DAVID BOWIE

HAPPY RETURNS

David Bowie revisits the past on his few new album in ten years

by Matt Ashare |
Posted March 20, 2013

There's a badly dated artifact from the big, bad ’80s that I happened to dig up on YouTube a year or so ago featuring David Bowie prancing around with Mick Jagger as they tear through a supersized cover of the Motown classic "Dancing in the Street." It was all for a good cause: the two stars recorded the single and shot the video to raise additional funds for Live Aid, the 1985 charity Bob Geldof organized to promote simultaneous all-star concerts at London's Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia 's J.F.K. Stadium in response to a devastating famine in Ethiopia. That said, it didn't exactly bring out the best in Bowie and Jagger, who were, by then, certainly something out an odd couple. Jagger, outfitted in bright, baggy primary colors (green button-down shit, blue pants, and, a silly yellow sneakers), bounces and preens like the peacock he'd become, while Bowie, somewhat modestly bedecked in a floppy yellow overcoat, tries his best to keep up with the overblown choreography, which is more calisthenic workout than dance routine.
    What's striking, perhaps even a bit shocking about the performance isn't Jagger, whose exaggerated moves resemble nothing so much as a overstimulated simeon creature on steroids, but the very fact that Bowie's seems more than happy to play along. It's a role that just doesn't seem to suit the art-schooled glamor dude who'd spent the previous decade mutating from psychedelic space oddity, to full-on alien (Ziggy Stardust), to cracked actor (Aladdin Sane), to the elegant Thin White Duke of 1976's masterful Station to Station, before settling in Berlin for a landmark trilogy of more muted experimental albums with Brian Eno. If Jagger couldn't keep from painting himself into a corner as some kind of over-sexed clown, then the more reserved and thoughtful Bowie, even after he embarked on the corporate-rock juggernaut of Let's Dance in 1983, made make-up — and dress-up — seem cool.
    I suppose that even the most fashionable of caricatures can be excused a bad hair day every now and again. But awkward is not something the now 66-year-old Bowie's been prone to. Somehow, he managed to make it out of the wild ’70s, as one of the more distinguished ambassadors from the far side of the rock universe.  Indeed, outside of the rarified realm of stage acting, it's hard to think of a performer who's aged quite so gracefully, perhaps because the space he inhabits is as darkly cerebral as it is androgynously physical. And, yet, time finally caught up with the seemingly impervious Bowie in 2004, when he suffered a heart attack after a festival show in Germany on the "Reality" tour, supporting what would turn out to be his last album for a full decade.
    Since then, he's made sporadic appearances, most notably hooking up with the Arcade Fire for their televised 2005 "Fashion Rocks" show, accepting a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, and joining Pink Floyd's David Gilmour on stage at the Royal Albert Hall for a transcendent rendition of "Comfortably Numb" that found its way onto the 2007 live album Remember That Night. But, there was little word on what Bowie was up to — a pretty major feat for a celebrity of his stature in our digitally wired world — until this past January, when out of nowhere he announced on his website that a new studio album, The Next Day, would be out in March, and released the single "Where Are We Now?," accompanied by a video shot by avant director Tony Oursler.
    In a sense, The Next Day simply picks up we things left off a decade ago with Heathen and Reality, the pair of solid if not entirely memorable albums that found Bowie back in his comfort zone with producer Tony Visconti, a guy he'd worked with on and off since the 1969 classic Space Oddity. The album's cover — essentially, a reappropriation of the iconic artwork from 1977's Heroes with the title crossed out and "The Next Day" stenciled plainly into a large white space covering Bowie's face — suggests as much, and much more. After a ten-year hiatus, and a brush with mortality, the typically detached Bowie appears to be in an uncharacteristically reflective mood, self-reflective even. The ruminative, at times elegiac single, "Where Are We Now?," time travels back to Bowie's Berlin of the ’70s, with gentle references to key landmarks like the Potsdamer Plotz rail station, the neoclassical Brandenburg Gate, and, of course, the Berlin Wall.
    At heart, Bowie may be a true romantic. But he's rarely, if ever, sounded this sentimental. Oursler's video, which superimposes Bowie's stoic visage, unadorned and disembodied, over that of a furry toy doll in what looks to be an artist's studio,  includes grainy vintage footage of West Berlin that drives home the plaintive point: Bowie, the man of many faces, has had time to reflect on where he's been. But, as he's stripped away the many masks, he's begun to wonder what, if anything, these remembrances of things past might add up to, even as he sets out to revisit them.
    So, it's not entirely surprising that, sonically, The Next Day strikes some familiarly nostalgic chords from the Bowie songbook. The disc's charged and defiant title track and opener recalls the angular rock of the title track from 1980's Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks), with skewed guitars playing against a fragile melody, as Bowie declaims "Here I am/Not quite dying/My body left to rot in a hollow tree/Its branches throwing shadows on the gallows for me." "Valentine's Day," a timely yet not overly topical sketch about a high school shooter, has the sharp hooks and epic quality of a Ziggy Stardust track. And "Dancing Out in Space" takes the uptempo beat of "Modern Love" and lays a more minor-key melody down as Bowie finds his way back out onto the dance floor.
    Not everything on The Next Day is so easily reductive. "I'd Rather Be High," a movingly modulating tale from the frontlines of some unnamed battlefield, may be in keeping with Bowie's penchant for unnerving character studies, but it's more Pink Floydian than Bowie-esque. And the insistently linear "Love Is Lost" is a half-sung/half-spoken nugget of avant-rock that doesn't land solidly in any particular era.
    To the extent that The Next Day reflects the cumulative momentum of an artists who's rarely stood still long enough to pin down, it's a success. And, there's a strong core of solid songs here, which is certainly not the worst that's been said of Bowie. How it ranks among the strongest in his catalog is something cultists are free to argue intently over, at least until The Next Day fades from view. If, like me, you're a Bowie fan, or even just a curious student of pop archetypes, it's an album you'll want and perhaps even need to hear. And that's not a bad accomplishment for a 66-year-old performer who's been on the sidelines for a decade.