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.