The Man Who Sold the World

"The Man Who Sold the World"
"The Man Who Sold the World" cover
Promotional single by Nirvana from the album MTV Unplugged in New York
Released	1 November 1994
Recorded	18 November 1993 at Sony Music Studios in New York City
Length	4:20
Label	DGC Records
Writer(s)	David Bowie
Producer(s)	Alex Coletti, Scott Litt, Nirvana
MTV Unplugged in New York track listing
13 tracks "About a Girl" "Come as You Are" "Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam" "The Man Who Sold the World" "Pennyroyal Tea" "Dumb" "Polly" "On a Plain" "Something in the Way" "Plateau" "Oh, Me" "Lake of Fire" "All Apologies" "Where Did You Sleep Last Night"

"The Man Who Sold the World" is a song written and performed by David Bowie. It is the title track of his third album, which was released in the US in November 1970 and in the UK in April 1971. The song has been covered by a number of other artists, notably by Lulu, who had a UK No. 3 hit with her version in 1974, and Nirvana, whose 1993 performance of the song for the television program MTV Unplugged introduced it to a new audience.

The song was reworked by Bowie, featuring a heavy bassline, güiro as percussion and a notably darker mood, for performances in concerts from 1995 to 1997, including the 1995 MTV Europe Music Awards. Bowie later returned to playing the original version in the 2000s.

The persona in the song has an encounter with a kind of doppelgänger, as suggested in the second chorus where "I never lost control" is replaced with "We never lost control". Beyond this, the episode is unexplained: as James E. Perone wrote,

Bowie encounters the title character, but it is not clear just what the phrase means, or exactly who this man is. … The main thing that the song does is to paint – however elusively – the title character as another example of the societal outcasts who populate the album.

In common with a number of tracks on the album, the song's themes have been compared to the horror-fantasy works of H. P. Lovecraft. The lyrics are also cited as reflecting Bowie's concerns with splintered or multiple personalities, and are believed to have been partially inspired by the poem "Antigonish" by William Hughes Mearns:

A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…

In the BBC Radio 1 special programme "ChangesNowBowie", broadcast on 8 January 1997, Bowie was interviewed by Mary Anne Hobbs and was asked about the song. He commented: "I guess I wrote it because there was a part of myself that I was looking for. Maybe now that I feel more comfortable with the way that I live my life and my mental state (laughs) and my spiritual state whatever, maybe I feel there's some kind of unity now. That song for me always exemplified kind of how you feel when you're young, when you know that there's a piece of yourself that you haven't really put together yet. You have this great searching, this great need to find out who you really are."