Scream Like a Baby

Song infobox
Name = Scream Like a Baby


Artist = David Bowie
Album = Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
Released = September 12 1980
track_no = 7
Recorded = The Power Station, New York; Good Earth Studios, London February-April 1980
Genre = Rock, New Wave, Post-punk
Length = 3:35
Label = RCA Records
Writer = David Bowie
Producer = David Bowie, Tony Visconti
prev = "Teenage Wildlife"
prev_no = 6
next = "Kingdom Come"
next_no = 8

"Scream Like a Baby" is a song written by David Bowie that appears on the 1980 album "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)".

Music and lyrics

The song focusses on a protagonist called Sam who is evidently being held, along with the track's narrator, in a political prison. Though set in the future, the story is related in the past tense, in a fashion Bowie has described as "future nostalgia... A past look at something that hasn't happened yet".Nicholas Pegg (2000). "The Complete David Bowie": p.181] Musically the song is noted for its "ultra-modern new wave guitar/synth sound", as well as for Bowie's use of varispeed vocals to illustrate Sam's downward spiral in the prison hospital – according to "NME" critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray, the effect is "as if the narrator of 'All the Madmen' inhabited the world of '1984'". [Roy Carr & Charles Shaar Murray (1981). "Bowie: An Illustrated Record": p.113]

"Scream Like a Baby" was one of a number of tracks on "Scary Monsters" that evolved from pieces Bowie had written years before. It was originally composed in 1973, with different lyrics, as "I Am a Laser" for The Astronettes (Ava Cherry, Geoffrey MacCormack and Jason Guess). [David Buckley (1999). "Strange Fascination - David Bowie: The Definitive Story": p.207] Bowie worked on an album for the group but it was eventually dropped, finally surfacing in 1995 as the Ava Cherry album "People from Bad Homes"; "I Am a Laser" was one of the tracks.

Other releases

* It was released as the B-side of the single "Fashion" in October 1980.

Notes