Love David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” but find the lyrics too highfalutin’? Well, even if the answer is “no,” that’s too bad because a group of performers have figured out a way to simplify Bowie’s breakout hit. Molly Lewis, Marian Call, Seth Boyer, and Patrick Race worked together on “Space Weird Thing,” a sweded version of the video that redoes “Space Oddity” using only the thousand most common words in the English language.
The group was heavily influenced by xkcd’s “Up Goer Five” comic that explains how a rocket ship works by also only pulling from the thousand most common words in English. The result is a pretty hilarious and eerily accurate recreation of the original music video along with lyrics that sound as if they were Google translated from another language. It’s a great send-up that also honors the Bowie original and suggests a whole new genre of send-ups with poetic lyricism transforming into awkward garbled speech.