The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  Hence this remarkable track, which began with a fuzzy keyboard searching for direction, before being kicked into order by the most aggressive snare drum sound yet captured on recording tape. “Speed of Life” rekindled the glorious tradition of rock’n’roll instrumentals from the late fifties, augmented to reflect the pace of technological invention over the previous twenty years. Beneath the sonic playfulness of treated drums, mutated guitar, and keyboards that mimicked prehistoric birds, the primary riff could have been performed by a fifties horn section with answering handclaps. Not so its companion, set to a more unsettling semitone fall (Da-C), through which a rhythm guitar chattered like a telegraph machine—itself one more victim of the relentless speed of life.

  [134] BREAKING GLASS

  (Bowie/Davis/Murray)

  Recorded September–November 1976; Low LP

  * * *

  After years of attempting to translate music into theatrical or cinematic extravaganzas, Bowie had finally recorded an album that begged to be represented on film. The movie of Low would have required a simple but chilling technique: episodic scenes of psychological disintegration, viewed just out of focus, each one fading swiftly to a black screen. For “Breaking Glass,” a single close-up on the hero’s face would have sufficed, documenting the disconnection between emotion and appearance.

  In just six masterful lines, and less than two minutes of music, Bowie had succeeded in capturing a state of total dislocation between two people—or, to be more accurate, between one person and his perception of the world. It didn’t matter whether, as many commentators have suggested,* the something “awful” design that the narrator drew on the carpet was, or was not, the “Tree of Life” from Kether to Malkuth [see 126]. No sooner did he command his companion to avert his/her eyes from his “awful” drawing than he barked, “See!” Such was the fracture between his conduct and his self-awareness that when he declared that he would never touch his companion again, the only sensible response would be “Thank God.”

  Bowie’s vocal was virtually robotic, certainly stripped of humanity, even when double-tracked in the chorus: two madmen were no more comforting than one. The soundscape was uncertain: cymbals and drums crashed in reverse, appearing from their own echoes. Both of his commands—listen, see—were followed by bursts of electronic sound between the speakers, obeying some logic that was entirely his own. This was desolation in miniature: fade quickly to black.

  [135] WHAT IN THE WORLD

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September–November 1976; Low LP

  * * *

  In a sequence of songs that owned up to depression and alienation, “What in the World” was the exception. Not that those conditions weren’t present, but Bowie’s narrator deflected them onto a girl who was entombed in her room. “What in the World” treated her like a foreign object, before Bowie decided that, despite it all, he was still prepared to allow himself to sample her love. (The repetitions of “for your love” by Bowie and his guest vocalist, Iggy Pop, were a homage to the Yardbirds’ 1965 single of that name.) So this wasn’t a song about a depressed girl, after all; the star of the show was a man who could view her only through the prism of his own lust. Bowie could not be accused of tumbling into romantic clichés.

  The song’s emotional dislocation was matched by the mechanical nature of Bowie’s lead vocal, which by the second verse could barely muster the energy to change notes. That sense of imprisonment—in the room, in the ego—recurred in the structure of the song, with its repeated chord changes between major chords two semitones apart (F-Ea; later D-C). Only during the brief seconds when Bowie was admitting to some emotional involvement was there any respite, as a descending bass line offered a hint of some traditional pop romanticism, only to be shut down immediately. Nor did the musical accompaniment lighten the gloom: everything was as synthetic and preprogrammed as Bowie’s responses, from the treated drums at the start (supported by what sounded bizarrely like an electronic wobble board) to the staccato attack of the guitar solo.

  [136] SOUND AND VISION

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September–November 1976; Low LP

  * * *

  Some statistics, first of all: “Sound and Vision” ran for 183 seconds.* No human voices were heard for 46 seconds, when the backing singers crooned a two-note descent; no hook for 74 seconds, until Mary Hopkin (then married to producer Visconti) provided a deceptively playful wordless chorus. Not until 88 seconds had passed did David Bowie’s voice appear, posing a question with which his admirers could surely identify.

  Like “Quicksand” [50], “Sound and Vision” was Bowie’s admission that his creative inspiration had disappeared: cunningly, he used a confession of artistic bankruptcy to spark his muse back to life. Hence the tension that haunted the first side of Low: Bowie no longer knew whether he could function as the artist he had once been. “Sound and Vision” didn’t promise that he could reconnect with the outside world (it was telling that he chose not to promote this record in any way), but it did at least reconnect him with himself; as such it was arguably one of the most important songs he had ever written.

  It was also a consummate pop record, as tightly produced as any disco classic of the era: indeed, it might well have registered with the public just as strongly as an instrumental, with Hopkin’s vocal as the focus. Its glassy sheen was constructed from metallic elements—the sizzle of a cymbal on the third beat of each bar, guitar reverb on the first beat, a mock-reggae rhythm in the right channel, the defining guitar riff in the left, and then the whiniest of electronic strings, running down the key of G. Bowie’s lead vocal was lugubrious and almost apologetic, his harmonies ludicrously affected, suggesting he didn’t believe in his renaissance. And at the end, the track faded quickly away, as if trying to erase its own existence.

  [137] ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September–November 1976; Low LP

  * * *

  Bowie explained this song with a charming anecdote about the time when he had chased a drug dealer around the car park of a Hollywood hotel, recklessly sideswiping anything within automobile range. His ability to exaggerate and mythologize within the utterly unreliable context of a promotional interview, and with a poker face, has been a hallmark of his entire career.

  Regardless of its truth, Bowie’s tale was irrelevant in the context of Low. Driving was central to the mystique of American rock’n’roll: brand names and car chases littered the writing of Chuck Berry and Bruce Springsteen. In US popular culture, the automobile signaled freedom, movement, direction, identity, individuality in the instant of signing up for a collective fantasy. In the seventies novels of J. G. Ballard, driving was hazardous, directionless, maniacal, suicidal, murderous. “I think the twentieth century reaches its purest expression on the highway,” he wrote in a 1971 essay. “Here we see all too clearly the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine and, conceivably, with its own death and destruction.” His 1973 fiction Crash eroticized the phenomenon of the automobile accident, equating the puncturing of the flesh by twisted steel with the bodily invasion of sexual intercourse. The narrator grows “to accept the perverse eroticism of the car-crash, as painful as the drawing of an exposed organ through the aperture of a surgical wound.” Reviewers were less accepting: a reviewer in the New York Times declared Crash to be “hands down, the most repulsive book I’ve yet to come across. . . . Believe me, no one needs this sort of protracted and gratuitous anguish.”

  Man and machine had become indissoluble, just as, in the sonic landscape of Low, technology had enabled the synthesis of computer and creator. In a Ballardian universe, the car was a vehicle for the human in the same way that the body was a vehicle for the soul or mind. This was the ultimate driving metaphor: life on the road, not as a touring musician but as a passenger of the human condition. You could get a paint job, but it was still the same car.

  Bowie’s lead vocal on this track—pla
cid, isolated, cocooned in echo, reduced to little more than a whisper—accentuated the sense of remorseless circularity. When he briefly broke out for a repeated cry of “yeah,” he sounded hollow, not liberated; it was like a cynical pastiche of the Beatles’ life-affirming chorus from “She Loves You” an eon before. Behind Bowie, keyboards and guitars mapped out the same featureless landscape—repetition, an unbroken drone—in a world of distortion: a suitably inhuman and unreal setting for a drama in which identity had been sacrificed.

  [138] BE MY WIFE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September–November 1976; Low LP

  * * *

  David and Angela Bowie were still married, if effectively estranged, when Bowie wrote this apparently straightforward song. But it was not intended for a specific target: “It could’ve been anybody,” Bowie admitted. Just as his car was a symbol for his life, so a wife was the totem of what his life was missing: a symbol of belonging, of (in every sense of the word) engagement, the opportunity for empathy, a public gesture of normality. So this was not a marriage proposal but a confession of living outside and beyond, of restless movement and an empty heart. This was not a conventional declaration of romance: “share my life” was not an enticing suggestion. As Bowie said later, “It was genuinely anguished, I think.” His qualification was an attempt to soften the blow for himself.

  Who was delivering this message? A Londoner, audible as such for the first time since he had left Britain in 1974; someone who didn’t reveal his emotions lightly, who preferred the clipped irony of the Englishman abroad. On Young Americans, two years earlier, Bowie might have opened his heart like a soul singer; here he preferred to adopt a low profile. So the listener had to search out his intentions in the music—in the predictable Am/G/F chord structure of the opening line, which was then subverted by being left hanging on the G chord next time around; in the wry smile of a vaudeville-style piano, masking the clown’s tears; in the suppressed emotion of the strident piano chords that completed each line; and in the animal howl of the guitar solo.

  [139] A NEW CAREER IN A NEW TOWN

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September 1976; Low LP

  * * *

  Bowie identified “A New Career in a New Town” as the “most narrative” piece on Low—a judgment that was either playful or devious, as the track was purely instrumental. If there was a sense of movement and progression beyond the title, then it was in the juxtaposition of “old” and “new” Bowie styles: the collision between the synthesized percussion,* ambient drone, and sonic manipulation of the opening section, and the more traditionally rhythmic blend of rock and funk that provided the main theme. The latter hinged around the classic doo-wop chord sequence (I-vi-IV-V), utilizing a repetitive keyboard motif against a blues harmonica that was strangely reminiscent of the 1970 UK novelty hit “Grooving with Mr Bloe.”

  THE ART OF MINIMALISM

  The division of Low into “experimental rock” and “ambient” sides mirrored two of the major influences on this era of Bowie’s career: minimalist music and the German tradition dubbed (by British journalists) Krautrock. Each of them offered a conscious shift of perspective away from the dominant cultures of the age. The minimalists represented a return to simplicity and melody after decades in which classical music had been dominated by the modal compositions of the modernists. Rather than returning to the orthodoxies of previous centuries, however, they preferred to use repetition to capture the spirit of the age, and subtle variations on that repetition to express individuality. The two premier figures in this field were Steve Reich and Philip Glass (whom Bowie and Brian Eno saw in 1970 performing “Music with Changing Parts” at the Royal College of Art in London). Reich’s work favored the intervention of juxtaposition and chance, as part of what he called “music as a gradual process”; Glass preferred to introduce deliberate variation into an area of repetition. Each composer had his “school” of admirers and copyists.

  Krautrock, meanwhile, was a defiantly German answer to the Anglo-American dominance of the global rock industry, arriving at both repetition and atonality as an electronic means of extending musical boundaries while imposing tight restraints on artificial notions of novelty. The racism implicit in the Krautrock name was exposed when one surveyed the remarkable range of music that it pigeonholed: everything from the ethereal, almost ambient textures of Tangerine Dream’s synthesized compositions, to the confrontational rock and sound experiments of Faust. The band Can were perhaps closest to their American psychedelic contemporaries; Kraftwerk relied on almost robotic formality; and NEU! divided their three albums between raucous rock assaults and deceptively simple synthesizer pieces.

  Both schools were reflecting techniques and theories that were current in the contemporary visual arts, from the repeated motifs of the Op Art painters to the self-imposed asceticism of those European artists who set themselves the task of endlessly reproducing the same canvas (among them Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, and Niele Toroni).

  If Bowie’s conduit to the minimalists was Brian Eno, he had discovered the Krautrock tradition firsthand. The link between the two schools was electronic, and more specifically synthetic: the Moog synthesizer and its cousins introduced new textures, encouraged the mechanization of music making, and proudly displayed their “nonhuman” tones. There was no more a definitive Krautrock sound than there was a single technique of minimalism, but both of them marked a step away from the traditions in which Bowie and his peers had been raised. The German bands deliberately refused to use the clichés of British and American rock, especially its roots in the blues; the minimalists, equally consciously, rejected the harsh dissonance of the post-Schoenberg schools.

  In Brian Eno, Bowie found a partner who was comfortable with both innovations: sonically and theoretically daring, not least in his willingness to allow quiet, almost inaudible sounds into a (music) world dominated by noise. (Eno defined minimalism as “a drift away from narrative and towards landscape.”) Eno contributed another vital ingredient, in the form of his Oblique Strategies cards. Their instructions, like the verbal art concepts of the Fluxus group in the sixties, encouraged participants to jettison their instinctive responses to the problems of creativity. The cards in Eno’s pack were as potent and jolting as anything in Aleister Crowley’s tarot: they might, for example, encourage an artist, “Abandon normal instruments” (see [171]), “Give way to your worst impulses,” “Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action,” or, indeed, “Just carry on.”

  Over the course of three albums made with varying degrees of collaboration, Bowie and Eno exploited many of these suggestions, and ignored as many more. The cards provided a playful theoretical backdrop to a series of projects that extended both men’s musical vocabularies, but depended (as Lodger proved) on Bowie being willing to risk more than his colleague. Or perhaps it wasn’t a risk at all: Bowie had no wish to continue the career he had been pursuing, and Low was an abrupt and challenging way of disrupting it. For those who had taken little notice of the computerized rhythms of Kraftwerk, the apparently seamless patterns of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, the sparse landscape of NEU! and the deconstructive impulses of Faust, Low sounded completely revolutionary. Even for those who knew its antecedents, the album (and its successor) wrenched both its creators and its listeners out of their comfortable familiarity.

  [140] WARSZAWA

  (Bowie/Eno)

  Recorded September 1976; Low LP

  * * *

  “Music carries its own message,” Bowie told Angus MacKinnon in 1980. “Lyrics are not needed because music does have an implicit message of its own; it makes its case very pointedly. If that were not the case, then classical music would not have succeeded to the extent that it did in implying and carrying some definite point of view, some attitude which presumably can’t be expressed with words.”

  As on “Subterraneans” [143], Bowie employed the human voice on “Warszawa” to sing words that had no meaning in any language, but wer
e chosen for their phonetic sound. So his voice became another instrument, alongside the treated piano, bass drone, and synthesized orchestra (strings, church organ, woodwinds); and like them, it was translated through technology, as Tony Visconti recalled: “To make him sound like a boy I slowed the tape down about three semitones and he sang his part slowly.”

  The title of “Warszawa” was intended to supply the meaning that the words did not express: Bowie explained that it reflected the sadness of the Polish peasants he had glimpsed during a train journey from Berlin to Moscow. Yet the framework of the piece had been prepared by Eno while Bowie was enduring business meetings in Paris. Perhaps that was why, of all the instrumentals Bowie and Eno created for Low and “Heroes,” “Warszawa” sounded the most carefully scored, with no hint of randomness or accident.

  The piece opened tentatively, as if searching for safe ground, with an ambiguous A minor chord, a rising motif resolving in A major that was reminiscent of the famous opening to Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” and a second climb to a repeated C major chord, which suggested that it might determine the key signature for the entire piece. Instead, a hauntingly simple melody rose above a F# chord, was briefly echoed, and then answered by a second line that ended in midair on F, begging for completion. Again the ground shifted: another melody vied for supremacy, but was finally set aside as Eno elegantly steered the piece from F# into E, at which point Bowie’s monkish vocal chorale chanted lines that sometimes sounded traditionally Western, and at others bore the clear hallmark of Eastern Europe or points farther east. He crafted six different melodies for his multidubbed choir (one of them a careful reversal of its predecessor), before Eno engineered another transition to the opening section. But rather than allowing the full four-line sequence to appear, he repeated the first two lines—with the result that “Warszawa” was left to sway on that unresolved F. If this was minimalism, it was certainly not repetition: in “Warszawa,” there was literally no place like home.