- published: 19 Mar 2009
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"Underground" is a song from the soundtrack of the film Labyrinth, performed by David Bowie.
The track was something of an experiment for Bowie, dabbling in gospel music to a small extent, helped by a large chorus of backing vocalists and blues guitarist Albert Collins, but retaining use of synthesizers.
Steve Barron directed the video clip for promoting the song, which featured images of Bowie’s most notable “roles”, including Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke (Bowie’s 1975 persona, explicitly named during the title track of Station to Station), Thomas Newton (from The Man Who Fell to Earth), Jareth (from Labyrinth) and Baal, before Bowie dances with the puppet characters from the film and turns into a cartoon himself.
The single reached #21 in the UK charts. A video for “As the World Falls Down”, another track from the Labyrinth album, was mooted for a Christmas 1986 single release, with a 3:36 edit and another Steve Barron video made. However, this release was cancelled, for reasons that are still largely unknown. The video, consisting mainly of clips from the film, has since been released on Bowie collections. In January 1987, another track from the soundtrack, "Magic Dance," was issued as an American 12”-only release.
Underground most commonly refers to:
Underground may also refer to:
In music, a song is a composition for voice or voices, performed by singing. A song may be accompanied by musical instruments, or it may be unaccompanied, as in the case of a cappella songs. The lyrics (words) of songs are typically of a poetic, rhyming nature, though they may be religious verses or free prose.
A song may be for a solo singer, a duet, trio, or larger ensemble involving more voices. Songs with more than one voice to a part are considered choral works. Songs can be broadly divided into many different forms, depending on the criteria used. One division is between "art songs", "pop songs", and "folk songs". Other common methods of classification are by purpose (sacred vs secular), by style (dance, ballad, Lied, etc.), or by time of origin (Renaissance, Contemporary, etc.).
A song is a piece of music for accompanied or unaccompanied voice or voices or, "the act or art of singing," but the term is generally not used for large vocal forms including opera and oratorio. However, the term is, "often found in various figurative and transferred sense (e.g. for the lyrical second subject of a sonata...)." The noun "song" has the same etymological root as the verb "to sing" and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the word to mean "that which is sung" or "a musical composition suggestive of song." The OED also defines the word to mean "a poem" or "the musical phrases uttered by some birds, whales, and insects, typically forming a recognizable and repeated sequence and used chiefly for territorial defence or for attracting mates."