David Bowie (Pt. 2)

Art Decade (1980-2016)

Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) is his most front-loaded album, with all of its eccentric charms being used up before the second side. “It’s No Game (Part 1)” is self-consciously hideous (a good thing), Bowie screaming at inner demons which contrasts with the robotically spoken Japanese vocals that end up being the most melodic part of the song (which is to say, it ain’t a melodic song). “Up the Hill Backwards” is an absolute joy and ranks among my top ten favourite Bowie songs, the instrumental sections chugging along as if we are actually going up the hill (backwards), and the hook is re-assuring: “It’ll be alright!” Even Sisyphus might feel better. The title track is manic because it must be: Bowie as a scary monster chasing after a woman in a twisted relationship; the lyrics are genuinely concerning and make me think of the death-obsessed X from that same year: “When I looked in her eyes, they were blue but nobody home”; “Now she’s stupid in the street and she can’t socialize.” These are dark; way darker than you’d expect, even for Bowie. “Ashes to Ashes” is the “Space Oddity” sequel where, even after a decade of floating in space, Major Tom still isn’t saved. (I like it more as a song; that riff is great. But I wonder if it was truly ‘needed’ since it clears up the ambiguity of the original: “We know Major Tom’s a junkie.” Well, okay then.) “Fashion” has more pulse than anything on Lodger: there’s more groove in the bass and more space in the mix for Robert Fripp, which makes me wonder why that album was so comparatively bloodless. All good stuff; great, even! But there’s barely any melodic content in the second half from Bowie and it’s left to the other personnel to save the material, particularly Robert Fripp on “Teenage Wildlife” and George Murray on “Scream Like a Baby” (41 seconds in). I wonder if switching the positions of “It’s No Game”—Neil Young-style—would have helped this album flow a little more, and also having the neat trick of letting it end with Bowie screaming “SHUT UP” and the album just cutting afterwards.

Consider this the fall. I know some people hold Let’s Dance in some regard (not even high regard), but it’s here where David Bowie stopped even trying to be the art rock auteur that he became on Station to Station. And even after he emerged out of the 1980s, some of his records felt more like trend-chasing than trend-establishing, even though he never really established anything (i.e. Eno already dropped the half-song, half-ambient Another Green World before helping Bowie with his half-song, half-ambient albums). In keeping with the shift of 1983, the songs on Let’s Dance are longer on average without doing anything to earn the extra run-times; the drum beats are do that thing where it stopped sounding like human beings were producing them. “Modern Love” is fun, with the squiggly saxophones and two chord finish ending every measure. “China Girl”—a cover of Iggy Pop’s song from The Idiot—generated enough royalties for Pop so we didn’t have to hear any more awful Iggy Pop albums during this period. “Let’s Dance” is a glimpse into David Bowie as a potential house artist, which he never tried, thank God. “Without You” is pure falsetto and no tune. “Ricochet” sucks. “Cat People” replaces Giorgio Morodor and does nothing to improve the song. God, that cover! The three main components of the cover—Bowie himself, the font of his last name, the ‘connect the dots’ stylization of the album title—all clash with one another. Predictably, it was his best-selling album.

Still, Let’s Dance plays like a masterpiece compared to Bowie’s next two albums which slid further into this Godless territory. Most notable about Tonight is the very slight reggae influence that pervades its songs, although somehow Bowie’s version of reggae beats don’t have enough energy to get themselves off the floor, including the title track featuring Tina Turner. “Loving the Alien” has an understated ‘ah ah ah’ vocal that sounds vaguely like it was influenced by Laurie Anderson’s masterpiece, and while it might be the best song on the album (finally, some space!), it’s long and not rewarding enough; big hit “Blue Jean” features some really obnoxious vocals from Bowie as if trying to get you to feel anything, which is more than I can say for the rest of the album. Iggy Pop shows up to collect some coke money but no one knows what he actually does. There’s a cover of “God Only Knows” that serves the same purpose as Bowie & Mick Jagger’s mega-smash cover of “Dancing in the Street” soon to come in that both make me wonder how we got from those masterpieces in the 60s to these in a relatively short amount of time. (Okay, everyone needs to watch the music video for “Dancing in the Street” once in their lifetimes, obviously. Better if you just mute the actual song though.)

In 1986, David Bowie was cast as the Goblin King (Bowie gives all of his goblin minions +1/+1 and mountainwalk) in the film Labyrinth of which he and Trevor Jones created the soundtrack for. “Underground” was the hit, teased early in the film when a young Jennifer Connelly runs home in the rain and then used for the credits again in the film, but obviously “Magic Dance” is the true winner because—like “Dancing in the Street”—the visuals:

“As the World Falls Down” is better than anything from his forthcoming album, but that electric bass that’s chiefly responsible for getting from one measure to the next sounds like punctuating fart and highlights an issue I have with Bowie/everyone’s songs around this period: acoustic(-sounding) instruments could have done the trick better than synthetic ones.

And so we arrive at Never Let Me Down, his worst album, missing the simultaneous bottoming out from all the rock legends of 1986 by one year. The joke reviews write themselves: time does crawl! He did let us down! Etc. Bowie himself acknowledges that it’s not good at all (“It was such an awful album […] I really shouldn't have even bothered going into the studio to record it”), so I won’t dwell on the specifics too much. “Beat of your Drum” has the airs of old Bowie but doesn’t sound like the same artist; “Zeroes” overloads itself with clichés and just won’t fucking die, and not helping is the Prince reference making you yearn for the rare talent that made these sounds sound, not just good, but actually great. Bowie disliked “It’s Dizzy” so much that it’s now the rare song that’s purposely excluded off subsequent releases, but frankly the rest of the album isn’t that much better. Overall, in terms of rock legends that had a troubling 80s’ period, Bowie’s output doesn’t compare to Bob Dylan’s or Neil Young’s, and part of that is that he simply produced less notable anything but also he didn’t get as interestingly bad either: it’s not even fun or funny to listen to Never Let Me Down whereas there are a few laughs to be had on the bad songs from Knocked Out Loaded. “You wanna ramble?” Well, no, but also…I can’t look away?

Everyone quickly ditched the 80s’ sonics as soon as the new decade began, and Bowie returned to the artsy sound of his pre-Let’s Dance records that would more or less characterize the rest of his output. Black Tie White Noise is a wedding album celebrating his marriage to Iman; the ‘black tie’ in the title refers to a ‘black tie affair,’ while also doubling for the call to end racism in the title song. It’s strange: Bowie wanted to avoid making “Ebony & Ivory” (the over-hated McCartney-Wonder hit from the 80s) in “Black Tie White Noise” but all he did was make something equally unbearable. Forgotten R&B man Al B. Sure! (period and exclamation mark) starts things off with “I’ve got a face, not just a race”—fine, whatever—and then proceeds to shoot the listener twice, “Bang bang! I’ve got you babe” like a bad hip-hop song, and it’s clear no one put any effort into the lyrics. And then Bowie immediately shows up with “Cranking out the white noi-noiiii-noiiiiise” and that swishing of the word ‘noise’ ranks as his worst vocal ever. Most of the songs, including the other two singles “Jump They Say” and “Miracle Goodnight" and cross-over jazz instrumental “Looking for Lester” (featuring the other Bowie, Lester), feature the rinky-dink electronic drums that were everywhere in the early-90s (we basically swapped out one horrible drum sound for another). The Morrissey cover ain’t bad. The wedding songs—reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s wedding song for Sara—are all touching for exactly one person and it ain’t you or me.

I agree with everyone (including Bowie) that The Buddha of Suburbia ended up as secretly Bowie’s best album this whole decade, but it’s not that good. No great songs, for starters. Bowie sounds surprisingly distant in the title track, and not in that cool, disaffected way of previous songs but it sounds like a weird filter has been applied to his voice. (Not helping is the echo on “Englishmen going insane (saaaane).”) “Strangers When We Meet” sounds like any radio hit around this time, and frankly I don’t see what Bowie saw in this song that he would remake it again one album later, and the same applies for “Dead Against Me” - a very dopey-sounding chord progression. “Bleed Like a Crazy, Dad” brings us boldly back into Never Let Me Down territory with guitars and drums that sound like loud mush. “Sex and the Church” sounds like Bowie remembered Kraftwerk but not what made them special. Two of the three instrumentals—“The Mysteries” and “Ian Fish UK Heir”—seem like the sort that ‘work better in context’ but I’m doubtful that they even manage that much, but the third one, “South Horizon,” has some very good noir jazz playing but it’s so unfortunate it has these lame hip-hop beats that keep peaking their heads in to see what’s going on.

Outside is the first Bowie album with Eno involvement since the ‘Berlin Trilogy,’ and so it’s also the first Bowie album in a long line of them where critics were too quick to declare it a comeback of sorts. Despite a love for the fantastical, Bowie never really fell pray to the over-conceptualization like so many prog albums; that is, until this album. 74 minutes, and not a tune in sight. Not even enough interesting texture either, which is surprising since Eno’s on deck: there is the needling drum-work of “We Prick You” (including OMD’s “Enola Gay” drum hook), sure, but not enough. Industrial fans might dig the general atmosphere and the pummel of the drums and distorted guitars; give “Hallo Spaceboy” to your friend with the NIN t-shirt after you’ve already directed them to Scary Monsters. “A Small Plot of Land” is a 6-minute tired Naked City jam (that’s Joey Baron on drums) circa Radio if Zorn and Yamatsuka Eye went out to take a leak; “The Motel” is the obligatory rock-musician-tries-trip-hop-beat song that doesn’t come off. I’ve owned this album for a decade and have never survived playing it front-to-back.

After trying industrial rock, Bowie sets his sights on jungle and techno beats for Earthling, a potentially embarrassing prospect for an aging musician. A potentially deeply embarrassing prospect. And even though the beats are dated by ‘97’s standards, and even though the beats feel grafted into songs, and even though there’s even less thought than usual on transitioning between different parts of the same song, I’d still say this is the stronger album over Outside, and yet, no one seems to back me up there. No Eno, no dice? True, the hook of “Little Wonder” is a little fratty for me tastes; the hook of “Looking for Satellites” a little too Primal Scream-y. But it doesn’t change the fact that the Prodigy-esque way “Little Wonder” roars into view makes it one of the most exciting Bowie openers in quite some time. And altogether, 48 minutes is a much easier pill to swallow than 74 minutes. “I’m Afraid of Americans” has an important message (from Bowie’s press release: “The invasion by any homogenized culture is so depressing”), but it would take a different artist than Bowie backed by Trent Reznor to pull something like that off, especially when the lyrics are kept in children’s book rhymes: “Johnny wants to suck on a Coke […] Johnny wants to think of a joke.”

And so after two albums that hopped on other trends, Bowie ended the decade with a ‘return to normal rock’ in ‘Hours…’, except it turned out he wasn’t very good at what he used to do anyway. And whereas the quotation marks on “Heroes” had a point, the single quotes deployed here just serve as blatant nostalgia and nothing more. Speaking of, short interlude “Brilliant Adventure” rips off “Moss Garden.” Some of these songs are the nadir of the 90s’ trend of trying to make guitars and drums sound as absolute shit as possible. His second-worst album.

Heathen follows a few major events: the birth of his daughter in 2000 and the death of his mother the following year, and the overall sound is understandably more dour, although it should be stated somewhere that the songs were originally written for Toy and pre-date 9/11. It’s also the first record co-produced by Tony Visconti since Scary Monsters, which gave it the air of a comeback record that was picked up on by a lot of critics. The cover of Pixies’ very strange sex ballad “Cactus” is fun, but that it has more melody than the rest of these songs highlight Bowie’s less mobile vocals, which he ballasts with artsy textures instead. Opener “Sunday”’s blips and bloops makes me think that that was R.E.M. was trying to for on “Airportman”; “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship” revives Earthling’s drum and bass beats. There’s some nostalgia—he became a nostalgia act in these years until The Next Day whose cover rewrites the past—“5:15 The Angels Have Gone” is clearly a Who reference, and Pete Townshend appears himself on the re-write of “‘Heroes’” that is “Slow Burn.” A solid album, and it’s his best album since Scary Monsters, but it’s hardly a true comeback.

Reality followed soon after, and similar to Heathen, it includes covers of heroes old (George Harrison’s “Try Some, Buy Some”) and, erm, less old (Modern Lovers’ “Pablo Picasso”), but ditches the art rock textures for, well, nothing. The rock songs all feel stilted, like he’s going through the motions, especially the title track. By contrast, “The Loneliest Guy” reaches for some sort of emotional release and all we get are bad vocals instead (way too much vibrato).

Both Heathen and Reality were positively received, but after Bowie collapsed during a show in Germany in 2004 and needed heart surgery, there was almost a decade of radio silence leading to a lot of speculation about his health and even one jokey song by the Flaming Lips titled “Is David Bowie Dying?” at a time when Wayne Coyne had his head firmly lodged up his own ass. The Next Day was a big deal then, and was welcomed as yet another comeback album. And true to form like Outside and Heathen, most people forgot about it the very next week.

At the time, I thought it was a dreary, tuneless ‘art rock’ record but listening to it now for the first time in 8 years, it’s much better than I remembered. To wit, I like it more than just about every Bowie album since Scary Monsters with the possible exception of Heathen, and the chief issue here is that there are simply too many songs without enough of anything to differentiate from one another, an issue that’ll be course-corrected on his next one. “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” and “Valentine’s Day” pull out some sharp guitar that has been thoroughly missed on the last dozen David Bowie records (although the latter is lazily written: the verses are so, so short). “Dirty Boys” is cabaret-gone-wrong and worth a listen or two. “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die” has well-arranged backing vocals (although the song stagnates when they’re absent) and closer “Heat” is David Bowie’s tribute to the avant-garde incarnation of Scott Walker. All good stuff. “Love is Lost” is a dance track robbed of its energy but kind of hideous sounding, so you can see why James Murphy gravitated towards it for his, um, “Hello Steve Reich Mix,” but most songs do their thing. All that being said, The best album from a rock legend from 2013 was Paul McCartney's New whose “Early Days” is a genuine touching should-be classic that I’ll listen to for the rest of my life. No such song on The Next Day.

Blackstar doubles down on the artsy pretensions of his records since the new millennium, no longer bothering with the occasional nostalgic cut that only made you want to listen to the early records anyway. (Although closer “I Can’t Give Everything Away” brings in the harmonica from “A New Career in a New Town” to tremendous effect.) At only 7 cuts, it’s his album with the least amount of songs after Station to Station, which crucially means you can’t apply the same ‘this cut works and this cut doesn’t’ as you (I) did on Heathen, Reality and The Next Day. The textures are far more interesting than those records too: the upfront mixing of the drums throughout highlights just how feeble the drums were on Earthling; the mournful horns of “Lazarus”; the nifty way the piano harmonies bleed into the sax on “'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore”; the throttle of the bass on “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime).” Meanwhile, Bowie’s vocals are even more committed to the Scott Walker/David Sylvian aesthetic, and the better for it - he’s no longer struggling to reach for hooks because he’s not bothering with those things at all. All that being said, there’s an inertness to these songs: bassist Tim Lefebvre works hard on “Lazarus” but Mark Guiliana's drums are set to ‘plod,’ like he consciously wanted to pretend to be a drum machine instead of the jazz drummer that he actually is; the shorter songs feel barely a cut above the stuff on The Next Day and often play their hands early, and I’m not sure what Bowie was going for on the vocals of “Girl Loves Me.” Still: as good a swan song as anyone could have hoped for; it’s his best album in decades.

If you like Blackstar, make sure you also grabbed the title track from No Plan EP posthumously released one year later. The other two new songs aren’t particularly good: “Killing a Little Time” returns back to Bowie’s brief flirtation with industrial rock and “When I Met You” is just another Velvet Underground rocker, but “No Plan” has a haunting piano line and the first lines (“Here, there’s no music here / I’m lost in streams of sound / Here, am I nowhere now?”) are deeply affecting given their context.

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