David Bowie - The Man Who Sold the World (Warning Graphic)

"The Man Who Sold the World" is a song by David Bowie. It is the title track of his third album, released in the U.S. in November 1970 and in the UK in April 1971. The song has been covered by a number of other artists, notably by Lulu in 1974, and Nirvana in 1993.

The song's title is similar to that of Robert A. Heinlein's 1949 science fiction novella The Man Who Sold the Moon, with which Bowie was familiar.[However, the song has no similarities with the story of the book. The persona in the song has an encounter with a kind of doppelgänger, as is suggested in the second chorus where "I never lost control" is replaced with "We never lost control". Beyond this, the episode is unexplained: as James E. Perone wrote, Bowie encounters the title character, but it is not clear just what the phrase means, or exactly who this man is. ... The main thing that the song does is to paint — however elusively — the title character as another example of the societal outcasts who populate the album.

In common with a number of tracks on the album, the song's themes have been compared to the horror-fantasy works of H. P. Lovecraft. The lyrics are also cited as reflecting Bowie's concerns with splintered or multiple personalities, and are believed to have been partially inspired by the poem "Antigonish" by William Hughes Mearns:
" Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away..."