In the chameleonic career of David Bowie, no era captures his talent of molding himself into personas just one step ahead of the zeitgeist than his glam period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While the album Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars is revered in the minds of listeners as the work most representative of this stage in his life, it’s his 1970 offering The Man Who Sold The World that hides an unsung treasure, among its already glittering ranks, that extracts and utilizes a very specific element of glam's inherent theatricality, even if it comes nowhere close to exercising it in a literal sense.
"She Shook Me Cold" stands out from the rest of The Man Who Sold The World; musically speaking there’s little in the way of humming soap opera organs, or the grandiose pomp of swirling synthesizers spiralling merrily towards the heavens. If one of the key elements of the glam ethos is dressing oneself in extravagant costumes as a method of transfiguration, then "She Shook Me Cold" is Bowie's brilliant attempt at taking the standard love song, typically full of admiration and longing for a young lady's affections and normally attired in the soft, gossamer glow of pink chiffon, and stripping it naked right before our ears, rolling it through the mud and adorning it with the dark, heavy garb of his early 1970s contemporaries Black Sabbath. While this may sound utterly laughable on the surface, it becomes less so upon closer examination. From the initial strains of its grey, stagnant churn, Bowie weaves a narrative about a woman so stunning and powerful that even the self admitted lothario of the song cannot hold his ground against her feminine wiles, while a tableau of bluesy undertones and lightning quick tempo changes as Mick Ronson's Iommi-esque guitar wail segues seamlessly into the doom laden buzzing of Tony Visconti, whose faux Butler basslines seem to hum and stutter in all the right places.
While "She Shook Me Cold" may not be a love song in any traditional sense, this barbed wire valentine is not about the epitome of our fondest romantic notions realized, but rather a fuzzy, sexed up, roll in the mud with an object of desire so beguiling, that we'll gladly trade our sense of sanity or common sense for just one more go.
