![]() " This is the first section of the song that's a conventional length. The F#7 leading to A rather than the expected Bm is a real Bowie-ism he does the same thing in " As The World Falls Down. The prechorus flows seamlessly out of the verse. Also, the phrasing is weird you think it's going to be a pair of sixteen bar units, but the second one cuts off two bars early. There is so much empty space in the melody, entire measures of silence, vast stretches of it. Was Bowie pulling chord names out of a hat? Or was he trying to support a rising chromatic melody from the G-sharp and A in the Amaj7 chord to the B-flat in the G☇ chord to the B-natural in the G chord? That's an appealing idea, but if you don't voice these chords exactly right, then they just kind of thud. ![]() This then leads to an equally inexplicable G chord. That chord is followed by an inexplicable G☇ chord. That chord makes no sense at all! It sounds like a jazzy tonic chord in A major, which nothing up until now has prepared you for. The first chord is Bm, the relative minor in D, no big surprise. The first verse feels like it's an hour and a quarter long, full of harmonic twists and turns. The first part of the intro was twelve bars long, and this second part is eighteen bars long, making for a very atypical thirty bars total. ![]() The second part of the intro is a 1950s-sounding D major doo-wop riff that goes on for what feels like twenty minutes before the first verse finally starts. None of this bears any relationship to anything else in the song. This riff then shifts up a minor third to D Phrygian dominant and then back down to B. The song begins with a metal-ish riff in B Phrygian dominant. Anyway, here's my chart of "Absolute Beginners." ![]()
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