"The Man Who Sold the World" is a song by the English musician David Bowie from his third studio album of the same name. Produced by Tony Visconti, the track was recorded at Trident and Advision Studios in London in May 1970, towards the end of the album's recording sessions. Bowie recorded his vocal on the final day of mixing for the album, reflecting his generally dismissive attitude during the sessions. Musically, it is based around a "circular" guitar riff from Mick Ronson. A psychedelic rock and hard rock song, its lyrics are cryptic and evocative, being inspired by numerous poems, including the 1899 "Antigonish" by William Hughes Mearns. Bowie's vocals are heavily "phased" throughout and have been described as "haunting".

"The Man Who Sold the World" was released in November 1970 in the United States and in April 1971 in the United Kingdom by Mercury Records. It was not released as a single by Bowie, though it appeared as a B-side on the 1973 reissues of "Space Oddity" in the US and "Life on Mars?" in the UK by RCA Records. It was not until it was covered by the Scottish singer Lulu, whose 1974 recording, produced by Bowie and Ronson, peaked at No. 3 on the UK Singles Chart, that the song gained mainstream attention. In subsequent decades, the song has been covered by Scottish musician Midge Ure in 1982, and in 1993 by Nirvana.

Retrospectively, Bowie's original recording has been named one of his best songs, with reviewers praising its haunting and unsettling atmosphere. Later in his career, Bowie's live performances would include notable differences from original recording. This included a markedly darker style during 1995's Outside Tour; a studio recording of the tour's arrangement appeared as a B-side of "Strangers When We Meet" in 1995. He again rerecorded the song in an acoustic arrangement in 1996 for the documentary ChangesNowBowie; which was released in 2020 on the digital version of the EP Is It Any Wonder? and on the album ChangesNowBowie. The original recording has appeared on multiple compilation albums and has been remastered multiple times, including in 2015 as part of the box set Five Years (1969–1973).

Composition and recording The backing track for "The Man Who Sold the World" was recorded at Trident Studios in London on 4 May 1970, along with other album track "Running Gun Blues". At this point, the track was recorded under the working title "Saviour Machine" and did not contain the title phrase. The lineup featured David Bowie on acoustic guitar, Mick Ronson on electric guitar, producer Tony Visconti on bass, Woody Woodmansey on drums and percussion, and Ralph Mace on Moog synthesiser; Ronson and Woodmansey would later become famous as a part of the Spiders from Mars. According to Visconti, Bowie recorded his vocals on 22 May at Advision Studios, the final day of mixing for the album which, when traveling to Advision, Bowie had originally intended to name Metrobolist in homage to Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis. Chris O'Leary writes that Bowie wrote the lyrics in the reception area of the studio while Visconti waited at the mixing console. Once Bowie finished, he quickly recorded his vocal and Visconti added a "flange" effect and mixed the track in a few hours, sending the tapes to the label later that night. Bowie's last-minute addition frustrated Visconti, who recalled in 1977: "This was the beginning of [Bowie's] new style of writing – 'I can't be bothered until I have to'. When it was finished, on the last day of the last mix, I remember telling David, 'I've had it, I can't work like this anymore – I'm through' ... David was very disappointed." Visconti's frustration was due in part to his dissatisfaction with the recording sessions: as producer he was mostly in charge of budget and production, as well as maintaining Bowie's interest in the project. In 1976, Bowie would tell BBC Radio 1's Stuart Grundy in that: "It was a nightmare, that album. I hated the actual process of making it."

The end result was something highly unusual. It was described by music critic Peter Doggett as "enigmatic", while Nicholas Pegg described it as giving an "unassuming air of pathos and menace". Doggett notes that the track contains none of the "metallic theatrics" that are found on the rest of the album. Musically, the song opens with a repeating electric guitar riff from Ronson with an acoustic guitar from Bowie underneath it. The electric bass and Moog synthesiser notwithstanding, O'Leary writes that apart from Ronson's electric guitar, the song is primarily acoustic. The chord structure is in the key of F with an A major chord "borrowed" from the D minor scale, similar to the track "All the Madmen" off the same album. Throughout the song, Visconti's bass "runs scales" under the chorus and a melody "elsewhere", Woodmansey plays "ecstatic" drum fills deep in the mix and Latin-style percussion "trembling" on the surface, while Ronson uses feedback to introduce the chorus. Bowie's vocals are "heavily phased" during the verses and briefly doubled (which, in Bowie's words, "came as some surprise" in post), compressed and again double-tracked during the chorus. Douglas Wolk of Rolling Stone similarly calls Bowie's vocals and lyrics "haunting". Pegg describes the guiro percussion as "sinister", the guitar riff "circular" and Bowie's vocal "ghostly". The tracks ends with a coda in D minor containing wordless vocals, described by Doggett as a "haunting chorale" and by O'Leary as "ominous". Musically, "The Man Who Sold the World" has been described as a psychedelic rock and hard rock song, with a length of three minutes and fifty-eight seconds.

Title and lyrics

According to Doggett, the song's title has multiple "precursors": including a 1949 Robert A. Heinlein science fiction novella The Man Who Sold the Moon; a 1954 DC comic, "The Man Who Sold the Earth"; and a 1968 Brazilian political satire, The Man Who Bought the World. However, none of these have a thematic link to Bowie's song. Pegg suggests that the title partly reflects an element of "self-disgust" Bowie has over the thought of "losing control" and "selling" his private life via profoundly personal music.

The lyrics are noted as being very cryptic and evocative; in Doggett's words, "begging but defying interpretation." Like most of his work during this period, Bowie frequently avoided giving a direct interpretation of the lyrics. He later remarked that he felt it was unfair to give it to Lulu in 1973 because it dealt with the "devils and angels" within himself. Bowie once stated that the song was a sequel to "Space Oddity" which, in Doggett's words, is "an explanation designed to distract rather than enlighten", quoting the lyrics "Who knows? Not me". The song's narrator has an encounter with a kind of doppelgänger, as 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 several 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 family problems and splintered or multiple personalities and are believed to have been partially inspired by the poem "Antigonish" by William Hughes Mearns: "As I was going up the stair / I met a man who wasn't there / He wasn't there again today / I wish, I wish he'd stay away..." By claiming he "wasn't there", Bowie "compounds" the identity crisis while believing his companion "died alone, a long, long time ago." Pegg writes that the "defacement of the individual" and "dread of mortality" provide "grim counterparts" to the "immortal anguish" of fellow album track "The Supermen" and the meditations on "impermanence" and "rebirth" in "After All".

Release and reception The Man Who Sold the World was released in November 1970 through Mercury Records as Bowie's third studio album, with "The Man Who Sold the World" released as the eighth and penultimate track, sequenced between "She Shook Me Cold" and "The Supermen". Although no singles were issued from the album, the song appeared as the B-side on the 1973 reissue US single release of "Space Oddity" and UK single release of "Life on Mars?", both by RCA Records.

Retrospectively, Bowie's original recording has been named one of his best songs, with many praising the haunting and unsettling nature of the recording. Following Bowie's death in 2016, Rolling Stone listed the song as one of his 30 essential songs. The same year, Ultimate Classic Rock, in their list of Bowie's ten best songs, listed "The Man Who Sold the World" at number 10, calling it "one of his most haunting songs of all time". They subsequently commended Lulu and Nirvana's cover versions for helping bring the song into the mainstream. In 2018, NME, in their list of Bowie's 40 greatest songs, ranked "The Man Who Sold the World" number 17, writing, "[The track] is not just a vintage slice of Bowie story-telling but a key part in his '90s renaissance, 20 years later", due in part to Nirvana's cover, which appeared at a time when "Bowie's critical stock was at a career-low... coming after Bowie's late-'80s run of maligned albums." In 2020, Alexis Petridis of The Guardian ranked the song 23rd in a list of Bowie's 50 greatest songs, writing, "The title track of his eeriest album remains mysterious, creepy and haunting 50 years on."

Legacy Bowie's original recording of "The Man Who Sold the World" has been released on multiple compilation albums, including The Best of David Bowie 1969/1974 (1997), Best of Bowie (2002), Nothing Has Changed (2014) and Legacy (2016). The song, along with its parent album, has been remastered multiple times, including in 2015 as part of the box set Five Years (1969–1973). Bowie performed the song on numerous occasions. He appeared on the American television programme Saturday Night Live in December 1979, performing the song with Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias. Pegg calls this version "superb". He performed the song during his summer 2000 Mini Tour, including at the BBC Radio Theatre in London and at the Glastonbury Festival. Performances from these venues have been released on Bowie at the Beeb (2000) and Glastonbury 2000 (2018), respectively. A performance from the Reality Tour is featured on the live album A Reality Tour (2010).

The song has been covered by hundreds of artists, with many noting that certain covers have managed to outshine the popularity of Bowie's original recording. Scottish singer Lulu recorded a version in 1974 that was produced by Bowie and Ronson and later became a top ten hit on the UK singles chart. Scottish musician Midge Ure recorded a version for the soundtrack to the 1983 film Party Party, though it mainly gained popularity through its inclusion in the 2015 video game Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. American rock band Nirvana performed the song for the television program MTV Unplugged in 1993, introducing it to a new audience. Speaking about Lulu's recording, Bowie recalled in 2002, "I still have a very soft spot for [Lulu's] version, though to have the same song covered by both Lulu and Nirvana still bemuses me to this day." AllMusic's Dave Thompson argues that the Lulu, Midge Ure and Nirvana recordings have managed to "establish the song at the very forefront of Bowie's canon." Pegg writes that the popularity of its covers have made listeners unaware that Bowie wrote the song. However, Alexis Petridis of The Guardian argues that although subsequent covers have tended to outshine Bowie's original in terms of popularity, none have ever matched the quality of the original.