Fall Dog Bombs the Moon

"Fall Dog Bombs the Moon" is a song written by David Bowie in 2003 for his album Reality. According to Bowie himself at the time of the album release, "It came from reading an article about Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company that Dick Cheney used to run. Basically, Kellogg Brown & Root got the job of cleaning up Iraq. What tends to happen is that a thing like an issue or a policy manifests itself as a guide. It becomes a character of some kind, like the one in Fall Dog. There's this guy saying, 'I'm goddamn rich'. You know, 'Throw anything you like at me, baby, because I'm goddamn rich. It doesn't bother me.' It's an ugly song sung by an ugly man. So it was definitely about corporate and military power."

Biographer Nicholas Pegg wrote his own interpretation of the song: "The key on this occasion is the fearful predicament of global politics at the time of the Reality sessions. The album was recorded during the preamble to, and the prosecution of, the Iraq war, and it's impossible to hear lyrics like 'I don't care much, I'll win anyway.../I'm goddamn rich, an exploding man/When I talk in the night, there's oil on my hands' without pondering their most obvious resonance. It wouldn't be particularly extravagant to surmise that the 'Moon' of the title suggests the Crescent Moon of Islam, thereby narrowing down the candidates for 'Fall Dog' fairly decisively."