She’ll Drive the Big Car

What does David Bowie know about the disappointments and frustrations of a mundane life? Probably not much, having escaped from it long ago, but he can empathize. This may a standout from Reality, which I’ve always thought was a very strong album overall. It’s a return to the plastic soul sound he perfected so well in his Young Americans days. It certainly tunnel-visions it back to the days of station wagons with faux-wood paneling on the outside and Soul Train on television. And it imagines the nagging resentment of a life lived on the wrong side of the Hudson River, a life of suburban dreams grown shabby and the paths to escape growing fewer over the years and the repetition of daily life becoming the only experience. That’s a life we all either end up living, or narrowly escape from.

Advertisements

She Shook Cold

This is not one of my favorite David Bowie songs, which puts on a list of possibly less than ten songs out of hundreds. It’s too abrasive? It’s musically discordant, and lyrically crass. Those are two things I don’t expect from David Bowie, and they’re not necessarily things that bother me per se,  but again, not from David Bowie. David Bowie is not who I go to when I want to hear about fucking. Dick-swinging braggadocio is not his best look. That’s what The Rolling Stones are for anyway. Still, kind of an interesting experiment in striking a hard-rocker pose. Probably should have been best left as a B-side or something.

Shapes of Things

Usually, you could count on David Bowie for being a thoughtful and nuanced interpreter of other people’s material. (And, you know, his own too.) He chose interesting songs and covered them in interesting styles. But sometimes nuance and thought went out the window in favor of sheer mega-watt campiness. On the Pin Ups album Bowie chose a  motley selection of obscure 60’s classics and attacked them in full Ziggy Stardust mode. And Ziggy always was one for maximum drama. To be fair, in this case, the Yardbirds’ original was already very dramatic. It’s hard to imagine anyone trying to top Keith Relf’s delivery, but David Bowie heard it and thought, “Challenge accepted.” This is probably his most bizarre vocal performance; he belts it out like a drag diva delivering a death scene. It’s just unparalleled. Enjoy.

 

Shake It

Shaking it, if you didn’t know, is a metaphor for sex. You didn’t know that, did you? Yeah. And rock music, even at this late date of 1983, is trying to incite youth to lustfulness, right before your very eyes. David Bowie, whom you’ve never heard of before, may appear to be a very clean and upstanding young man whose hair just naturally looks like that, but he is, in fact, a sexual deviant – like all rock performers – who uses the devil’s jungle music to corrupt your children’s moral fibers. This music promotes fornication and homosexuality… homosexual fornication, even. You want to put a stop to all this gay fornication, but there’s nothing you can do about it, because it’s too late; rock music has become so thoroughly mainstream there’s now a television channel devoted to it, allowing degenerate people like David Bowie to finally infiltrate the American heartland with their entreaties to ‘shake it’ and ‘dance the blues’. Your children are going to move to New York and San Francisco, become homosexuals, cross-dress, fornicate madly, build their own subculture, create great works of music and art and literature, survive the “Gay Plague”, gain political traction, fight for equality, settle down and get married, adopt and raise children, and just generally make the world a better place. And that’s just your sons. Don’t get me started on what your female children are up to. You should have banned MTV when you had the chance.

Sex and the Church

There comes a point in every important conversation when you have to stop and ask, “But what does David Bowie have to say about it?” Although David Bowie has contributed more than most others in his field to our evolving ideas about sexuality and gender, he’s not the type to write crude anthems about fucking. I’m guessing that he was probably one of those insufferable intellectual soft bois who gave his one-night-stands a book to take home as a parting gift. Which, as a person who can’t quite separate sex from philosophy, I can relate to. That as it may, there wasn’t very much to find for this particular series of songs. Just a semi-instrumental from the obscure Buddha of Suburbia album. So, when pressed, I suppose that David Bowie just wants you to shut up and dance.

Seven Years in Tibet

I still haven’t figured out if this song is in reference to the movie of the same name that came out in the same year. That movie was two and a half hours of Brad Pitt looking his most Aryan-ideal-ish against a backdrop of snowy mountaintops, so most likely what David Bowie was thinking of was the book that the movie was based off. Certainly it wasn’t his first time visiting the theme; Bowie’s interest in Tibetan culture and spirituality goes all the way back to some of his earliest songs. Musically this couldn’t be farther away from the days of Silly Boy Blue and Karma Man – this was deep in Bowie’s 90’s industrial phase. But he’s still toying with a lot of the same ideas, mainly the ‘nothing ever goes away’ part.

Sell Me a Coat

The baby Bowie of the sixties was dorky, earnest and notably uncool – exactly the opposite of everything we’ve come to associate David Bowie with. It was adorable. It was also odd that out of all the exciting things going on in music at the time, Bowie was writing twee little narrative songs in music hall style, probably the least hip possible direction to go in. It does show that he was already an iconoclast with a nose for the unexpected. He just hadn’t figured out how to channel that in a way that people actually liked. Of course it also means that, in his absolute failure to get attention, he really dodged a bullet. Imagine an alternate universe in which something like this (or worse, The Laughing Gnome) became the novelty hit of the summer. It would have been an absolute career dead end, not a reputation one could easily shake or move on from. We would then have enjoyed decades of David Bowie, composer of cute novelty songs and writer of middling West End musicals, perhaps with a lucrative sideline banging out power ballads for vocal divas. That’s not a world I’d much like to live in.