Everyone Thought This 1970s Hit Was an Anthem, but the Songwriter Thought It Was “Completely Opposite”

When Mott The Hoople released “All The Young Dudes” in 1970, it seemed to be a love song to the glam generation. “All the young dudes carry the news / Boogaloo dudes carry the news.” The song seemed to be speaking directly to an in-the-know subcommunity—an “I see you, and I know you see me” moment. And the public couldn’t be blamed for that perception. The band inherently imbued this attitude into the song because it felt anthemic when they first heard it, too.

The members of Mott The Hoople first heard “All The Young Dudes” played on acoustic guitar by its songwriter, David Bowie. In Paul Trynka’s Starman: David Bowie, The Definitive Biography, singer Ian Hunter recalled, “I knew straight away it was a hit. There were chills going down my spine. It’s only happened to me a few times in my life: when you know that this is a biggie. We grabbed hold of it.”

So, why would Bowie, a commercial musician in his own right, be willing to part with a song that seemingly spoke to an entire generation? Easy. It’s because he didn’t think that it did. And if it did say anything, it wasn’t exactly a palatable message.

“All the Young Dudes” Is in the Ziggy Stardust Canon

To Mott The Hoople and the countless rock ‘n’ roll fans who heard and sang along to that song from 1970 onward, “All The Young Dudes” was morbidly humorous, to be sure. But there was something spunky about it that made it easy to identify with, even if some parts of the song sounded negative. According to David Bowie, the negativity was all he meant to focus on when writing the song. In fact, it was an extension of an apocalyptic storyline from his Ziggy Stardust canon.

The legend of Ziggy Stardust sees its titular character in the middle of a five-year doomsday countdown. “Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted,” Bowie explained in a 1974 interview with Rolling Stone. “The older people have lost all touch with reality, and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock ‘n’ roll band, and the kids no longer want rock ‘n’ roll. Ziggy’s adviser tells him to collect news and sing it, cause there is no news.”

The news Ziggy sings about, of course, is the impending apocalypse. Bowie extended this plot line into “All The Young Dudes”. He described it to Rolling Stone as “a song about this news. It is no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite.”

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