“Ashes to Ashes” is a follow up to “Space Oddity”, reinterpreting its iconic stranded spaceman Major Tom as a drug addict lost in the throes of substance abuse.

In addition to alluding to longtime rumors that “Space Oddity” was secretly about heroin, this song is also an open-faced allegory for David Bowie’s own experiences with cocaine addiction. In 1976, at the height of his substance abuse, Bowie notoriously got lost in character as the fascist and sociopathic Thin White Duke while promoting the role’s parent album, Station to Station, leading to a number of PR incidents that led people to suspect that Bowie was genuinely a neo-Nazi. As his actual politics were in direct opposition to Nazism and fascism as a whole (as demonstrated elsewhere throughout Scary Monsters), Bowie retreated to Berlin alongside his similarly drug-addled friend Iggy Pop, both hoping to detox for good (Berlin was ironically a heroin hotspot, but Bowie attributed his distaste of that drug as a blessing during those years).

This journey resulted in three seminal David Bowie albums in the waning years of the ‘70s: Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger. They are known as The Berlin Trilogy, also called his “Berlin Period.”