Excellent, very pertinent.

An excellent insight into the key album track. As another comment states, the Orwell estate refused to give Bowie rights for a 1984 musical opera. I'm guessing that Bowie lost interest in the project to a certain degree afterwards. As a result, I've always viewed this album as not what he fully intended and a bit of a mismatch.

Understand that this album is made up of tracks David had been working on for a rock opera about 1984. He couldn't get rights to use the name from Orwell's estate, so the work was basically scrapped, and this album as well as a few tracks that weren't on other records until later were instead released. The album makes a lot more sense when you consider it started out as an homage to 1984.