The Man Who Sold the World (41 page)

Most obviously, “Fashion” sounded like David Bowie, as the complex interlocking rhythms of “Fame” [125] were blended with the basic chord sequence of “Golden Years” [127]. On an album that frequently found Bowie singing as if at a peak of emotional distress, “Fashion” was delivered in almost robotic style, with the barest variation of tone. As such, it was perfect for the dance floor—and a deliciously blank canvas for the promotional video, proving (as with “Ashes to Ashes” [184]) that Bowie now found more satisfaction in that art form than in record making.

 

[186] TEENAGE WILDLIFE

(Bowie)

Recorded February–April 1980;
Scary Monsters
LP

To quote from Nicholas Pegg's encyclopedic
The Complete David Bowie
: “the lyric is often glossed as an attack on the herd of Bowie imitators who rose to prominence at the end of the 1970s: Gary Numan believes he is one of the song's subjects, telling [Bowie biographer] David Buckley that he was ‘quite proud about it at the time.' ”

Reading #1.1: Though it seems unlikely that Bowie was sufficiently alarmed about the career of Gary Numan
*
to devote an entire song to deflating his ego, elements of “Teenage Wildlife” can certainly be interpreted as a rather grumpy, middle-aged, and ungracious assault on anyone who had the temerity to be (a) successful and (b) younger than Bowie. As such it could be filed alongside Todd Rundgren's “Determination” as an example of the syndrome identified by rock critic Robert Christgau (in relation to Stephen Stills), whereby “when he was young old people were wrong and now that he's old young people are wrong.” In this reading, the isolated man in the corner could have been the uppity new waver, or Bowie himself, unfairly singled out for criticism because of his advanced years (he was thirty-three, a dangerous age for messiahs).

Reading #1.2: As above, except that the target would be one of Bowie's contemporaries, attempting to transform his image in order to conform with “the new wave boys.”

Reading #2: Rock as self-criticism, in the tradition of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: or, as Paul Simon once asked himself, “Who you fooling?” In other words, “Teenage Wildlife” was a message to a man out of time, who was also running out of road, but still trying to convince the world he was more than a familiar body in “brand-new drag.”

Reading #3: Five years earlier, “Fame” [125] had been “bully for you, chilly for me”—“you” being Bowie's former manager, Tony Defries. In 1980, Defries was still collecting his royalties from Bowie's new music. It was not a coincidence that, after
Scary Monsters
, Bowie did not release another new album until that deal had expired. Those figures must have tortured Bowie if he woke in the night. But now Bowie promised his target “chilly receptions”: chilly for you, chilly for me. As the song's original working title put it, “It Happens Everyday.”

Reading #4: “Teenage Wildlife” was a nonlinear, no-winners commentary on fame, image, and the meaning of life, from a man riven by cynicism. It was assembled (like so many of his songs) out of phrases
*
from his notebooks, and shaped into form by contempt for everything around him. The targets in this reading: himself, Gary Numan, Tony Defries, his audience, the whole sordid charade of “teenage wildlife,” which had once occupied his dreams and now represented a living nightmare. It was an exit strategy, in other words, that Samson might have recognized: I'm going, and you're all coming with me.

Hearing #1: Almost seven minutes long, “Teenage Wildlife” was an epic exercise in bombast, worthy of Bruce Springsteen, Meat Loaf (one of Springsteen's imitators), or (one of Springsteen's role models) Phil Spector. Indeed, Spector would have commended the use of bells pealing deep in the mix, and have recognized the vocal interjections once used by his wife, Ronnie, on Ronettes' singles such as “Baby I Love You.” (Bowie used a virtually identical turn of wordless phrase on another
Scary Monsters
song, “Kingdom Come.”) For Spector, the creator of the so-called Wall of Sound, cacophony was intended to provide emotional catharsis, for him if not necessarily for the listener.

Hearing #2: Perhaps the strangest aspect of
Scary Monsters
, and this song in particular, was Bowie's dominant vocal persona—vastly exaggerated, deliberately grotesque, strained, pompous, yet strangely vulnerable in its tendency to crack into a falsetto croon at inappropriate moments. Clearly Bowie had not forgotten how to sing: Robert Christgau assumed it was self-parody, and it was certainly a rejection of all of the Bowie identities that had served him for the previous decade. Maybe he was still listening closely to Scott Walker's performances on
Nite Flights
. Or maybe he was infatuated with Meat Loaf, whose recent
Bat out of Hell
album had easily outsold all of Bowie's work to date.

Hearing #3: The master of cunning pastiche, Bowie offered one of his most obvious “clues” on “Teenage Wildlife,” by mimicking the verse structure of “Heroes” [149] so blatantly that it can only have been deliberate. Note, also, the conversational mention of his given name: the last such acknowledgment in his work had been the cheery, “Hi, Dave” in “Can't Help Thinking About Me” [A14] fourteen years before. Back then, he was indeed nothing more than teenage wildlife, ready to be hunted and mounted as a trophy on a businessman's wall. Both songs sounded like autobiography, and revealed both more and less about Bowie than they appeared to.

Hearing #4: “There's two basses on this, and I hope you appreciate it,” John Lennon muttered as he thought he was waving his career goodbye, completing the last song on his 1975 album
Rock & Roll
before entering several years of retirement. David Bowie didn't bother to announce it, but this was the only
Scary Monsters
song on which he employed both his visiting lead guitarists, Chuck Hammer and Robert Fripp. Let
them
fight it out.

Hearing #5: The eighties would, some complained, be a decade of sonic excess—drums too loud, guitar solos too fast and showy, too much echo, too much noise, vocals (think of Spandau Ballet's Tony Hadley) pretentious and (ill) mannered. “Teenage Wildlife” was Bowie's final glimpse into the future: a parade of everything we would learn to hate in the years ahead. In which light, the opening line sounded like a sarcastic abrogation of responsibility:
you
created this world, now
you
can live in it.

 

[187] SCREAM LIKE A BABY

(Bowie)

Recorded February–April 1980;
Scary Monsters
LP

For a song that had begun life as “I Am a Laser” [93], “Scream Like a Baby” always betrayed a mortal lack of focus. With “It's No Game” [180], Bowie had proved that he could retrieve long-forgotten song fragments and use them to construct something relevant to his contemporary life. “Scream Like a Baby” demonstrated the flaws in this method: unwilling to amend the original, bombastic melody of the song he'd originally written for the Astronettes in 1973, he found himself drawn to compose a set of lyrics that were equally overwrought. The resulting tale of rebel misfits—terrorists, maybe, or political outcasts: it was difficult to care—would have been rejected by those arch mythologists the Clash as being too banal. When delivered in a preposterously self-important tone, across a backing that mixed hard rock guitar with the percussion sound of Motown, circa 1964, the lyrics sounded like a parody of Bowie's clumsiest imitators. There was only one memorable moment, as the narrator declared himself ready to become part of society, only to find himself unable to spit out the final oppressive syllables of the phrase.
*

 

[188] KINGDOM COME

(Verlaine)

Recorded February–April 1980;
Scary Monsters
LP

The band Television's
Marquee Moon
album, issued in 1977, belied any sense of punk as a restrictive genre. Its fractured, expansive landscape, full of brittle melodies and exploratory guitar lines, was genuinely fresh terrain for rock'n'roll, at a moment when most artists preferred to retreat behind the comfortable old/new wave barricades erected by the media. At the heart of Television was Tom Verlaine, a self-consciously arty lyricist, mannered vocalist, and inspirational guitarist, whose instrumental interplay with fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd has rarely been rivaled on record. The compressed energy of
Marquee Moon
quickly dissipated, and Television imploded, but as Verlaine began what proved to be an anticlimactic solo career with a self-titled album in 1979, he was widely regarded as someone who would help to shape the decade ahead.

Hence Bowie's interest—which dated back to 1974—in Verlaine's work, reinforced by the suggestion from his own guitarist, Carlos Alomar, that he should consider recording this song. It was an intriguing choice for both Alomar and Bowie,
*
especially in the context of a record that signaled its own troubled genesis. “Kingdom Come” was a song of frustration, boredom, repetition: exactly the pitfalls that Bowie could no longer ignore. Consciously or otherwise, Bowie reinforced his negativity by a subtle alteration to the original lyrics. Verlaine complained repeatedly that he would be breaking rocks (like a life prisoner or an enchained Greek god) “till the kingdom comes,” with the hope expressed that salvation might eventually arrive. Bowie removed the hope until the very end of the song, by which time it sounded hollow: until then, he could foresee no destiny beyond the endless breaking of rocks, a Sisyphean fate for a man who had always regarded work as a justification for living and a defense against unwelcome psychological urges.

As usual when tackling outside material, Bowie performed “Kingdom Come” in the same key as the original, though he left his trace on the arrangement, which was an unhappy cross between the classic Motown sound and the sterility of American AOR (the elephants' graveyard of rock's vain pretensions to a rebel spirit). The explosive boom of the percussion on this track alone could be used to demonstrate a decade of production overkill to come; likewise Bowie's vocal, delivered as if he had forgotten how to do anything with his voice except over-emote like the hammiest of actors.

 

[189] BECAUSE YOU'RE YOUNG

(Bowie)

Recorded February–April 1980;
Scary Monsters
LP

Bowie explained away this song in 1980 as a message to his son's generation. “I can't write young,” he admitted.
*
Yet there was little in “Because You're Young” that hinted at an adult's mature advice. For this was a song of emotional fracture and disunion, sparked perhaps by the aftermath of his own marital breakdown, but tending toward a broader view of a world in which, as Bob Dylan might have said, everything was broken.

Fragmentation had always been safe territory for Bowie, in lyrical, musical, and philosophical terms. Now he no longer seemed to have conviction in his own ability to control that process and use the pieces of the past to create a future. “Because You're Young” lived in the shadow of younger talents, most notably Elvis Costello. The introduction of Bowie's record mirrored that of Costello's “Watching the Detectives”; the stabbed chords on a cheap organ suggested Costello's keyboard player, Steve Nieve; the chorus, like Costello's knowing throwbacks on his
This Year's Model
and
Armed Forces
albums, was pure early sixties; even the off-the-cuff vocal interjections in the fade-out sounded as if they belonged on Costello's “You Belong to Me” or “Radio Radio.” (The working title for
Armed Forces
had been
Emotional Fascism
, incidentally, a title that could usefully have been borrowed by Bowie for
Scary Monsters
.) To complete Bowie's debts, the song's title recalled the Duane Eddy instrumental hit from 1960, “Because They're Young”; and the track ended with some guitar licks that might have been transported wholesale from the Beatles'
Revolver
album.

Between these reference points, and the entirely predictable melodic structure of the song, there was barely room for Bowie to plant his own flag. Even his choice of guitar accomplice, Pete Townshend,
*
seemed to represent an abdication of creative power: the Who's leader neither challenged Bowie nor fired his synapses, probably because of the quantity of alcohol that, as Townshend later admitted, had been consumed during the session. Bowie was equally forthright about his predilections during this period: “My problem was cocaine, and then I went from cocaine to alcohol, which is a natural course of events.”

“Because You're Young” confirmed what much of
Lodger
had suggested: it had become increasingly difficult for Bowie to find inspiration from the creative methods that had served him faithfully for the previous decade.

SCARY MONSTERS (AND SUPER CREEPS)
LP

B
owie insisted that the techniques of rock ran at least a decade behind their equivalents in fine art. Yet there was an uncanny parallel between this 1980 album and the judgment of historian Stephen Paul Miller on the post-1975 work of the Pop Art pioneer Jasper Johns: “The later paintings systematically generate an ambiguity of surfaces throughout their canvases.” Rock critic Charles Shaar Murray expressed a similar sentiment eloquently in his
New Musical Express
review of
Scary Monsters
, describing “the latter-day Bowie sound” as “a grinding, dissonant, treacherous, chilling noise where standard rock tonalities are twisted until their messages are changed.”

All of those adjectives were justified for a record that dealt so nakedly in extremes—high emotions, wild passions, grating sheets of noise, sweeping judgments of self-criticism. No wonder that, a decade after its release, Bowie said that “
Scary Monsters
for me has always been some kind of purge. It was me eradicating the feelings within myself that I was uncomfortable with.” It was as if he had rounded up all the schemes and pretensions that had obsessed him during the previous ten years, exaggerated the most mannered elements of his music making, summoned up and then dispatched his legendary “characters,” and then exposed the hollowness that was left when all illusions were dispelled and all artifice uncovered. It was a record that announced, in word and in deed, that its creator had reached the end of the road; that there was no more mileage to be gained from continuing this particular experiment in combining confrontational art and lavish entertainment. As such, it was one of his most valuable statements, annulling his audience's expectations while setting out a warning for those who might dare to follow in his footsteps. Bowie proved to be as fearless in chronicling his own exhaustion—and the exhaustion of what Joni Mitchell once called “the star-maker machinery”—as he had been in extending the horizons of popular music and what it could achieve.

The contrasting arrangements of “It's No Game” that opened and closed
Scary Monsters
set out its emotional terrain perfectly: here be desperate screams and rigid control, each equally telling about the artist's sense of his identity. He now had to face the biggest dilemma of his entire career: how to continue without leaning on the props—the identities, concepts, and drugs—that had sustained and protected him for the previous decade. He would no longer be the Bowie of the seventies: but what else did he have to sell?