Album Poll, Day 2: 19-11

We reach the middleweight section of the album poll: those that wound up ranked between 19 and 11, by you (don’t blame me).

We begin with what was once, for a time, Bowie’s “last” album:

19. Reality (25 points/votes).

It is ironic. You haven’t seen the artwork yet, but there’s a fakeness to the cover that undermines that. It’s the old chestnut: What is real and what isn’t? It’s actually about who’s stolen this world.

Bowie, 2003.

Reality ends up changing in the wake of Bowie’s return. The fact was that his disappearance made Reality a better album. Not that it was bad, ever, but the only reason it was important at all was because of its status as “The Last One.”…The Next Day was hell on Reality because it made Reality have to stand on its own legs as an album for almost the first time. In its defense, the only real difference is that now we *really* wish ‘Try Some Buy Some’ was a B-Side.

Ian McDuffie.

18. David Bowie aka Space Oddity aka Man of Words/Man of Music (28 points/votes).

I’ve been the male equivalent of the dumb blonde for a few years, and I was beginning to despair of people accepting me for my music. It may be fine for a male model to be told he’s a great looking guy, but that doesn’t help a singer much, especially now that the pretty boy personality cult seems to be on the way out.

My songs are all from the heart, and they are wholly personal to me, and I would like people to accept them as such. I dearly want to be recognized as a writer, but I would ask them not to get too deeply into my songs. As likely as not, there’s nothing there but the words and music you hear at one listening…I see you’ve noticed that my songs are seldom about boy and girl relationships. That’s because I’ve never had any traumas with girls.

Bowie, NME interview, 1969.

David Bowie can be viewed in retrospect as all that Bowie had been and a little of what he would become, all jumbled up and fighting for control: a rag-bag of ideas all getting in each other’s way.

Charles Shaar Murray and Roy Carr.

17. The Buddha of Suburbia (42 points, 34 votes, 2 #1 votes).

One idea pulled another behind it, like conjurers’ handkerchiefs…I felt more solid myself, and not as if my mind were just a kind of cinema for myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through.

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia.

I spent so much time in my bedroom [in Bromley]. It really was my entire world. I had books up there, my music up there, my record player. Going from my world upstairs out onto the street, I had to pass through this no-man’s-land of the living room, you know, and out the front hall.

Bowie, 1990.

16. Let’s Dance (50 points/votes, highest-ranked LP to get no #1s).

A friend of mine who heard this record before I did told me that he was rather disappointed by it. “It’s got guitar solos all over it,” he announced in the sort of tone that you might use for telling somebody that there is a large, maggoty dog turd on their new jacket. Despite the expectation that the combination of Bowie and Nile Rodgers would result in the kind of immaculately tortured but immaculately deft angst-funk that seems in vogue in certain quarters, the actual result is something quite different: some of the strongest, simplest and least complicated music that Bowie has ever made. Let’s Dance is clean, straight and…huge.

Charles Shaar Murray, LP review, NME, 1983.

I think I’m just a little tired of experimentation now…there is a proliferation of synthetic instruments being used in that kind of, er, Me generation icy cold vein. I feel it’s very hard to use those instruments without a kind of preconditioning already there. That if you use the synthesizer it means this particular thing; that I’m part of this angular society.

So that’s why I’ve used a very organic, basic instrumentation on this new album. Such instrumentation doesn’t say anything other than it comes from a hybrid of white and black culture. That is the only underlying subtext it has really…As I say, experimentation can be rewarding for finding awkward stances musically. But it just isn’t satisfying after a while. And it’s not satisfying because it’s not very useful, except – as Brian Eno would say – for setting up a new kind of vocabulary. Now I’ve got the vocabulary I’m supposed to do something with it! Ha ha!

Bowie, 1983.

15. Earthling (57 points, 49 votes, 2 #1 votes).

I’ve been featured in a long-running cartoon in Britain as being a rather disengaged culture vulture. A bit of a mad pilot that kind of flies from avant-garde trees, making this nest out of glittering jewels that belong to other beings. Well, I guess that’s me. The thing is, I agree with all that, and I don’t see anything wrong in that. Yes, that’s what I do. I’m a contagious, infectious enthusiast. It’s what I like doing.

Bowie, 1997.

What’s great about him in that he’s constantly looking for new input. There’s all this stuff going on around us, and it’s so easy to just shut it out because it’s too much. Instead, he just wades right in, like an old lady at a basement sale. Instead of going through racks of clothes, he’s going through racks of ideas, pulling out what interests him.

Reeves Gabrels, on Bowie, 1997.

and the first notable jump in votes:

14. The Next Day (98 points, 94 votes, 1 #1 vote, 2 voters specified Next Day Extra).

Effigies Indulgences Anarchist Violence Chthonic Intimidation Vampyric Pantheon Succubus Hostage Transference Identity Mauer Interface Flitting Isolation Revenge Osmosis Crusade Tyrant Domination Indifference Miasma Pressgang Displaced Flight Resettlement Funereal Glide Trace Balkan Burial Reverse Manipulate Origin Text Traitor Urban Comeuppance Tragic Nerve Mystification

Bowie’s “work flow diagram” for The Next Day, sent to Rick Moody, 2013.

Stay-At-Home Bowie isn’t boring, however…In fact, it’s one of the most interesting evolutions of Bowie’s public persona. He’s taken a conception of himself forced upon him by popular culture, an idea created in his absence from the public eye. It’s also a character that is forced upon him by the passage of time: he simply is older now. And he’s playing up to that, to a degree. He’s also raging against it, subverting it, adding to it, and generally not doing the sort of things you’d expect David Bowie to do. Plus, Bowie getting old and revelling in it: that has the same sort of rebellious spirit as modern-day Bob Dylan, his protest song period long behind him, putting out a record of Christmas standards.

“A Sitting Ovation.”

13. The Man Who Sold The World (112 points, 104 votes, 2 #1 votes).

Tony Visconti’s compressed production gives the album an utterly synthetic audio quality: few records this simply played sound as studio-created.

Trouser Press Record Guide, 3rd edition.

It’s clearly the beginning of the Spiders from Mars…Though that band was yet to be invented, technically, it’s a logical extension of what was going on with The Man Who Sold The World. It was a pivotal album in that it gave [Bowie] a taste of what it was like to be in a rock band.

Tony Visconti.

It was all family problems and analogies put into science-fiction form.

Bowie, on MWSTW, 1976.

12. Heathen (150 points, 134 votes, 4 #1 votes).

Especially in one’s mid-fifties, you’re very aware that that’s the moment you have to leave off the idea of being young. You’ve got to let it go.

Bowie, Interview, 2002.

Heathen will surely be condemned by those who cannot forgive him for his past greatness, and will likely be loved by a few who still imagine strains of “Space Oddity” beneath its refrains. It’s hard to shake the thought that even thirty years later, some people still seem to be expecting another Ziggy.

Eric Carr, review, Pitchfork, 2002.

Heathen was written in the mountains, and kind of feels like that, I think.

Bowie, 2002.

11. Young Americans (157 points, 137 votes, 5 #1 votes).

Bowie played [Young Americans] for the ten blissed-out, formerly camped-out, devotees, who’d been ushered into the studio, finally, at 5 am by Stuart George. With wine, tears and adulation flowing around and from the blessed, Bowie was an affable host as he signed more autographs, apologized for the unfinished mix of the album and agreed to play it a second time, at which point the party erupted into dance. Bowie took center floor with a foxy stomp.

Rolling Stone, 1974.

My own recent music has been good, plastic soul, I think. It’s not very complex, but it’s enjoyable to write. I did most of it in the studio. It doesn’t take very long to write…about ten, 15 minutes a song. I mean, with Young Americans I thought I’d better make a hit album to cement myself over here [the U.S.], so I went in and did it. It wasn’t too hard, really.

Bowie, Melody Maker, 1976.

Next: the Top 10. Oy Vey Baby still has a shot.

Photos: mostly Discogs. Also: amateur painter, 2014 (Jimmy King); “According to G,” Next Day promo posters, NYC, 2013; Bowie at an HMV promo for Heathen, 2002 (unknown photog); Ms. Swift & Young Americans (ASOS).

Album Poll, Day 1: One-Votes to 30-20

If the song poll was a cavalry battle, the “readers’ favorite Bowie albums” poll was trench warfare.

The song poll’s results came after many sweeps and shifts, with a wide range of songs jockeying for position during the vote tallying. The album poll, by contrast, quickly settled into a long slog between two LPs for the top slot, while three albums slugged it out in the middle of the top 10. The rest of the list soon sorted itself out, position-wise. The top 15 was cemented by the time I’d compiled 100 ballots (out of roughly 350 cast).

So, at least within the confines of this poll, there’s a substantial consensus on what the top Bowie albums are. You’ll find out soon enough.

But first, as in the song poll, here are the single-vote picks: those albums loved by one single voter. Mainly a list of bootlegs and compilations:

Blackstar (one clairvoyant, or optimistic, voter). ChangesTwoBowie. Christiane F. (soundtrack). Images: 1966-1967. iSelect. Nothing Has Changed. Peter and the Wolf. A Reality Tour. Live Santa Monica ’72. A Portrait in Flesh (bootleg: Los Angeles, 5 September 1974). 50th Birthday Bash (bootleg: New York, 8 January 1997). Heaven’s In Here (bootleg: Tin Machine, Chicago, 7 December 1991). Sound + Vision (voter specified the original 1989 set).

Then the handful-favorites:

Lust for Life; Glass Spider (2 points/votes each); All Saints; Ziggy Stardust: the Motion Picture (soundtrack) (3 points/votes); Labyrinth (soundtrack), Bowie at the Beeb (4 points/votes); Baal (5 points/votes); Deram Anthology (5 points, 1 vote—its sole vote was a #1); Tin Machine II (6 points/votes); ChangesOneBowie (6 points, 2 votes, 1 #1 vote).

Now, we reach the outer regions. The top 30-20 Bowie albums, starting with the last “underrated” Bowie LP?:

30. ‘hours…’ (7 points/votes).

I’ve watched [friends] flounder a little over the last 10 years, when they’re reaching that stage where it’s very, very hard to start a new life. Some of them are affected with resignation and some of them, a certain bitterness maybe…they found themselves in relationships that aren’t what they had expected to be in when they were younger.

Bowie, 1999.

‘Hours . . .’ wafts into the room, breezily delivers its angsty arabesques and afterlife lullabies, and then luminously bows out in a succinct 45:42… an album that improves with each new hearing…further confirmation of Richard Pryor’s observation that they call them old wise men because all them young wise men are dead.

Greg Tate, Rolling Stone, 1999.

THREE WAY TIE, 29-27, among albums that have little to do with each other:

Stage (10 points/votes).

This particular package, extravagant yet minimal, arrives hard on the heels of a critically and commercially successful world tour: to capitalise on the thousands thirsting for vinyl souvenirs – love me, love my records – and to conveniently fill the contract quota. Spanning four sides and six years, it’s an obvious complement to the earlier, more fraught ‘David Live’ – there being no reduplication of any songs therein – and serves as a suitably ‘weighty’ and timely summary to the latest (and to many, the most interesting) stage.

Jon Savage, Sounds, 1978.

Leon (10 points, 6 votes, 1 #1 vote).

(For new readers asking ‘wait, what the hell is Leon?’ A not-quite-album, Leon is a bootleg collection of three 20-minute mood/song suites that were later cut up and diced into Outside.)

Our conceptual parameters are not that dissimilar. Brian would often set tasks which would define the movements of the day and then we would work according to that plan, which he would redefine in the studio. This is a great way to start because, as Brian often says, “When you ask musicians to jam, the common ground will always be the bloody blues.” So you always end up with these endless, boring bloody blues pieces. Brian’s thing is to break the structure from the beginning of the day and enter into a feeling of improvisation from new places.

Bowie, 1994.

Never Let Me Down (10 points, 6 votes, 1 #1 vote).

My nadir was Never Let Me Down. It was such an awful album. I’ve gotten to a place now where I’m not very judgmental about myself. I put out what I do, whether it’s in visual arts or in music, because I know that everything I do is really heartfelt. Even if it’s a failure artistically, it doesn’t bother me in the same way that Never Let Me Down bothers me. I really shouldn’t have even bothered going into the studio to record it. [laughs] In fact, when I play it, I wonder if I did sometimes.

Bowie, 1995.

Never Let Me Down is an inspired and brilliantly crafted work. It’s charged with a spirit that makes art soul food; imbued with the contagious energy that gives ideas a leg to stand on.

Glenn O’Brien, Spin review, 1987.

26. Tin Machine (11 points/votes).

We were sick of turning on the radio and hearing disco and dance music and drum machines, which I think in the business they call “crap.”

Tony Sales, 1989.

I’ve never been worried about losing fans. I just haven’t bothered to put that into practice recently. My strength has always been that I never gave a shit about what people thought of what I was doing. I’d be prepared to completely change from album to album and ostracize everybody that may have been pulled in to the last album. That didn’t ever bother me one iota. I’m sort of back to that again…

Bowie, 1989.

25. The Idiot (13 points, 9 votes, 1 #1 vote).

Iggy is in great shape – he’s not the drug-crazed lunatic of yore. Iggy is very together…he’s still got mischief forever. And it’s a great album. David plays saxophone on it. Everybody’s gonna find out where all the punk bands that are making it did their homework. I mean, Iggy’s so far ahead of everybody…

RCA official, to Wesley Strick, Circus, 1977.

I was happy to be a guinea pig if [Bowie] had a new idea. The more obscure and weird the idea, that’s what I wanted.

Iggy Pop.

CAREER SPANNING TWO-WAY TIE for 24-23: young man; rich man:

David Bowie (1967) (14 points, 10 votes, 1 #1 vote).

It was such a weird album. I can’t believe it got released.

Gus Dudgeon, 1993.

Oh, that thing… that was on a very semi-professional basis. I was still working as a commercial artist then, and I made that kind of in my spare time, taking days off work and all that. I never followed it up, did any stage work or anything. I just did an album, ’cause I’d been writing, y’know, sent my tape into Decca and they said they’d make an album. Thought it was original.

Bowie, to Lenny Kaye, 1973.

Tonight (14 points, 10 votes, 1 #1 vote).

It was rushed. The process wasn’t rushed; we actually took our time recording the thing; Let’s Dance was done in three weeks, Tonight took five weeks or something, which for me is a really long time. I like to work fast in the studio. There wasn’t much of my writing on it ’cause I can’t write on tour and I hadn’t assembled anything to put out. But I thought it a kind of violent effort at a kind of Pin Ups.

Bowie, 1987.

Tonight is not a great album. It is, however, a good album, and perhaps more importantly, it’s a much better album than you think it is, or may have been led to believe. Bowie’s made some subpar records, but this isn’t one of them—and frankly, even its failures aren’t boring, because, well, it’s an ‘80s Bowie album, from a decade in which he was wildly inconsistent, but also never dull. And remember: your family is a football team.

Thomas Inskeep, 2005.

22. David Live (17 points, 9 votes, 2 #1 votes).

The artiste at his laryngeal nadir, mired in bullshit pessimism and arena-rock pandering–and the soul frills just make it worse.

Robert Christgau.

The first track, “1984” burst into the room, and again Bowie settled back in a chair to listen. While the album was playing, several of the musicians traveling with him and some of the MainMan staff came into the room to hear it. Bowie was very much a musician, not a “personality” in the manner of so many rock stars when they listen to their own music. He was like a fan pointing out special touches – some crisp guitar lick or a particularly hot saxophone solo – that delighted him. There were, quite justifiably, many reasons for his delight. Though it is a bit dangerous making such judgements on the basis of a single listening, David Live is quite possibly the best live rock album I’ve ever heard – an urgent, highly accessible, brilliantly performed collection.

Robert Hilburn, Melody Maker, 1974.

WE END ON ONE LAST TIE, 21-20:

Black Tie White Noise (19 points/votes).

I knew what people would think when they heard I was going back in to work with Nile. But I was thinking, ‘I hope this doesn’t turn into another ‘Let’s Dance’,’ and that probably drove me even harder. It is a very personal album.

Bowie, 1993.

Black Tie is a very straight album. The skills which were once Bowie’s by default have been irretrievably passed on to the kind of talents he used to eat for breakfast, and he is left flapping alone, a mudskipper when the mud’s dried up. Welcome to the middle-aged disco, welcome to the dehydrated dance and, once past the hopeful roar of the instrumental opening ‘Wedding’, welcome to the disinherited second cousin of Let’s Dance again (like we did last summer).

Dave Thompson, The Rocket, 1993.

Pin Ups (19 points/votes).

This flashy tribute to the English scene, ca. 1966, remains Bowie’s quirky triumph–not that he’d come up with any other kind of triumph. I mean, who else could sing ‘Here Comes the Night’ as a raging queen and make it sound right?

Greil Marcus.

In those days [the 1960s] I was an audience, but I never dressed like anybody that was in the rock business.

Bowie, 1973.

Next: Bowie albums, 19-11 (I think—unless I find enough time to put it all together tomorrow. but most likely 19-11).

The Informer

The Informer.

Starting as a reworking/development of the instrumental “Plan,” “The Informer” wound up with a dozen vocal tracks (all Bowie) and a lyric possibly inspired by Martin McDonagh’s black comedy In Bruges. In the latter, two Irish killers are hiding out in Belgium after a hit goes wrong; their refuge Bruges soon reveals itself as a Dantean purgatory, for both them and their boss (who shows up in the third act to wreak havoc).*

The verse lyric (built on strides between C major and a fluctuating G major (from a suspended fourth back to the major chord)) seems written for Colin Farrell’s character in the film, a neophyte hitman whose debut assignment is to dispatch a priest, with a young boy winding up in the crossfire. “I’ll be telling myself…that you brought it on yourself” (or see later in the bridge, “you were the prime assignment/ so help me Christ“).

By the last verse, Bowie’s character study has given way to broader speculation/gripes about God, Satan, Christianity in general (there’s even a U2 dig in the last verse: “I still don’t know/what we were looking for“), with Bowie in his well-worn role of addressing an absent God like a lover to be abandoned or a false friend that he’s cutting. It’s “Word on a Wing” four decades on, its singer having grown ever more embittered and defensive over the years.

As with the other Next Day Extra tracks, there’s the mandatory dose of self-reference: see the “Satellite of Love” backing vocal line or how the dramatic build in the bridge calls back to the climax of “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide.” Yet with its crackling, swooshing guitar atmospherics, brusque rhythm section, its backing vocal tracks neatly arranged like a set of miniatures, the compression and harsh brightness of the mix, “The Informer” seems like the end of a long run. It’s the feel of Heathen and Reality pushed to the point of exhaustion, with Bowie having a last go in a played-out style. He pulls it off with aplomb, but in retrospect it was the closing number of Bowie’s millennial show, with the lead actor already plotting to tear down the set and bring in a new pit orchestra.

Recorded: (rhythm tracks) 3 May-ca. 15 May 2011, The Magic Shop, NYC; (overdubs) spring-fall 2012, spring 2013, Magic Shop; Human Worldwide, NYC. Released on 4 November 2013 on The Next Day Extra. Credits: “Crayon to Crayon” for some musical finds & I believe it was commenter “Dave L” who first noticed the In Bruges connection.

* Not even the first possible reference to Bruges in a Bowie song, as the Georges Rodenbach line in “Dancing Out in Space” could tie to Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte (which is very much the Bruges of McDonagh’s film).

Various business: Last weekend for the poll. As of this writing (Thurs. morning), 220 ballots are in and the top 2 songs are TIED, people. So vote if you haven’t already. Deadline is 8 PM EST, Monday 7 December. Poll results will be the week of 14 December: I’ll likely space the song winners out over a couple of days, and may do the top 100 instead of top 50. We’ll see.

Top: “Faungg,” “Bruges, Belgium,” 2011.

Like a Rocket Man

Like a Rocket Man.

Given the new direction revealed in “Blackstar” and (possibly) its upcoming album, the Next Day Extra tracks now seem, particularly in the winning “Like a Rocket Man,” as a last (?) winking goodbye to the past, to the point where they barely exist as songs. They’re more bright coalitions of memories, in which everything from lyric to title to vocal to chords has an analogue somewhere back in the dead 20th Century.

“Like a Rocket Man” ticks off more boxes than even the other past-obsessed songs of The Next Day. The title’s a dig at an Elton John single Bowie had groused about being a “Space Oddity” ripoff from the day it charted; the verse melody is a near-actionable steal of the Beatles’ “Help“; the lyric references (again) the Kinks’ “Days,” while much of it’s a brutal recollection of what it was like to be a cocaine addict in the mid-Seventies.

As in “Fascination,” Bowie personifies cocaine (quite literally: “Little Wendy Cocaine”) as the consuming passion of his life in the Young Americans/ Station to Station years. His sunny top melody shines up his lines describing the joys of coke, its delusions, its agonies (“I’m lead, oh, I’m sand…I’m crawling down the wall: I’m happy screaming, yes I am!…I have no shape nor color, I’m God’s lonely man…I don’t want to die but I don’t want to live”). Of course, it’s easy to get lost in Bowie’s house of mirrors here: he’s playing openly with his own myths, tweaking the Coke Dark Magus Bowie tabloid image that gets drummed into service whenever a new album, single or biography is released.

“[It] has a deceptively bouncy beat but lyrically it goes to more dark places,” Tony Visconti said of the track, “and this time David sings it with a cheeky smile.” And Bowie savors his rhymes: the consonance of “shaking hips and cuckoo eyes” and the title line; the triple runs of “doxy/ trolly/ poxy” and “anything/ dealing/ heaven sings.”

The feel, musically, is a brief tour through a shadow Sixties via the Nineties, with a latticework of guitars: a brisk acoustic matched to the dry snare/cymbal drum figure; a low-mixed bass; ominous David Torn atmospheres heard in the middle distance; Gerry Leonard’s wistfully arpeggiated opening riff (packed off after being played once) and the groaning, retorting twin-guitar riff (Torn) that stamps itself on the coda.

Bowie provides his usual backdrop of “commenter” backing vocals (Elvis-like low asides, a few Ronnie Spector tics), while his lead vocal, particularly when single-tracked, has the nasally timbre of a fledgling work like “Can’t Help Thinking About Me,” with some raw-sounding grazed notes left in the mix (see the high notes on “just tooo-ma-row” at 1:25) . It’s a fitting performance for a slight bonus track that wound up being a secret wake for a half-century’s worth of personae and memories.

Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. July 2012, The Magic Shop, NYC?; (overdubs) fall 2012-spring 2013, Magic Shop; Human Worldwide, NYC. Released on 4 November 2013 on The Next Day Extra.

Pictures: From various chapters of Casanova: Avaritia (Matt Fraction/Gabriel Bá), 2011-2012. Things have come full circle: this book of Casanova was partially inspired (so Fraction says) by a look at “Pushing Ahead of the Dame” some years ago (Bowie fans will have a field day with the amount of references piled into this comic). So here we have it: the blog using for illustrations something that the blog itself played a (very) small role in. Yet another sign my work’s almost done. Thanks, Matt!

Also: don’t forget there’s a poll going on. And Happy Thanksgiving.

Atomica

Atomica.

Ziggy Stardust was, in his creator’s words, a prefab rock star, a plastic rocker. Bowie tended to work out of sequence: he’d create something, kill it off, then look back in interviews and devise what his intentions had been. So Ziggy, he later said, was his fabricated rock performer, fashioned out of collective rock memory; he was a mannequin who sang on a few records and was soon dispatched.

Thing was, the sound of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars isn’t prefab 1971-1972 rock at all, with the possible exception of “It Ain’t Easy,” its bog-standard rock moment. Ziggy Stardust is shabby provincial music hall pop, shot through with bolts of Mick Ronson’s guitar, and lifting lines and sounds from horror movies, Fifties novelty singles, Beat poets and Kubrick films. You could find Ziggy a clunk-work of irreconcilable influences, but you really couldn’t argue it was “plastic.” It sounded too snippy and weird; it’s unassimilable. Even today, when “Suffragette City” turns up on a Pandora “Classic Rock” playlist, it stands out from “Lay Down Sally” or “Whipping Post” or what have you. It sounds like a vicious knock-off of classic rock standards: a track scrapped together by feral theater kids who managed to snare an ace guitarist and a Moog.

It’s one of the central ironies of Bowie’s work. Even when he tried to create mediocre, keep-your-head-down music, he kept making stuff that couldn’t quite pass. His mannequins would bother and even unnerve shoppers. “Shake It” is pretty dire 1983 R&B, but it wouldn’t have passed muster on many R&B stations of the time—its odd lyric, which Bowie seems to lovingly mock as he sings it, stringing phrases across bars; its fanatic castrati backing vocals; its lumpen rhythms.

On a bonus track released in 2013, Bowie seemed to pull off the trick at last. “Atomica” begins as simulacrum, drawing from the past three decades of music without grounding itself in any. Its opening 30 seconds could play anywhere—an Urban Outfitters, a Cheesecake Factory, or in the background of a home improvement show or a Korean cartoon—and wouldn’t draw attention. The lead guitar riff, nicely keeping in bounds; the tastefully popped bass; the seemingly programmed cymbal fill; the first lines—I’m just a rock star, stabbing away. All safely anonymous, as is the refrain, whose lyric seems to have been generated by bots.

But by the refrain, things have started going awry. Bowie jams twice as many syllables as should fit into his verse lines (“when-you’re-head-o-ver-heels-and-the-magic-is-there-but-im-POSS-i-ble–POSS-i-BLE”). He sings “police” like “puh-leeze,” rhymes “covered-up pool” with “purple tulle.” And after the second refrain, the track sinks into a hole of fixation, with Bowie moaning that “I….hold myself…like a god,” over and over again, until he looks ready to abandon the song. Snare drum fills and synthetic strings don’t rouse him. It takes the opening guitar riff, working as a defibrillator. “Atomica” marches out in its crooked way, stamped as yet another Bowie song.

“Atomica” started in the first wave of Next Day sessions in May 2011 (Gail Ann Dorsey’s on bass) but it needed more work, Tony Visconti said. Released as one of the Extras, it shares with its fellow bonus tracks a cheekiness, a sense of randomly-aimed parody, a labored looseness. “How others must see the faker,” Bowie once sang. But he was never a good faker, it turned out. He was the sort of counterfeiter who couldn’t resist altering whatever piece he was fabricating, so that any close look would reveal a forgery with its own strange intentions.

Recorded: (backing tracks) 3 May-ca. 15 May 2011, The Magic Shop, NYC; (vocals, overdubs) spring-fall 2012, early 2013, The Magic Shop, Human Worldwide, NYC. Released on 4 November 2013 on The Next Day Extra.

Top: Paramore, live in Dallas, 27 October 2013 (Antiquiet).

Born In a UFO

Born In a UFO.

Half a year after Bowie’s surprise return, it turned out that the surprise return wasn’t quite done yet. The Next Day Extra, announced in September 2013, offered four new tracks, along with compiling previous bonus tracks and remixes. It was, cynically, a means to get fans to buy the album again and, generously, a way for Bowie to get more songs out, rather than letting them languish for decades in his vaults, like all the alleged Lodger outtakes.

So what was The Next Day Extra? How should it be considered? As a new EP? As a digestif for an overstuffed album? As just more ones and zeroes sent into the ether, more disconnected music for a time when sequenced albums are antiquated?

The Extra tracks were mainly cut during the Next Day sessions but had needed more time to cook, Tony Visconti said, with further overdubs done in early 2013. But they didn’t sound too labored over. If anything united the Extra tracks, it was a sense of Bowie letting his hair down. No longer having to establish the Back-From-the-Dead Bowie, he could sneak out a couple of loopy, SF-themed songs that few people (relatively) would ever hear. Sharing an overbearing, blotto production aesthetic, the four Extra tracks now seem, with two years’ distance, to be a brief loud party held before the next scene change.

“Born In a UFO” is a case in point: a cracked parody of Bruce Springsteen (obviously in its refrain, but the verse melody also has a pinch of “It’s Hard to Be a Saint In the City“), with a Dylan nod (“‘there’s no direction home,’ she pleads”) and even some of Toni Basil’s “Mickey” in the rising keyboard lines (played by Bowie). A homage to SF serials Bowie had watched as a boy in Beckenham and Fifties novelty songs like the Earth Boys’ “Space Girl,”, it’s also a workable metaphor for falling in love with the “right” person at last: she or he can seem like they fell out of a spaceship one day, sent here to upend your life.

Zachary Alford said the song began as a reworking of a “leftover from Lodger,” (though there’s a chance he was recalling another song whose title Bowie later shifted to the released “UFO”). If so, you can see a few common threads—“UFO” shares the gonzo mood of “Red Sails” and has some vague similarities, chord-wise, to “DJ”: more in its sense of movement, with three rising chords as a hook (F-G-Ab in “UFO”, Am-Bm-C in “DJ”). Visconti and Alford (or Sterling Campbell) hammer the hell out of things; Earl Slick gets the “Andalusian” guitar solos. Bowie plays a suburban loser made hysterical by lust, though more for his alien inamorata’s fashion sense (“an a-line skirt,” “her clutch bag,” “silver hair, trapezoid flanks” and, best of all, “I was so in love with her lavender vest!“). All she’s missing is a bipperty-bopperty hat.

Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. July 2012, The Magic Shop, NYC?; (overdubs) fall 2012-spring 2013, Magic Shop; Human Worldwide, NYC. Released on 4 November 2013 on The Next Day Extra. Thanks to “Crayon to Crayon” for musical insight, as often.

Top: Maj Halova, “Žižkov Television Tower,” Prague, January 2015 (“there are babies climbing our rocket-like TV tower”). Maj has been commenting for many years, and it’s always nice to see her take on a new post. Thanks, Maj.

POLL POLL POLL: closing in on 100 ballots received so far. Plenty of time for you to add to the pile! Again: bowiesongs@gmail.com, subject line: POLL. Your 30 favorite Bowie songs, 10 favorite albums.

Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day.

One of the last tracks completed for The Next Day, “Valentine’s Day” bristles with purpose: trebly, compressed, everything upfront, as if determined to get its hooks in you early. Scratched together quickly, it’s just Earl Slick on guitars (from chord-pacing acoustic to the lead lines) and the unobtrusive rhythm section of Tony Visconti and Sterling Campbell. It’s economical in structure as well, with just two D major progressions for verses (a set of knight’s moves away from the home chord) and refrains (a quick sweep back home) and then a shift to B minor for the coda.

The subject, if slightly oblique in the lyric, was spelled out by Visconti: “inside the mind of a high-school mass murderer named Johnny,* inspired by the spate of shootings in US schools.” An inspiration appears to have been the Columbine shootings, with the reference to the killer taking out “the football star,” but it could have been any of the endless run of American school slaughters of the past two decades: Red Lake, Virginia Tech, Nickel Mines, Northern Illinois U., Sandy Hook and so on.

It’s possible Bowie’s upcoming play Lazarus will shed some more light, as one of its main characters is Valentine, whose casting description was “the most ordinary of men—a person seemingly with little confidence—physically withdrawn to the point of invisibility; a loner who is in search of a friend—for some love—for a cause; but a man who is unable to edit his opinion and function as a ‘normal’ person; psychotic.” Or take the most recent revelations about the play, that some of its setting will be “inside the protagonist’s mind.”

So calling “Valentine’s Day” a straight-out depiction of a school shooting seems too literal. For one thing, who’s singing it? “Valentine” is seemingly another character, someone who’s confiding in the singer—the voice of a split personality, or the about-to-snap friend who’s warning the singer to stay home from school that day? And there’s little indication that the shooting is actually happening—it could well be a violent power fantasy (note how the setting shifts from school to “the mall” in the second verse).

“Isolation, revenge, osmosis” was Bowie’s précis for the song, and at its heart are the lines that build up the refrain—Valentine told me so, he’s got something to say. It’s a perversion of what Bowie had once promised his fans: that you can recreate your life, that you can build a life based on a commitment to change and renewal, that everybody can be a star. Here that dream of self-transformation is reduced to a hectoring, boorish demand—listen to me—at the point of a gun. It’s the terrorist position, as Leonard Cohen once called it: The terrorist position is so seductive that everybody has embraced it…Reduce everything to confrontation, to revenge.

Or just take how a line that Bowie in “Outside” had meant as a spur to creativity, a call to discard the past and focus on the present—not tomorrow…it happens today—is here merely the reality that some bastard with a gun could end your life today, just because he woke up and decided it was so. It’s happening today!

It wouldn’t be as chilling if Bowie hadn’t made the song so catchy, with his Beatles chorus vocals (compare his ooo-la-la-las to those of “You Won’t See Me”) and Slick’s guitar arpeggio fills. Even the line about Valentine’s victims—“Teddy and Judy down”—has a sad Sixties echo to it, calling back to Ray Davies’ Terry and Julie in “Waterloo Sunset“; in a brighter time, the song could have been about them, a pair of lovers trying to work things out. Instead they’re just bodies lying in a classroom, another pair of names in a newspaper report (recall also that the names of the Aboriginal couple in the “Let’s Dance” video were Terry and Jolene).

And there’s a sense of building anger and disgust in Bowie’s vocal, how he moves from his opening fifth-spanning phrases that he drags through bars, gently extending his vowels (“treeeeasured,” “football staaaar,” “toooolld me”), to his agitated push upward on the title line to, in the coda, harping on a single note until nudging up or down to end a phrase (“it’s-in-his-ti-ny-HAND”).

The video, directed by Indrani and Markus Klinko, filmed Bowie miming the song in the ground floor of the Red Hook Grain Elevator. With Bowie dressed casually while playing a headless Hohner G2T guitar, the video’s intention seems to end the cycle of Next Day videos, lovingly depicting Bowie’s aging features in harshly-filtered lighting. (As the blogger How Upsetting noted, it’s the “living” Bowie after his resurrection in the “Next Day” video—a Bowie back on the job, doing the typical rock star thing where he pantomimes his new song in some obscurely chic setting—the Red Hook Elevator looks like a Roman bath.)

But there’s a barely-hidden violence everywhere you look—the way Bowie wields the Hohner like a rifle, to the point where some fans claim he was deliberately referencing a Charlton Heston pose; or what seems to be a bullet firing across a thrummed guitar string. And Bowie’s face, demonically grinning while he sings his refrains, is the counterpart to his angry closing vocals: own this. It’s a curse on his adopted country, a place in which the regular, random slaughter of children is considered the equivalent of some unavoidable act of nature, like a tornado. Hence the song’s title: a day meant to commemorate lovers is some grubby fanatic’s day of indiscriminate judgement.

Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. July 2012, The Magic Shop, NYC; (overdubs) fall 2012, Magic Shop; Human Worldwide, NYC. Released on 8 March 2013 on The Next Day and later issued as its fourth single.

*Not sure why Visconti called the character “Johnny.” Perhaps an earlier version of the lyric had “Johnny” as Valentine’s first name or the name of the singer, or maybe Visconti was recalling some earlier Bowie “Johnnys” (see “Repetition” or “I’m Afraid of Americans”).

Top: Shots from Bowie’s “Valentine’s Day” video (Indrani, Klinko).

(You Will) Set the World On Fire

(You Will) Set the World On Fire.

A track that seems as if Bowie used a Waring blender to make it, “(You Will) Set the World on Fire” is set in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s yet has a garish rock-show arrangement. Its title is a would-be manager’s promise of fame but it’s also advice given by St. Catherine of Siena (another sign Bowie had a yen for medieval saints—see “The Next Day”).

The presence of Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan (all hanging out in the same club, like a folkie Justice League of America) comes off more as stage-dressing, as if Bowie had just read Van Ronk and Elijah Wald’s Mayor of MacDougal Street (also used for the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis) and figured he’d litter the song with characters from the book.

Because rather being than any sort of homage to American folk music, “Set the World On Fire” is far more a “Broadway” song, with Bowie doing a camp take on a self-serious music—its closest ancestors are “Star” and “Zeroes,” his music-hall stage takes on rock ‘n’ roll.

The figure at the center of the song (“the black girl and guitar/burn together hot with rage”) is most likely the folk singer Odetta, who was represented by Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager (Grossman could be the refrain’s narrator) and who sparked everyone from Janis Joplin to Dylan himself. So the reference to St. Catherine (who allegedly dictated her visions while writhing in orgasmic ecstasy) is Bowie casting the Sixties folk scene as a medieval order.

But using Odetta as the hub of the wheel here also seems like a feinting maneuver, as the only figure who came out of MacDougal Street who could sell magazines and get Top 10 hits was Dylan himself (“manipulate, origin, text,” Bowie winked in his description of the song to Rick Moody). I’d argue that the song is Bowie’s sly tribute to Dylan, the consummate thief, charismatic and manipulator of his era, who left all of his peers far behind by 1965 (“you’re in the boat, babe/ we’re in the water”). Here Dylan’s shown perched off stage, watching the hot new singer’s moves and maybe planning to nick them; the parallels with the shark-like young Bowie seem obvious, if unintended.

It’s a pummeling, somewhat disjointed track, with its E major verses rammed along by Earl Slick’s power chords, over which Bowie offers some spidery phrasings, while its E minor refrains are flooded with guitar dubs (some of which sound like they were originally scored as string lines), harmonies by Janice Pendarvis and Gail Ann Dorsey and some enthusiastic tambourine by Sterling Campbell. After some Slick fireworks for a rising major-chord break, the song finishes off with cannon-blast refrains, where Bowie pushes to the top of his voice’s range, as if trying to sound young and untried again by force of will. As St. Catherine said, “labor to increase the fire of your desire.”

Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. July 2012, The Magic Shop, NYC; (overdubs) fall 2012, Magic Shop; Human Worldwide, NYC. Released on 8 March 2013 on The Next Day.

* From Letter 368, one of her epistles to Stefano di Corrado Maconi; it’s variously translated as “If you are what you ought to be, you will set fire to all Italy, and not only yonder” or “If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world on fire!”

Top: Oscar Isaac and cat, Inside Llewyn Davis (Coens, 2013).

Dirty Boys

Dirty Boys.

“A euphemism, and a song, for all the glam rock stars that have ever been,” Tony Visconti offered as his take on “Dirty Boys.” His employer simply said: “Violence, chthonic, intimidation.”

Sequenced as a mid-tempo, spacious contrast to the frenetic opener “The Next Day,” “Dirty Boys” is an E minor piece that sways to Steve Elson’s fifth-spanning baritone saxophone figure: the riff sounds like a big man stomping across a dance floor. Elson, who played with everyone from Shuggie Otis and Big Jim Wynn to Natalie Merchant and Radiohead, cut the baritone sax lines for “Modern Love” and was one of the “Borneo Horns” on the subsequent 1983 tour. While Bowie was in his secretive pre-production for The Next Day, he ran into Elson in New York, had “a dad conversation,” and then told him “I’ll be in touch about something.” A year or so later, Visconti called Elson in.

“He’s a little guy and he’s got a huge baritone sax, and he plays this dirty solo that sounds like stripper music from the 1950s,” Visconti recalled of Elson’s work on “Dirty Boys.” “Old bump-and-grind stripper music…it wouldn’t be out of place on Young Americans.”

When Elson turned up at the Magic Shop in 2012, many tracks “had working titles and some reference vocals. David had ideas of where the horns should be,” he told CounterPunch. Bowie’s directions included “don’t even think about what key we’re in” and “go farther out” (similar to what he told Mike Garson when recording “Aladdin Sane”). He wanted only a few takes, nothing too considered. What he liked when recording, he told Elson, was to leave some oddments in tracks, “so you might find, in a record, things that only happened once that one time maybe—just to show we could do it…the gems hidden in the recording.”*

“Dirty Boys” honored this intention: it’s one of the few Next Day songs given the chance to ramble and breathe, and it’s full of characters. Take how Tony Levin’s bass, sputtering underneath as if vexed by how much of a star turn Elson’s sax is getting, will occasionally bubble to the surface. The general mood is a sinister Carl Stalling theme for a Forties Warner Bros. cartoon, with traces of Tom Waits’ mid-Eighties records.

It’s just three verses (shifts from E minor to C major, the same progression as “Eleanor Rigby”), two bridge/refrains that hint at a move to C major, and an outro Em solo. Elson is such a dominant presence in the track, from his main riff (a swaggering step-up from root to dominant note in each chord) to his closing solo, that it’s hard to imagine “Dirty Boys” working without the saxophone. It’s possible Bowie tried out having a guitar play the brass riff, but that would have overcooked the song: instead, the guitars are foils, hitting on the off-beats or giving spiteful replies to Bowie’s lines in the verses (the players were Visconti, Gerry Leonard and Earl Slick, who said of “Dirty Boys,” “if you’re going to have a title like that, I have to be on it”.)

Bowie’s phrasing, keeping to a narrow range of notes and, in the verses, ending every other line with a sinking triplet figure (“lone-ly road,” “cric-ket bat”), calls back to his old “folk” piece “Come and Buy My Toys,” and his lyric traffics in more memory: “Tobacco Road” (whether the Erskine Caldwell novel, the John Ford film or, most likely, the Nashville Teens’ 1964 hit) and, as usual, old Bowie songs—see the third verse’s “we all go through.” The setting’s Finchley Fair in North London; the dirty boys could be vampire hooligans; the singer (and the person whom he’s calling out) want to join the gang, or sleep with them, or both.

It’s the sound of a cutting contest run by Bowie (mainly single-tracked, with what seems like a touch of distortion on his vocal) playing a genteel dirty old man. One of the small disappointments of The Next Day is how much of an outlier “Dirty Boys” proved to be in the context of the album.

Recorded: (backing tracks) mid-September 2011, The Magic Shop, NYC; (overdubs) spring-fall 2012, Magic Shop; Human Worldwide, NYC. Released on 8 March 2013 on The Next Day.

Top: “Tataata,” untitled, 2011.

*Take the little barking/scraping noise heard in the last seconds of the track—it could be someone yelping in the studio, or a squawked note from another Elson take.

Another reminder: Saturday, October 17; Astoria, Queens. Bowie night /trivia contest/ Rebel Rebel reading; all that jazz.

So She

So She.

Like “God Bless the Girl,” “So She” was a promising song from the Next Day sessions demoted to a bonus track. Started at the Magic Shop in September 2011 (the core group here was David Torn and Gerry Leonard on guitars, Tony Visconti on bass and Zachary Alford on drums), its odd structure is a whirl of feints and altered and swapped roles. A stark rockabilly guitar turns out to be some harsh prep for the song’s main hook, a dancing six-note melody (with leaps of sixth and seventh intervals) carried on keyboard and guitar. The chord progression of the first verse gets reused for the outro, while the second verse nicks the intro’s A major progression. And what seems like a refrain, a bittersweet eight-bar shift to C# minor and F# (“further out to sea…”), turns out to be a bridge: it appears only once, with Bowie singing the title line over the return of the intro hook.

Paced by acoustic guitar (Bowie, showing yet again he’s an underrated acoustic player) and Visconti’s restless bass, colored by Leonard and Torn’s atmospheres (and the occasional piano dub, like the raindrops of notes starting at 1:57) and a Visconti/Bowie string arrangement that builds from ruminative long-held notes in the bridge to fluttering figures for the title line, “So She” shines for what seems like a moment, then winds down into silence.

There’s a trace of “Slip Away” (“slide away”) and “The Motel” (“the priceless man,” meet “the odorless man”), and echoes of other The Next Day pieces—purloined eyes; lunar eclipses. Mainly it’s the return of “The Loneliest Guy“: the broken lonelyheart figure that Bowie’s played since “Letter to Hermione.” The second verse’s brief lyric—“she saw me smile….feeling like…I’d never been”—offers a happy ending at last: he’s found a love that makes him feel as if he hasn’t been born. Yet the reveal is that she makes him forget, for a moment, what he really is: “the only one and all alone.” And there it ends. Even the title’s a fragment: so she what? We’ll never know, nor will he, apparently.

Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. September 2011, The Magic Shop, NYC; (overdubs) spring-fall 2012, Magic Shop; Human Worldwide, NYC. Released on 8 March 2013 on The Next Day: Deluxe Edition.

Top: “Chris JL,” “Shoreditch, 2012.”