(an appropriate post as I enter the second day of my seventh - yikes emoji - decade - )
DAVID BOWIE's THE NEXT DAY
director's cut, The New York Times, March 6 2013
by Simon Reynolds
On “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”, the new single from
David Bowie’s comeback album The Next Day, one line jumps out: “We will
never be rid of these stars.”
In the video, Bowie and actress Tilda
Swinton play an elderly couple persecuted by a pair of vampiric stars, who
stalk them, invade their house and manipulate them like marionettes. But
the song itself is less literal. “The
Stars” portrays celebrities as an overlord class who “burn you with their
radiant smiles.” Bowie's original idea for the video was "stars like Greek gods, cruel and controlling"; a trace of that concept survives in the bit at the start where he enters a grocery store and catches sight of a celebrity gossip magazine called Pantheon. The famous are superhuman but also than human - faintly pitiable creatures, “jealous” of the quiet
lives and grounded existence of nonentities.
“I hope they live forever”, Bowie sings, a nod to the notion of fame as
immortality, the compensation for its otherwise distorting effects. Death and fame are closely braided themes
shadowing The Next Day, a dark, melancholy and surprisingly harsh-sounding
album that’s receiving acclaim as Bowie’s strongest effort in decades.
A superstar critiquing celebrity culture could be taken
as somewhat hypocritical, of course. Especially given Bowie’s full-spectrum
assault on the public’s attention this year.
For most of the 21st Century, Bowie had disappeared from view,
even as the glam theatricality and gender-bending he pioneered in the 1970s was
dominating pop through figures like Lady Gaga. Most assumed that he’d
effectively retired, physically exhausted after a life-threatening heart attack
and surgery in 2003 and creatively spent after four decades of
self-reinvention. But in a brilliantly organized stealth attack, Bowie returned
without warning in January with “Where Are We Now”, the herald for The Next
Day. That album, his first in a decade,
asserts Bowie’s continued relevance as a musician. Meanwhile, his stature in pop
history as the performer who has most convincingly bridged the gap between the
worlds of art and rock is being shored up by a retrospective at the Victoria
& Albert Museum in London, a celebration of his mastery of all the
non-audio aspects of pop, from clothes and stage sets to record artwork and
video.
Bowie has always had an ambivalent attitude to fame.
His biggest American hit of the Seventies, “Fame” was a harrowing dispatch from
inside the paranoid bubble of superstardom. He’s returned to the subject
frequently, from his 1999 album Hours, an exploration of “fame as injury”
according to Bowieologist Nick
Stevenson, to his new album’s “(You
Will) Set the Earth on Fire,” the sales pitch of a svengali to a potential
protégé. Bowie’s career has
been governed by a bi-polar rhythm, alternating between relentless pursuit of the
limelight and shattered retreat from it. Now, after his longest period of
seclusion ever, the 66 year old Englishman and New York resident is back for
what could well be his last blast, the supernova of his stardom.
Yet while Bowie himself has been virtually absent for
a decade, the Bowie-esque has been omnipresent. After the Nineties, a
period dominated by the authenticity and “real-ness” of grunge and gangsta rap,
the 2000s saw the return of glitz and artifice. All the things that Bowie,
alongside fellow glam rockers like Roxy Music and Alice Cooper, explored to the
hilt during the early 1970s— over-the-top theatricality and spectacular
staging, extremist fashion and sexual androgyny—became the defining principles
of 21st Century pop.
Lady Gaga is the most visible inheritor of Bowieism,
from her freaky costumes to her gender games (the male alter-ego Jo Calderone,
the artfully concocted rumor that she’s a hermaphrodite). But there have also
been figures like Adam Lambert, the American Idol star, who called his
first major tour Glam Nation, and, on a more alternative level, cult
performer Amanda Palmer and her punk cabaret outfit The Dresden Dolls.
You can see Bowie-like currents in recent black pop too, from rappers like Drake
who make their own fame the primary subject of their music, to the sharply
styled theatricality of Janelle Monae, to Beyonce’s Ziggy Stardust-like gambit
of creating the alter ego Sasha Fierce as a vehicle for her
walk-on-the-wild-side impulses. Above all, there’s Nicki Minaj, who has her own
alter-ego, the gay male character Roman Zolanski. While it’s unlikely
that Minaj is directly influenced by Bowie, the parallels between his serial
personae and her constant image changes are clear. As one presenter on a video
pop channel put it, “there isn’t a single ‘Nicki Minaj’... she says she’s
just being herself, but who she is changes every day.”
Among Bowie’s most famous pronouncements in his early
career were “I feel like an actor when I’m on stage, rather than a rock artist”
and “if anything, maybe I’ve helped establish that rock’n’roll is a pose.”
Before Bowie came along, rock defined itself against show biz and Hollywood.
There was meant to be a more or less direct correspondence between the performer
and their real-life personality. But
Bowie talked about playing characters, such as the fictional rock god Ziggy
Stardust, or the cold, remote Thin White Duke.
Like a movie star taking on different roles that refract a fundamental
unchanging charisma, Bowie was paradoxically the same and yet different each
time he came before the public with a new album and tour.
Bowie embraced metamorphosis from the start. In his
pre-fame 1960s, he hopped through five bands and a variety of musical styles
and looks before connecting with the public circa 1970. Once his career took off, the shape-shifting
took on a new urgency. Pop taste is
fickle. Some stars manage to become hardy perennials, but most are lucky to eke
out a living playing their hits to an audience of nostalgic diehards. Bowie circumvented
pop’s cruel turnover by turning himself into the New Thing, again and again. As
he said in 1977, “my role as an artist in rock is rather different to most, I
encapsulate things very quickly... my
policy has been that as soon as a process works, it’s out of date. I move to
another area.” Perhaps the fashion world
has so lionized Bowie (Gucci co-sponsored the Victoria & Albert exhibition)
not just for his cutting-edge style, but because he’s so thoroughly assimilated
fashion’s own logic of remorseless supercession.
But there’s more to Bowie’s compulsive
self-reinvention than a career strategy.
It’s an artistic impulse (the desire to challenge oneself) and it relates
also to existential anxiety (a fantasy of perpetual rejuvenation). What Bowie was really developing during his
Seventies heyday was a new postmodern psychology based around flux and
mutability. His great precursor and
influence here was Andy Warhol, about whom he wrote the song "Andy Warhol", and a role he would actually play in the 1996 movie Basquiat. Analysing Warhol, the critic Donald Kuspit wrote
of “the protean artist-self with no core”—a description that fits Bowie
perfectly. Likewise David Bowie Is, the intransitive title of the V & A exhibition,
signifies “how wondrous ‘tis to live in a world that contains this polymath
genius!” but also “fill in the blank space”. His career has seen that emptiness
filled up, then erased, then filled up again, repeatedly.
But living like a cross between a chameleon and a
magpie (Bowie is a voracious assimilator of influences and borrower of ideas)
has its downsides. Read the biographies
or the vintage interviews, and it’s striking how often intimations of
hollowness occur, the sense of a man who is outwardly super-confident but who
battles feelings of self-loathing and doubt.
“I honestly feel that there is something incredibly lacking in my life”...
“I’m not an innovator. I’m really just a Photostat machine. I pour out what has
already been fed in.” ... “When I heard someone say something intelligent, I
used it later as if it were my own. When I saw a quality in someone that I
liked, I used it later as if it were my own”.
As much as artistic hunger or artful career management, a continuing, returning feeling of
inadequacy over what I've done” has propelled the restless remaking of self,
the endless switches of sound and style.
Perusing the
lavish book that accompanies David Bowie
Is, with its dazzling procession of poses and images and its weighty
critical essays tracking the dense cross-references to pop culture and high
art, you get a sense of how much hard work it must be to be Bowie. Director Julien Temple, who made some videos
for Bowie and cast him as an advertising executive in his 1986 movie Absolute
Beginners, has spoken of the “grueling nature of reinvention... the
huge creative surge required to do that again and again. It takes its toll,
psychically.”
During the Nineties, Bowie did seem to be running almost
on empty. (Indeed it’s noticeable that David Bowie Is features little material
from after the mid-Eighties). For a while he subsumed himself in the collective
identity of a hard rock band, Tin Machine. Then he tried reverting to earlier
successful stages of his career. For Black Tie White Noise, Bowie reunited with
Chic’s Nile Rodgers, the producer of his 1983 blockbuster Let’s Dance. For the adventurous but confused Outside, he
re-enlisted Brian Eno, his foil during the experimental mid-Seventies Berlin
trilogy of Low, ‘Heroes’, and Lodger. Switching
strategy, Bowie attempted to refuel using cutting-edge electronic dance ideas
on Earthling, a charming if semi-successful dabble in drum and bass. Finally he
regrouped with Tony Visconti, the producer on all his classic Seventies albums,
for the solid but subdued Heathen and Reality, records on which he seemed to
reach a kind of settlement with himself.
The
Next Day sees Visconti at the helm again, but this time Bowie
seems galvanized by a desperate energy that over-rides the frailty palpable in
his haggard vocals. Imagery of decay,
debility and dejection pervade the record: “here I am/not quite dead/my body
left to rot in a hollow tree”, “just walking the dead”, “I gaze in defeat at
the stars in the night/the light in my life burned away/there will be no
tomorrow.” Some of the morbidity-- references to “a room full of bloody
history” in “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die”—may be influenced by books on
Medieval tyrants that Bowie has reportedly been reading obsessively. But elsewhere
the imagery seems obviously inspired by his own brush with mortality.
The Grim Reaper is no stranger to the Bowie songbook.
He covered Jacques Brel’s “My Death, while his big UK hit “Ashes to Ashes”
derived its title from the Anglican burial service. “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” on Outside, addressed
“the fact that
life is finite,” Bowie has explained. “That realization, when it comes, usually
later in life, can either be a really daunting prospect or it makes things a
lot clearer.”
But judging by The Next Day,
Bowie’s close encounter of the near-fatal kind has only muddied things. There
is little evidence of serenity or enlightenment. The climactic song, “Heat,” is a homage to
the existentialist balladry of Scott Walker, who covered “My Death” before
Bowie did and whose own recent work includes songs about the human body’s abject
vulnerability and doomed dictators like Mussolini and Ceaucescu. “My
father ran the prison,” Bowie intones enigmatically, moving through ominous lines
about missions grown dark and worlds ending, before confessing “ I don’t know
who I am” and “I am a seer/But I am a liar”.
Warhol believed “superstitiously” that fame could
“keep at bay” Death, claims Donald Kuspit. When Bowie declares “I hope they
live forever” in “The Stars”, it this a gesture of bitter solidarity with “the
dead ones and the living”, all those stars who believed and who still believe
in fame as salvation? You can reinvent yourself over and over, but Death, the
Great Uninventor, will catch up with you. The naked torment of such
apprehensions has shaped David Bowie’s twilight masterpiece.
