Shelter in Playlist: “Cosmic Dancer”

This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. Here is the fifth entry about a series of tracks of I’m calling “Lovestuck.” If you’d like to read the posts in order of how the songs appear on the playlist, start here. Hope you enjoy.

Are you seeing a pattern yet? Lonesome, surrounded by a menagerie of glittering links to the past, to other worlds. Inconsolable except by the stars. Though I will focus on the lyrics, my favorite part of “Cosmic Dancer” is the sound of Marc Bolan’s guitar. Based on what I hear, I believe (I can’t confirm with a cursory Google search) that these riffs are actually being played backward. The conventional electric guitar is a piercing, jagged sound; people love it because they can practically see or feel the notes penetrating the air. But backward, the riffs of “Cosmic Dancer” sound like they’re being sucked back into the void whence they came. The edges are rounded. Eroding, retreating. Leaping like a gull call back to the beginning of each note.

“Cosmic Dancer” is off of T. Rex’s Electric Warrior, an album that contained the one and only hit to cross the pond with American listeners, but funnily enough, the hit wasn’t today’s featured song. Beyond the DJ-favorite “Bang a Gong (Get it On),” the popularity of “Cosmic Dancer” has climbed only in recent years, or at least its use in soundtracks has increased. I first heard the song backing Todd Haynes’ 1998 box office flop Velvet Goldmine, a beautiful, strange, borderline melodramatic retelling of the birth and evolution of glam rock, an aesthetic musical movement of which Marc Bolan was a part. With a plot that’s two parts Citizen Kane, one part Almost Famous, we follow a journalist and a rockstar (a David Bowie-inspired character; so close, in fact, that Haynes had to rewrite the script for fear of a lawsuit) in intersecting vignettes, watching the blooming spirit of British queerness and camp travel in currents from Brian Slade (a la David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Jobriath), to Curt Wild (a la Iggy Pop, Lou Reed). Just as the aesthetics of glam-rock transcend sexuality, the movie is about more than the illicit affairs of its characters. Velvet Goldmine‘s “Rosebud” is a piece of jewelry owned by Oscar Wilde, given from the Iggy Pop character to the rock journalist as a kind of talisman. With this moment as its climax, the movie also seems to be about homage, carrying a legacy of those who live and create outside of convention. Specifically, British and American convention, and more specifically, Haynes’ focus is on the creators who are white men, with the exception of a nod to the late Little Richard. (Speaking of those influenced by Little Richard, I would love to see a version of this homage story with Prince at its center.)

Back to T. Rex: this song strikes me as the melancholy heart of glam rock, the melancholy heart of camp.* If camp is about any style that thumbs its nose at societal notions of “good” or “tasteful,” then “Cosmic Dancer” is about the loneliness of the uncommon. To perform camp, one must be both joyfully accessible and intentionally repulsive. One must beckon eyes and ears with spectacle, but remain impertinent, impenetrable. “I danced myself right out the womb,” Bolan’s speaker narrates in nasally, tremulous tones. A truly camp-y image: the tiny Marc Dolan, soft-shoeing between his mother’s legs, a universal experience that is somehow met with almost universal disgust for its viscera. And there’s loneliness here, too. He danced himself right out. No help implied. A similar solitude hangs over the other mentions of dancing, “when I was out,” and “when I was eight.” I see an eight-year-old boy, alone in his room, swaying—please tell me you see it, too. Just as I see myself when I am a kid, imagining an enraptured audience as I leap about with my chubby body, transporting myself into fantasy scenarios with trips and turns.

*This paragraph is working with a more general definition of “camp” as laid out Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp.” However, Sontag was wrong: the origins of “camp” cannot and should not be extracted from queer culture, especially from the communities and code invented by queer and trans people of color. Read Moe Meyer’s response to Sontag in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, this 2018 essay by Chi Luu, or check out this excellent overview of the history of camp by Erika W. Smith.

Like Velvet Goldmine, and matching the tone of “Cosmic Dancer”—i.e. “What’s it like to be a loon? I’d like it to a balloon”—the whole Electric Warrior album questions the origins of one’s perceived strangeness. Brian James writes in Pitchfork, “With the incomparable aid of producer Tony Visconti, Bolan sketches a vast, empty room, where, after the party’s over, he resides alone, wide-eyed and desperate.” I can imagine it, this dark room James conjures, abandoned by the tastemakers, the dotted disco lights rotating around the speaker like the swirling, indifferent cosmos. But I can also see him get up, start to sway as he did when he was a child. While questioning the strange, “Cosmic Dancer” also embraces it, especially considering the speaker dances through life all the way to the end. The mention of “tomb” is paired with heavenly strings, and a sense—as I said about the backward-seeming playback of the guitar—of the sound rewinding. “But then again,” the speaker says right before the final chorus, “Once more.” Once more through life, indefinitely.

Six years after Electric Warrior was released, Marc Bolan died in a car crash. While his human body expired, the lovely, strange worlds created by T. Rex live on. Or maybe, like the wishes of his glam-rock counterpart David Bowie, it isn’t just music that is still with us. “I always had sort of a repulsive need to be more than human,” Bowie once said. Perhaps Bolan is still here in the form of some astronomical material, some benevolent particle that floats through our houses, that gets kicked up with the dust as we dance.