From the spiky tapping heel, to the SEX earring, through the retrospectively disturbing 50′s imagery, through the moondust, to the query “do you like girls or boys?” it’s David Bowie being late-career brilliant. Not everyone loves Outside, but those who do, do so with a passion. For a lot of people it was just too grungy and unmelodic, too disturbing and perverse, too noisy, too too not-pop. For a small minority, it was the most vivid and important thing in decades. For me, who heard it as a young teenager, it was a slam in the head. Though I could never pick just one favorite kind of David Bowie, nineties industrial Bowie would be high on the list. Outside Bowie was a darker, meaner, completely alien new person. It was drenched in depravity and murder, oblique in meaning, with gory sleeve notes and filthy, deafening guitar noise. It was Bowie, always fascinated by the scary monsters within, taking his imagination to its most morbid reaches. I’ve always had a fascination with violence and gore myself, the brutal and pointless bloody ends that can befall an innocent. Maybe I read Helter Skelter way too young. I like horror and I like to be reminded that the world is a sick and ugly place sometimes, and sometimes utter destruction is beauty. There’s a David Bowie for that, too.
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