After Writercon, it feels like a total non-sequitur to launch right back into another long babble about David Bowie. I apologize to everyone who’s just friended me. But you know how it is when you’re in the grip of an obsession, right…?
So on to the Bowie talk.
Despite all my frustration about not being able to connect with Low, I have fallen head over heels for the song “Subterraneans.” I’ve been listening to it nonstop for a week. It captures this sense of time and place and distance and sadness and, just, the way Bowie’s lonely saxophone comes in at the end, wandering through the mist, reaching out and then fading away. It’s so beautiful and moving. I can’t explain it in words–you can listen to the song here.
I’m still reading Bowie books. I finished David Bowie’s Low (33 1/3) by Hugo Wilcken, which is absolutely fantastic. It’s exactly what I was wanting and not quite getting from Bowie in Berlin–an analysis of Low in relation to art and culture. Wilcken’s analysis is spot-on and interesting–he talks about Low as minimalism, its connections with German Expressionism, and about Bowie’s effort to remove narrative entirely. One of his best insights is that Low deliberately strips away the two things that were considered Bowie’s strengths: his words and his voice. His psychological analysis is less compelling, but I like how he talks about the album’s progression from the retreat into physical space (the first side’s references to hiding away in a room/bedroom) and then mental space (the second side’s nonverbal mindscapes).
He also talks a lot about how Bowie himself was already moving in an abstract direction–it’s not like Brian Eno swooped in and blessed Bowie with his ambient fairy dust or whatever. There’s a clear progression in Bowie’s work, starting from the linear narratives of his early folk songs (which probably culminates in the epic of Ziggy Stardust, although even by the Ziggy time the actual narrative was becoming ambiguous). Then the still very word-oriented “cut-ups” of the Diamond Dogs era (an idea taken from William Burroughs, in which Bowie would literally cut up his writings and paste words and phrases together in different combinations). It’s like he first tried to escape narrative convention with more and more layers of words and then with Low realized he could do it with many fewer words. The more I think about it, the more apparent it is that Low and Station to Station are two sides of the same coin. They have this same empty, disconnected, lonely core about the search for meaning and connection, but Station to Station’s surface is frantic and overwrought whereas Low’s is withdrawn and blank. And also, isn’t it a good thing that Bowie spent so long writing interminably epic narrative folk songs in relative obscurity, so that he was ready to explore more interesting experiments by the time he was famous?
I like that the book zeroes in on the work itself from an analytical point of view. It avoids long digressions about Bowie’s personal life and about which musicians played on what and which songs were released where. My only complaint is that the editing sucked. Wilcken uses the word “autistic” about forty times in a small 138 page book–yes, we got the point already. He’s also got a few factual errors and a couple of repeated phrases, but the overall work is so interesting that these flaws are easy to overlook. I’m really glad I read this–it’s helped me to understand and appreciate Low more than anything else so far.
I’m also reading Bowie: Loving The Alien by Christopher Sandford, which is absolute crap, on par with Alias David Bowie. It has Bowie “bursting into tears” in every other paragraph and alternates between describing him as an emotionally unstable lunatic and a scheming emotionless fascist. Its musical analysis is facile, it’s full of blatant factual errors, it treats all rumors as fact, it disregards everything Bowie says as agenda-driven but accepts as gospel the claims of bitter former acquaintances, and it’s just really offensive and gross. It’s clear that several of the better Bowie books are full of clarifications that are responses to this. (Thus the sense, when reading Strange Fascination, that I was missing half the story. I was, because it’s intentionally a sane reaction to the sensationalism of Loving the Alien and Alias David Bowie and probably a lot of other rumor-mongering crap.)
Current Mood: 
weird &
weird &
weird
Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.
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