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 as the eighth and penultimate track on Bowie's third studio album of the same name in November 1970 in the US and in April 1971 in the UK by Mercury Records. 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