The Next Day

David Bowie is a cryptic fellow. Especially lately, as he provides more tantalizing clues on record and in video while keeping his mouth firmly shut to the media. His embargo on self-promotion doesn’t extend to what used to be called ‘promo videos’, thankfully. If there’s one thing we’ve gathered from The Next Day, it’s that Bowie has some ambivalence towards his own image. He seems to simultaneously want to explain himself and to avoid all explanation. At least, he’s not explaining himself in the traditional sit-down-and-talk-about-it manner. On the other hand, the new album does feel like it’s a very personal one. Even as he’s obviously had it up to there with the 24-hour-news cycle that we now live in, he’s very much an active participant of the internet community. He was, after all, one of the first major stars to cotton on to the magic of the internet, running his own website at at time when most large corporations didn’t yet use email. It appears that Bowie wants to communicate directly to his fanbase, skipping the media interludes and providing only deeply encrypted information for puzzling over. I haven’t made heads or tails of it yet, but I’m sure that the more I listen the clearer it will become. It’s like he knows that fans will understand and he won’t be bothered talking to people who don’t get it.

Today we have a brand new video, which I warn you is not for sensitive viewers. The title track of The Next Day is one of the more defiant and aggro sounding songs on the album, and the video is deliberately morbid. For that we can surely thank Floria Sigismondi, a long-time collaborator and well known for her dark aesthetic. Bowie has certainly ventured into dark territory before, nothing unusual about that. What’s new is that he has never before shown any interest in Catholicism. He’s always been more intrigued by philosophy than religion, and, aside from sporting a little cross on occasion, hasn’t mined much into religious iconography. I could name some people who’ve built their entire careers on blaspheming all over the Catholic church, but I suppose that that territory is too obvious and rote for David Bowie. Until now. He must, of course, have a motive for opening up that can of worms. I’ve been observing the online fandom since before ‘fandom’ was a word, and one thing springs out; there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of Bowie fans who very seriously and sincerely consider him a god. I should know this, I’m one of them. David Bowie is most definitely a god, a prophet or the Second Coming. Like I said, it’s not just me being crazy, there’s a lot of us out there. And, David Bowie being an internet lurker par excellence, he’s most certainly aware that he’s got believers. So now, in this here video, he is very clearly telling us that, yes, he is indeed the Messiah. He’s confirmed it. It’s now officially official.

If You Can See Me

As you’ve probably heard by now, David Bowie has just released a new album after eons and eons of unofficial retirement. We had collectively almost given up on him, but there it is, brand new music. The unique circumstances of its creation and release make The Next Day a challenge to judge objectively. For one thing, Bowie has grown to such god-like proportions in the popular imagination that he can, at this point, practically do no wrong. The critics, to no one’s surprise, have tumbled all over themselves to hail a new masterpiece. In typical music-critic hyperbole, the new record has been described as his best work since <insert previous favorite David Bowie album title>. Such is the joy and relief of finally hearing something new that he could easily have served us up an album of Tin Machine demos and we would have licked it up. Fortunately, TND is not outtakes, demos or leftovers, but a solidly good album that deserves praise on its own merits. Although not all of the 14 songs stick in the memory, enough of them do. Bowie hasn’t made a huge change of sound since Reality came out in 2003. TND is in a similar guitar-heavy rock style, although the mood seems less aggressive and more thoughtful. The production is also less clean sounding, making for a deliberately fuzzy distorted effect, which some critics have compared to the punkiness of Scary Monsters and yes, Tin Machine. There are, as always, mysterious references to past adventures and echoes of older work. Bowie is still following the same threads of ideas he’s pursued all his life; alienation vs. love for example, and a paranoid sense of doom balanced out by a born romantic’s against-all-odds optimism. Although now Bowie does seem to be viewing those things as if from a cushy chair, rather than with his old neurotic immediacy. He is, after all, a very rich, thoroughly respected and happily married man now – he probably doesn’t have much to feel angsty about anymore.

As intriguing as the music itself, of course, is the manner of The Next Day’s release and Bowie’s passive-aggressive stance towards the media. The album was recorded in secret, with all the participants under legal gag order, while the public was busy wondering where Bowie had gone off to and if he was o.k. The first single was released, with no prior warning, on the day of his birthday and the album followed shortly. Since then Bowie has made no public appearances, granted no interviews and made no statements. There will be no tour, no late night TV talk shows, no opulent magazine spreads and no goddamn Tweets. This gnomic silence is in itself a statement of contempt for an entertainment industry that has turned the process of promotion into an end in itself. What used to be a means of selling a product is now merely a means. Many, many stars, including legitimately acclaimed ones, are happy to carry on a cycle of self-promotion with no actual product to offer. Some have elevated this activity to the level of post-Warholian performance art. The idea of having something of quality to sell or of having something to say, well, that’s an afterthought at best now. Into this vortex comes David Bowie, an artist-anointed-demigod whose thoughts and ideas there is a hungry market for, and he has nothing to say. All he has to offer is a quality product, his music, which he’s just going to leave here for you and you can take it or leave it as you will. You can tell straight up from the album art that David Bowie is considerably less in love with his glamorous mythos than his fans are. He’s made as blunt a point of that as he possibly could, taking the iconic image of “Heroes” and slapping a plain white square over it – The Next Day it says. “Heroes”, of course, lives as one of the highest points of a multi-high-pointed career, and there can be no underestimating its importance in 20th century culture. But on a personal level, it was an album created out of some not-very-happy times, during which Bowie narrowly escaped becoming another tragic rock’n'roll suicide. It can’t be terribly pleasant for him to see those years endlessly fetishized by wave after wave of lesser talents.  Something deeply personal and born out of great pain has been commodified into a fashion statement, as those things frequently do because pop culture works like that, and the man himself must be bored to tears at how glamorous everyone thinks his miserable young self used to be. But, clearly, he’s still thinking about it too. And still wants to talk about it, but only on his own terms. So here’s this album, full of references to places in Berlin and the nature of stardom, as oblique a strategy of communication as anything could be, here for us to try and understand with no helpful explanations or even hints from the creator to go on.

If I’m Dreaming My Life

David Bowie for the younger generation. Do not discount his latter day work if you are an older fan either, of course, but I think the nineties and 2000′s records belong to young fans who heard them with fresher ears. It’s hard to make objective judgement about an artist like Bowie in any case, because his music has been so diverse and there’s just so much of it. I can’t deny having a sentimental affection towards the albums that I actually had the experience of going out and buying, as we all get attached to the things we discover for ourselves. But trying to listen objectively, I honestly can’t see any downward turn in quality over the years (except for a short bit in the 80′s.) There’s just no way that anyone could deny that this is as magnificent a song as Bowie has to offer. Or that Hours… has enough such moments to qualify as at least medium-classic. If anything, Bowie has become a more visibly open performer as he’s got older. He was in his early years, by his own admission, a bit of an iceman, someone who had trouble expressing his feelings without hiding behind an outlandish persona or disguising emotion as theatre. I find that his later songs are so much more heartfelt and affecting the more he appears to be himself. He isn’t being an alien from Mars or some depraved Peirrot anymore.

I’m Waiting for the Man

I guess I don’t have to tell you what man Lou is waiting for and why. I can only comment that $26 went a much longer way ’67. You couldn’t buy very much heroin for $26 today, and also I’m afraid that all the shady characters have been swept away from Lexington Avenue long ago. Nevertheless, the general intent hasn’t changed much over the years. I’m sure what Lou Reed put to paper in 1967 remains a universal experience, amirite? I mean, who hasn’t trekked to the bad side of town to buy drugs before? Whaddya mean not all of you have bought heroin!? In any case, if the jangle and feedback of the Velvets isn’t alienating and culty enough for ya, check out the cover Nico cut. She, more than anyone else, understood the true meaning of the song – most likely a lot better than Lou Reed himself ever did. Nico was neck deep in heroin by the time she recorded her 1981 album Drama of Exile, and her attitude was very much in keeping with the material:

[Aura label head Aaron] Sixx admitted that Nico “didn’t give a shit what happened to the LP, she just wanted the money for drugs.” Yet despite these unconventional circumstances, Drama of Exile would see Nico receive some of the best reviews of her career.

— Dave Thompson, Better to Burn Out: The Cult of Death in Rock ‘N’ Roll

Waiting for the Man was certainly a brilliant choice for her. She didn’t have very much contribution in the recording of The Velvet Underground & Nico, having been roped in by Andy Warhol for glamour purposes, but she lived that album for the rest of her life. Lou Reed never did as many degenarate things as his songs lead us to imagine and in no time at all he was living the high life with David Bowie. Speaking of whom, there he is with Lou, still having a real good time together. It’s great to see those two jamming together on a particularly rockin’ mid-90s David Bowie song – oh wait, that’s a cover of Waiting for the Man that mysteriously just sounds exactly like a mid-90′s David Bowie song.

I’m Deranged

Outside. It’s an album that raises questions, dark ones. Like how redeeming is the power of art, really? Questions I’ve discussed here before. Even if you don’t want to delve that deeply into philosophical arguments, you still realize that this is as depressing as David Bowie gets. But I also think there’s a positive message hidden in there somewhere. Some hint of hope. Something about emotion breaking through the cracks of isolation. Maybe even something about love. Not that I could draw a definitive interpretation from something so opaque in meaning. It’s just an impression I get. Or maybe I’m just too attached to this record for sentimental reasons.

I’m Afraid of Americans

I suppose that if I have to explain it to you, you must be part of the problem. I also suppose that David Bowie was speaking for the whole entire world when he wrote this one. In the eyes of the rest of the planet, America is like that snotty popular girl in high school who you hate and envy and secretly long to make out with. But she’s also kind of a racist and owns lots of guns. Something like that. Anyway. David Bowie. Making some eternally relevant social  commentary, and giving us one of the classic songs of his career. And I’m sure it was a happy day for anyone who had been waiting decades to hear Bowie say “pussy” in a song. Just another reason to love it, and him.

The Stars (Are Out Tonight)

Supreme excitement over here! The second single from David Bowie’s upcoming new album has arrived. Going by the elegiac first single and video, there was an expectation that the new album would have a consistently mournful mood, but this shows a much more upbeat spirit. The video is all kinds of perfect. It’s pretty surreal, but I think it’s got something to do with our collective obsession with celebrity culture. First, it’s directed by longtime Bowie collaborator Floria Sigismondi, who is an auteur of music videos. Then, of course, the joy of seeing a plainly not-dying David Bowie being adorable with Tilda Swinton. Plus an eerie Thin White Duke-alike played by Iselin Steiro. Plus the most exquisitely androgynous of fashion models, Saskia De Brauw and Andrej Pejic. Plus all the creepy, sexy stylishness you’e come to expect from a Bowie/Sigismondi team-up. And a good song too! It’s like he’s never been away.

I Wish You Would

Here’s another one of David Bowie’s super camp covers of classic songs from Pinups. The original artist was Billy Boy Arnold, a minor Chicago blues musician who played with Bo Diddley. That’s probably not the version David Bowie heard and loved, though. That would be The Yardbirds’ version. I might be in a small minority here, but I think that The Yardbirds, though they sure knew how to pick guitarists, were one of the less interesting British Invasion bands. They played a sped-up blues-rock, and they played in well, but without the soulfulness of The Animals, the theatricality of The Who or the raw sex appeal of The Rolling Stones. Their cover of Arnold’s song was good, but not particularly memorable. No question, the original, being the original, is more authentic. David Bowie’s cover, though it hasn’t gone down in history as one of his greatest songs, is way on the other end of the spectrum from Billy Boy. It’s amped-up and dramatic, almost a pastiche of the British Invasion sound, and miles away from being recognizable blues. What Bowie’s intentions, aside from having a little fun in the studio, might have been, I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to make some kind of meta statement about musical identity and transformation. There’s a library’s worth of thesis papers waiting to be written about those things. For example, I could take off and write my thesis about David Bowie, a working class young British lad, appropriating American black identity via the already Anglified blues of The Yardbirds, and transmogrifying it into a pansexual non-gender-normative empowerment identity using his own hyper-camp androgynous image as the conduit, concurrently taking the musical language of racial delineation and turning it into a language of sexual and gender role transformation and identity creation. But that would be a pretentious thing to write. What he really did was take an obscure blues song and made it really gay.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUwTONWZKtY

 

I Pray Olé

Call this one a long lost treasure. Because David Bowie was being so prolific in 1979 that this is something he decided wasn’t album material quality. It didn’t see light of day until 1991, when the Rykodisc re-releases came out. Those, by the way, were really great editions with a ton of juicy bonus tracks and good packaging. There have been other reissues since then, but none quite as good. I’m not usually a person who cares what particular edition of something I happen to own. I’ve never cared about that, and now that everything is digital it matters even less. But at the time, those were some really good reissues. But you don’t want to hear about the 1991 reissue of Lodger. There’s more fresh and exciting news to think about, like Bowie’s upcoming new album, which officially comes out March 12. Which he’s been secretly working on for the past two years, while gullible fans were busy telling each other rumors of his impending demise. Now I can securely tell you all, ‘I told you so’. While some of you were convinced that David Bowie’s absence from the public eye meant he was surely at death’s door, because what short of terminal illness could keep sexagenarian rock star from jet-setting his way around the world in a blaze of publicity? And I told you all not that long ago, that just because he wasn’t courting blazes of publicity just now, didn’t mean that he wasn’t privately hard at work on some new project that maybe he didn’t feel inclined to blab about on television. Let me remind you that David Bowie is 66 years old and he isn’t running on a full tank of cocaine and red peppers anymore. But that’s a far cry from fixin’ to die. He just wanted to work in peace and quiet for a change, that’s all. So anyway, with a new David Bowie album on the horizon, I think we can put our worries to rest and get down to celebrating!

Where Are We Now?

Happy 66th birthday to David Bowie today! He’s given us all a present this year. A new song! And video! AND  plans for a whole new album, coming up soon. It’s kind of a mournful song, and if all the big German words are anything to go on, it’s about his days in Berlin. It’s been about ten years since he last spoke up, but sounds like the wistful mood from the last couple of albums is carrying over. I, for one, am super excited. It’s going to be classic, of course. See, I told you he wasn’t dying.