'Time' is a song written by David Bowie in New Orleans in November 1972 during the American leg of his first Ziggy Stardust tour. It was released as the opening track on Side Two of the album "Aladdin Sane" in April 1973.
The piece has been described as "burlesque vamp", and compared to the cabaret music of Jacques Brel and Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill. Keyboardist Mike Garson said that he employed "the old stride piano style from the 20s and I mixed it up with avant-garde jazz styles plus it had the element of show music, plus it was very European." Co-producer Ken Scott took credit for the idea of mixing the sound of Bowie's breathing right up front when the music paused, just before guitarist Mick Ronson launched into his cacophonous solo.
The song's best-known couplet is "Time - he flexes like a whore / Falls wanking to the floor"; RCA allowed it to remain in the US single edit, being unfamiliar with the meaning of the British term "wanking".
Like its parent album, 'Time' has divided critical opinion. Biographer David Buckley calls the full-length version "five minutes of wired perfection" and the lyrics "poetic and succinct", while NME critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray have described the words as sounding "strained and incomplete", concluding that "with such a weak lyric, the overly melodramatic music sounds faintly absurd".