Jul 23, 2017
I read Rob Sheffield’s lovely meditation over a few evenings, going slowly because he kept making me want to listen to Bowie’s music. Written shortly after Bowie died, it’s a very personal book — even though Sheffield is an experienced music journalist with several books under his belt, this one reads more personally — an appreciation written by someone who was a fan for most of his life.
Sheffield is very close to my age, and he describes a familiar relationship with Bowie. “Bowie was always a rock star who told me the truth,” he says. [26] His future wife, after hearing Sheffield give a lecture on Bob Dylan, said she had nothing to add. “Bowie is my Dylan. Bowie is also my Bowie.”
He was the hottest tramp, the slinkiest vagabond, the prettiest star who ever shouted “you’re not alone!” to an arena full of the world’s loneliest kids. [1]
It was his crackpot compassion that made him Bowie. The lust for human connection is what his music is all about. … The hero of “Star Man” isn’t the actual star man — it’s the two kids who talk about him, after picking up his signal on the radio.… [Bowie] was the cracked pastor, shepherding his flock of lost kids. [5]
For both Sheffield and me, our appreciation of Bowie began long before we owned any of his albums, when he was just a voice on rock radio. Even if we didn’t know it yet, Bowie was giving us a music of our own. Sheffield makes an inspired comparison between Bowie and Neil Young:
Bowie arrived late for the 60s party, so he missed the idealistic hippie days and had to settle for being the quintessential 70s rock star along with Neil Young. It’s funny how much those two have in common, despite their opposite fashion sense. Both arrived as solo artists just as the 60s were imploding, a little too late to be Bob Dylan, and they never got over it. Both built their massive 70s mystique around abrupt stylistic shifts. Both fluked into a number one hit (“Fame” and “Heart of Gold”), but both responded to this success by refusing to repeat it, much to the despair of their record companies. Both wrote gorgeous sci-fi ballads blatantly inspired by 2001 — “Space Oddity” and “After the Gold Rush.” Both wrote classic songs about imperialism that name-checked Marlon Brando — “China Girl” and “Pocahontas.” Both were prodigiously prolific even when they were trying to eat Peru through their nostrils. They were mutual fans, though they floundered when they tried to copy each other (Trans and Tin Machine). Both sang their fears of losing their youth when they were still basically kids; both aged mysteriously well. Neither ever did anything remotely sane. [63]
But Bowie’s esthetic, music and subject matter always appealed to me much more than Neil Young’s. Where Neil tended to the earnest and folkie, Bowie tended towards knowing winks, science fiction, and dance music.
Bowie’s sci-fi caper made him the C–3PO of rock and roll — a golden droid who has adventures all over the galaxy yet remains fussily British (and gay?) wherever he goes. … Like any protocol droid, he’s programmed to study and copy humans, but he’s strictly an interpreter who isn’t supposed to have feelings of his own. C–3PO’s Bowie-est moment is [in] Return of the Jedi, on the planet where he gets worshiped as a rock star. “I do believe they think I am some kind of God,” he tells Han Solo. “It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” [51]
Plus, as Sheffield says, Bowie wasn’t “one of those English blues dudes getting back to roots that were never his.” Long before I understood the disturbing politics of appropriation, those musicians never appealed to me. Bowie was certainly pretending to be something he wasn’t, but much more intelligently than Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page were. If nothing else, he let us in on the joke — made clear he knew it was a joke — and warned us not to get comfortable. “He’s just passing through,” says Sheffield. [99] I appreciated Bowie’s intelligence, his implied rejection of the 60s’ false authenticism.
Ziggy served notice and called time on the 60s and celebrated a tawdry new school of 70s rock pretensions. He was already mocking the “brothers back at home with their Beatles and their Stones” in 1972, barely two years after the Beatles split — and not only did the Stones still exist, they’d just dropped their best album. [71]
Sheffield has special love for “Young Americans,” a song that I loved long before I owned a single Bowie album. It’s one of his most emotional songs, in a certain respect, and as with so much of his work, essentially loving underneath all its hard edges and funk beats.
Bowie sings about [the song’s characters] with so much compassion and generosity, not to mention lechery. He roots for them to stand by each other with love, togetherness, and devotion, even though he is incapable of it himself. He knows he can never be as pure of heart, as uncorrupted, as a young American. But of course, it’s also a song about his own damage. [97]
Curiously, Sheffield refers to the lyrics of “Young Americans” as “utterly incomprehensible,” even though the album came with a lyric sheet, and proceeds to badly misquote a key few lines: “you ain’t a pervert, you ain’t a whore, sir, a man’s gotta carry on and maybe drive a Chrysler, Blacks got their Stanford, whites got their soul train.” [95] Huh?
This is even more curious considering that he accurately quotes the complicated Kabbalah-based lyrics of “Station To Station,” which album did not include a lyric sheet. [124] Describing that as his other favorite Bowie song, along with “Young Americans,” Sheffield calls the song “a gargantuan version of that R&B standby, the train song.” Sung by Bowie’s Thin White Duke character, “a would-be romantic with absolutely no emotion,” it’s full of Jewish mysticism and the Stations of the Cross, but with a monster groove: “James Brown is always on board this train.” Sheffield decodes those Kabbalistic lyrics that were for years incomprehensible to me:
Moving from Kether to Malkuth means descending from the crown of creation (the divine source beyond human comprehension) to the earthly kingdom (the material world that reflects God’s glory). In other words, falling to earth. [124]
Sheffield doesn’t spend much time on Low and “Heroes”, confessing that as a teenager he didn’t fully understand them. I fell in love with Low the first time I heard it; where Diamond Dogs sounded to me like a Samuel R. Delany novel come to life, Low was a soundtrack for the icy dystopias of J.G. Ballard that I was devouring at the time I got the album. I spent hours in my room listening to Low. And my room actually was painted electric blue (the trim, at least).
Sheffield became a serious fan one album earlier than I did — he started with Lodger in 1979, whereas I started with Scary Monsters in 1980. Both albums were strange and angular, with gender-twisting poses and often menacing lyrics. Scary Monsters, unlike Lodger, yielded several top 10 singles, including the ubiquitous “Ashes To Ashes,” and while the first side of the album, with that song, the title track and “Fashion” all in a row, captured me immediately, it took me longer to appreciate the second side. The young Sheffield was captured by the first single from Lodger, “Boys Keep Swinging” — “it made a mockery of the whole idea of boyness”[153] — while the song that finally captured me was the side-two opener of Scary Monsters, “Teenage Wildlife,” with its beautiful Robert Fripp guitar line and Bowie’s half-sympathetic, half-scornful message to bullied high school students. (“Don’t ask me, I don’t know any hallways”). But in both songs, Bowie was talking to us, the outsiders. “Bowie was all about eroticizing what you don’t know for sure.” [150]
Discussing Bowie’s 1979 “DJ,” the only other single from Lodger, he says that like me, he first got to know many of the songs by taping them off the radio, permanently burning into one’s head the segue to whatever song the DJ chose next on that particular day. [147]
You think [“DJ”] might seem dated by now, rooted as it is in the glory days of rock radio when the DJs picked out their own playlists. But nothing’s changed except the technological devices. Just change the hook “I’ve got believers!” to “I’ve got followers!” and it becomes a case study in social-media syndrome. The DJ sits alone in the dark, addicted to pitiful jolts of validation from random (and probably imaginary) strangers he’ll never meet. That can do a number on the brain. This tune was years ahead of its time. [148]
Sheffield could have been writing about my feelings as the 1980s began, describing his excitement when Let’s Dance came out: “I became convinced that ‘Modern Love’ was my new favorite Bowie song ever.” [158] As he says, that album has “gotten unfairly lumped in with [Bowie’s] other 80s flops, so it’s probably worth pointing out that nobody was mad at Let’s Dance at the time. Whether we liked the new songs or not, fans saw this new smoothie as a role Bowie was playing.” [160] He and I both shared the same disappointment as the 80s went on, and Bowie seemed to be permanently inhabiting the least interesting of all his many personas. “Just four years after Let’s Dance, when he was the elder statesman of rock cool, he had turned into one of those franchises turning out big budget projects nobody paid attention to. And he’d bailed on the music.” [163]
Sheffield likes Bowie’s “comeback” album, 1995’s 1.Outside, less than I do, although I agree that it hasn’t aged well. But Bowie’s return to writing good songs, working with Brian Eno, and trying new things, was a welcome relief after the dismal 80s and the monotonous grunge of Tin Machine. That year I took a day off work to wait on line for hours outside the long-gone HMV in Herald Square to get Bowie’s autograph on the first of his LPs I’d ever bought, Changesonebowie. “You don’t see many of these any more,” he laughed at my vinyl. Later that year, in pouring rain on a fall night in Camden, New Jersey, I stood in the mud and watched him share a bill with Nine Inch Nails, sounding every bit as up-to-date as Trent Reznor’s then-new industrial band, singing “Hurt” better than anyone would until Johnny Cash covered it years later, and sharing the vocal on “Scary Monsters” with Reznor, leaving the youngsters wondering if they were hearing a new NIN song.
Albums continued to come every few years, all good, some very good, until the mid–2000s when Bowie more or less retired. I was lucky enough to see his last concert appearance, in 2006, at a charity event hosted by Alicia Keys. He looked relaxed and happy, and his singing voice was exquisite. I’d always hoped he would book something like a weekly gig at Joe’s Pub, just down the street from his home, and play whatever he felt like once a week. But clearly, he had better things to do with his time: spending time with his family, going out to clubs to see bands, and finally, after almost ten years away, recording his last two utterly amazing albums in secret. The Next Day was announced on his birthday in 2013 with the single and video, “Where Are We Now,” a poignant look back. “You never knew that / That I could do that / Just walking the dead.” The album as a whole rocked hard and is permanently paired in my head with Arcade Fire’s Reflektor, released the same year, on which Bowie made a vocal cameo.
Then came 2016, and his last album, Blackstar, released on his 69th birthday, two days before he died. Musically inspired by Kendrick Lamar, and featuring some of New York City’s best avant-garde jazz musicians, it sounded like nothing he’d done before, and like nothing anyone else was doing: “Bowie listened to Kendrick and got an idea for a different way he could approach music. He still wasn’t finished learning.” [187] Musically it drew from Lamar’s laid-back beats, from Bowie’s love of angular jazz improvisation that dates back at least to “Aladdin Sane,” and from a myriad of other sources, including Bowie’s own trademark melodic hooks. Lyrically, it was perhaps the most genuine thing he’d ever written; at the end, the masks were, if not exactly set aside, more transparent and more raw than they’d ever been before.
The whole album was a love letter he left behind for everyone, talking to us about what he was going through, giving us music to grieve with, so we could feel closer to him as we went through the shock and bewilderment of his death. He spent all these years building a unique connection with his fans, and now he’d spent his final year making a soundtrack to the bereavement he knew was waiting for us. He sang about his grief and fear, his pain about the people he was leaving behind. In “Blackstar,” he sings the key line: “At the center of it all, at the center of it all, your eyes.”
But on the other hand, “Blackstar is different because it’s the death letter of an old man who ambiguously did not want to die.” In this way it is very different from other final albums like Warren Zevon’s or Johnny Cash’s, not least in that it doesn’t have any comforting familiarity. It could have been the next chapter of an entirely new Bowie, but instead ended just as it got started, like one of those song fragments on the first side of Low. What in the world?
Blackstar isn’t a completely unified statement — two of the songs were released in different versions a year earlier, and while many revolve around death and dying, others are more impenetrable or downright funny. “Girl Loves Me” combines Nadsat vocabulary with the repeated question, “Where the fuck did Monday go?”
But what is more Bowie than darkness leavened by humor? Or is it anger? Seeing more and feeling less? Saying no and meaning yes?
I’m dying to / Push their backs against the grain
And fool them all again and again / I’m trying to …
Don’t believe for just one second I’m forgetting you
And who is Bowie if not the sum of his many sharp-edged parts, even if they didn’t all fit together smoothly? “He’s like a Lego kit,” David Robert Jones said about Bowie. “I’m convinced I wouldn’t like him, because he’s too vacuous and undisciplined.” [109] I think Jones might be right; Bowie seems to have been pretty extremely unlikable at times. But I will always love him.
