“Hello Space-boy” is the sound of Bowie and Eno going nuclear on Trent Reznor’s death-disco dance floor, hot-wiring the migraine gallop of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” into a ferociously distorted whirl of slaughterhouse jive. Taken in parts (a bit like the poor, disassembled Baby Grace), Outside has irresistible charms: the tense Euro-dance propulsion of “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” the layered, circular-guitar locomotion of “Voyeur…,” like Philip Glass in a King Crimson mood. “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town,” the jail-house lament of a petty thief falsely accused of the murder, is delivered by Bowie with a nice slice of wry: “And the prison priests are decent/My attorney seems sincere/I fear my days are numbered.” (Also note the song’s sly reference to Bowie’s 1975 hit, “Fame,” in the skittering, metallic rhythm guitar.) The lines “Poor dunce/He pushed back the pigmen/The Barbs laughed/The fool is dead” in “A Small Plot of Land,” a looping piece of freakcabaret jazz, say much more about the long dark shadows and desperate, clawing evil poisoning of the Outside world than all of Bowie’s prose wordplay. It’s my job to pick thru the manure heap for the peppercorns.”)Īll that explication belies the smart, sharp stab of Bowie’s more effective lyric writing. A colorful parade of riffraff with nifty handles like Algeria Touchshriek passes through the diary entries, but nothing much happens aside from Bowie and Adler’s fevered meditations on sculpted gore and the violent possibilities of self-expression. On Outside, Adler is wrapped up a little too tightly in the high-concept ritual murder of Baby Grace Blue, an adolescent of undetermined sexuality. You can practically feel the weight of Bowie’s own description of his story line: “A nonlinear Gothic drama hypercycle.” Outside is really just a confusing highbrow detective fable - Sam Spade meets Neuromancer via Naked Lunch - laid out as the diary of Nathan Adler, a futurist shamus specializing in art-crime investigations (as opposed to crimes against art, which too often go unpunished in real life). Indeed, it’s the superfluous wordage - the intrusive spoken monologues, the jury-rigged cybernoir narrative, the overelaborate characterizations - that damn near sink the record. The music - a potent collection of avant-garage riffs and rhythm notions co-written mostly with Eno and echoing the weird science of Low and “ Heroes” - feels shoehorned into the script with frustrating rigidity.ĭavid Bowie Estate Links Up With Nine Artists for New NFT Project Bowie’s almost pathological fear of dropping all the masks, of simply reveling in the power of a good chorus and the soulful quiver of his maturing tenor, has driven him into multiple-personality overdrive and forced melodrama. As rock & roll’s consummate quick-change artist, he has created some of the greatest leading roles in the pop-art theater of the imagination: the bisexual charmer of Hunky Dory the star-crossed alien lipstick-killer Ziggy Stardust the white-soul dandy of Young Americans that vampiric-looking beanpole the Thin White Duke the disco sophisticate of Let’s Dance.īut Outside, Bowie’s first album since his 1993 debacle, Black Tie, White Noise - and a highly anticipated studio reunion with Brian Eno, the co-architect of Bowie’s bench-mark Berlin trilogy Low, “Heroes” and Lodger - is way too much of a good thing. David Bowie has made a career of being anything and everything other than himself.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |