David Bowie: a subjective overview, part 3
David Bowie’s sudden right turn from freak-flag Stonesy rock to blue-eyed Philly soul remains, 35 years later, one of the more startling transitions in pop-music history. This transition is most notable on Changesonebowie, where the LP suddenly goes from “Rebel Rebel” to “Young Americans,” and if you’re not prepared it can snap your head around like a spring-loaded head-snapping machine. The transition is so complete and uncompromised, it’s hard to believe it’s even the same artist — until the distinctive voice comes in, which somehow doesn’t make the transition any easier to digest. Rather the opposite — if the Bowie of Diamond Dogs was the “real Bowie,” then this bouffanted smoothie with the gold bracelets and the smoldering cigarette must be some kind of put-on, right? Because if it’s not, what could this music possibly mean? And yet the music on Young Americans seems, if anything, more authentic and accomplished than the half-parody rock of the Ziggy Stardust era. Then, was Ziggy the real put-on? But then who was the long-haired prog-folk freak in the dress from the first three albums?
The soul influence on Young Americans is obvious and pervasive, but almost as important is the influence of the young Bruce Springsteen. Bowie recorded both “Growin’ Up” and “It’s Hard to be aSaint in the City” and the panoramic, complex lyrics of “Young Americans” shows his influences — the first verse, with its doomed, working-class lovers making out in the car under the bridge is practically parody. What makes it impressive is not that it’s imitation but that it’s so well-executed, as though it were a long-lost early Springsteen song, performed by, say, Teddy Pendergrass. And if you were to remove the ridiculous, over-emphatic cover of John Lennon’s “Across the Universe” (honestly, if there was ever a song ill-suited to the soul-man shout-out treatment, it’s “Across the Universe”) and substituted Bowie’s version of Springsteen’s “Saint,” Young Americans would be instantly improved and have a lot more cohesion. (His version of “Growin’ Up” is another story.)
The other startling thing about Young Americans is the sudden improvement of Bowie’s songwriting skills. Of the eight songs on the album, fully half of them are well-made, with nary a clunker or doff line among them. This, oddly, presents a different problem: Bowie, on Young Americans, has digested his source material so thoroughly that some of the songs feel more like genre exercises than personal statements, songs anyone could have written. It shows great dedication to form but leaves little room for expression. They’re all enjoyable, but only “Fame” bursts through with a distinctive point of view. (There are two other songs of this stripe, “It’s Gonna Be Me” and “Who Can I Be Now?” that are just as good, if not better, but weren’t on the original LP for some reason, although either could have replaced the dreaded “Across the Universe.”) After “Young Americans,” the best, most startling song is “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” where Bowie takes one of his oldest motifs, the shape-shifting Nietzschean overman, and, somehow, manages to put him into the context of a sweet soul croon.
Station to Station is to Young Americans as Aladdin Sane is to Ziggy Stardust. The material is weaker, the production more ambitious, drama again substitutes for content and focus is again a problem. The title track sounds impressive, with its multiple sections and widescreen production, its vague-yet-serious-sounding lyrics. It, like the line says, drives like a demon from station to station, but I’m telling you, I’ve been listening to this song for 30 years now and I can’t tell what the hell he’s going on about.
I’ve been reading the Wikipedia article on Station to Station, which notes that the frosty, insincere nature of the singing is apparently due to the “character” of the Thin White Duke that Bowie was “playing” through the recording of the record, who apparently is not a very nice man. Well, it’s nice to know that this is supposed to be a “character,” but that doesn’t help me enjoy the record more. There are six songs on the LP, six, all of which are quite long, as though that were some kind of guarantee of seriousness, one of which is ten minutes long, or one-fourth of the total running time. One is a cover, three others are impersonal genre exercises not unlike the ones on Young Americans, well structured and but sung with more detachment and a kind of melodrama that leaves me cold. The most baffling of these is “Word on a Wing,” which Bowie (or the character he’s playing) would have us believe that he is a passionately devout Christian. I remain unconvinced.
That leaves “TVC 15,” which is, of course, a delight — weird, personal and idiosyncratic, with a beat and arrangement that kind of comes out of nowhere and sounds like nothing else on the record. I’m not sure exactly what happens in the song, I think it’s about a man who falls in love with TV set, then loses his girlfriend inside it. It’s not “Penny Lane,” but it comes closerto my idea of what good Bowie is.
Epic fail, part 2
For the second time in a week, Epic McFail chooses to behave as though the past eight years — oh hell, the past twenty years — did not happen. The Russian/Georgian conflict, he says is “the first…serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War.”
Everyone says stupid things. I say stupid things all the time. But then again, I’m not running for president. John McCain has been saying stupid things for months now, incredibly stupid things, regarding foreign policy, the one subject he considers to be his forte. And yet somehow he’s still taken seriously by some people (the media, primarily) as a presidential candidate.
The other day I thought maybe his flatulent “in the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations” line was some kind of misstatement of chronology — after all, a man who doesn’t know what a computer does can hardly be expected to understand when the 21st century began. But now he’s decided that the two wars we’re currently fighting, the two wars his party started and promptly fucked into a cocked hat, simply don’t count as “serious international crises.” No, they aren’t crises — they are logical progressions of events that run with the precision of fine Swiss craftsmanship.
These are not gaffes, these are not misstatements. This is his point of view. The Gulf War, Afghanistan, um, 9/11, um, the war in Iraq, it seems none of those count to him, none of those are “serious international crises.” What he means, of course, is that the Russia/Georgia conflict is the first “serious international crisis since the end of the Cold War” that he has a chance of understanding, that he has any kind of frame of reference for. McCain, and the rest of the fossils dominating the crumbling Republican party, miss the Cold War oh so dearly, when we knew who the enemy was and how to fight them, and I’ve seen signs in the Washington media this week that say “Oh boy! Another war! With Russia!! Hooray!! It’s just like the good old days!!!”