1)"), but very different in tone. Pt. 1 is filled with fury, with Bowie spewing venom on lines like "To be insulted by these fascists it's so degrading." Pt. 1 has mostly the same lyrics but Bowie delivers them in a pleasant voice over a pop song melody.

    In a 1980 promotional interview, he explained that this was meant to show how protest changes over time: "When a protest or an angry statement is thrown against the wall so many times, the speaker finds that he has absolutely no more energy to give it any impact anymore, so it comes over in that very sort of lilting, very melodic kind of superficial level. The sentiment is exactly the same as in the the first one on the first side, but the ambiance has changed. It's a gentle, almost nostalgic quality to it rather than the very angry statement on the beginning of the album. It's the two sides of social protest."
  • By bookending the Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) album with two versions of "It's No Game," Bowie gave it a concept similar to The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which opens and closes with the title track. Scary Monsters isn't a true concept album though, with the songs standing on their own. The most popular songs from the album are "Ashes To Ashes" and
    Fashion."

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