Close Reading Wednesday: David Bowie’s “Alway Crashing in the Same Car”

The blahness of the verses is what makes the genius of the chorus possible. Like, the verses are founded on a Creative Writing 101-level trope of likening life to driving a car, and suddenly the chorus then goes psycho and explodes the trope in a thousand directions. I mean, basically it’s that you can’t crash in the same car over and over again but the same person can life-crash over and over, so the narrative climax of the analogy is also the analogy’s extinction — self-destruction, really — , which in this way enacts as a cognitive trauma (the violent falling-apart of sense) the narrated trauma of crashing: The chorus is the crashing of the verses. Then the work of reconstructing sense starts…