The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  Or was it just acting, like the staged emotion of Hirota’s monologue? Thirty-five minutes later, “Part 2” revised “It’s No Game” as a lesson in emotional withdrawal, with a vocal that sounded subdued and resigned; repetitive but nonconfrontational guitar riffs; and booming drums to announce the sonic values of a new decade. Where “Part 1” climaxed with the signals of insanity, “Part 2” just ended, draining color from everything around it. And then the tape ran off the reel, as if Bowie were saying, “That’s it. I have nothing left to offer you.” He trailed hints of that message across the entire album.

  [182] UP THE HILL BACKWARDS

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February–April 1980; Scary Monsters LP

  * * *

  “Up the hill backwards”: as clever a statement of creative emptiness as Bowie could have concocted in that enervated state. In the deliberately banal chorus of this song, that title carried no hint of burden. But the physical task it described was something between an ordeal and an impossibility (try walking upstairs backward as a quick demonstration). So was the possibility of dancing in 7/8 time,* as demanded by the augmented Bo Diddley riff that opened the song. Another throwback to fifties rock’n’roll came in the verse, the first line of which used the same chord sequence as Eddie Cochran’s anthem of teenage frustration, “Summertime Blues.” In the chorus, there was a jaded chant of “yeah, yeah, yeah,” as a sarcastic reference to the carefree exuberance of the Beatles’ “She Loves You”—a trick he had already pulled on “Always Crashing in the Same Car” [137] three years earlier.

  This was a song about difficulty, about the disappearance of inspiration, and about the vacuum that might await someone who decided to step away from the necessity to be productive. Bowie made no attempt to disguise the jerry-built nature of the piece: the time signatures didn’t marry up, there were no neat links between the separate sections of the song, and the lyrics were vaguely apocalyptic fragments. The only time when inspiration seemed to take control was when Bowie relinquished the reins, to allow Robert Fripp’s typically oblique guitar technique to tackle and control the final return to the 7/8 time signature.

  [183] SCARY MONSTERS (AND SUPER CREEPS)

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February–April 1980; Scary Monsters LP

  * * *

  Tony Visconti’s excellent autobiography, Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy, provided a telling—but, to the layman, potentially bewildering—account of how the sonic picture of this track was created: “I programmed a descending bass line and fed the snare drum into the trigger circuit of the keyboard. . . . We made [the bass] pulsate by putting it into a Keypex gate and we had Dennis Davis’s eighth-note kick drum pattern trigger the bass.” He also described how this song, and indeed much of the album, emerged from fragmentation into the semblance of unity: “We’d go back to specific sections [of the mix], sometimes as short as a two-second tom-tom fill, rearrange the faders, add special effects and equalization changes. Then I would edit all the smaller, special pieces back into the main mix with razor blade cuts and splicing tape.” This was state-of-the-art studio trickery for 1980 (though probably an anachronism by 1983), aided by the involvement of a genuinely creative and musically proficient producer in Tony Visconti. It was also a modus operandi that Bowie could never have mastered on his own: like his earlier collaborators, from John Hutchinson through Mick Ronson to Brian Eno, Visconti had presented Bowie with a paint box that contained colors he had never seen before, and encouraged him to experiment.

  This was the technological apogee of analog recording, soon to be erased from history by the new possibilities and constraints of digital sound. With its razor blades and drums bleeding across the tracks, it was a last connection with the amateur science that had freed the likes of the Beatles to capture psychedelic inspiration on tape more than a decade earlier. Yet it was also sufficiently removed from the chords and notes of traditional music making to allow the artist—however creative—to hide behind the process from time to time, and let the studio (and its master controller from Brooklyn) do the work.

  Both Visconti and Bowie deserved credit for ensuring that the title* track of the Scary Monsters album survived that ingenuity and manipulation with its energy intact. Like “Up the Hill Backwards,” this was ostensibly a portrait of exhaustion, with a woman who (unlike the cast of Low) found rooms unbearably claustrophobic and a man (like Bowie and John Lennon before him) who was on the run from what the ex-Beatle called “the freaks on the phone.” There was a hint of narrative to the tale of their love and abuse, and a tip of the hat to Blondie musician Jimmy Destri. All this was delivered by Bowie in his finest long-distance approximation of a Cockney accent, with a clipped ennui that might have made this a perfect song for Johnny Cash to cover. More Bowies emerged from every dimension as the song progressed, one of them shouting the chorus like a killer on a bad phone line.

  If Bowie in all his vocal incarnations represented the scary monsters, then perhaps the super creeps did their work via the medium of Robert Fripp’s triumphantly atonal guitar solo—his mastery of the instrument and oblique approach to a melody combining to create many of the most remarkable moments of this album. Finally, Bowie took another opportunity to reference the pioneering dynamics of NEU!, echoing the neo-punk sound of their 1975 track “After Eight” in a defiantly post-punk environment.

  [184] ASHES TO ASHES

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February–April 1980; Scary Monsters LP

  * * *

  The cinematic quality of “Space Oddity” [1] in 1969 was erased when Bowie returned to the song a decade later and reduced a widescreen epic to a starkly lit black-and-white photograph [177]. The strangely alienated space explorer from the year of Apollo 11 had been placed in the sonic landscape of John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band album, in which all nerves were jagged and exposed and all emotions stripped to the bone.

  In that context, it made perfect sense for Major Tom, the space oddity himself and a key part of the Bowie brand since 1969, to reappear a few months later as a junkie—though Ground Control, in the style of government agencies everywhere, was still trying to pretend that everything with their intrepid explorer was fine, just fine. Nobody seemed quite sure whether he was up there or down here, though with heroin running through his veins he alternated sharply between the two locations.

  Bowie had been blatant about his drug use, so it was predictable that his confession that Major Tom was now a junkie would be widely interpreted as a commentary on his creator’s struggles with illegal substances. The songwriter was certainly prepared to concede the most anguished section of the song—in which he effectively demolished his past as being neither good, bad, nor spontaneous—as a confession.* “Those three particular lines represent a continuing, returning feeling of inadequacy over what I’ve done,” he told Angus MacKinnon of the New Musical Express in 1980. “I have a lot of reservations about what I’ve done, inasmuch as I don’t feel much of it has any import at all.” For the ambivalent space hero to become an addict, then, dismissed Bowie’s last decade as clinically as it pronounced the hollowness of America’s space mission.

  With the benefit of another decade’s hindsight, Bowie was able to reflect that “Ashes to Ashes” represented a unification of who he was with what he’d been: “You have to accommodate your pasts within your persona. You have to understand why you went through them. . . . You cannot just ignore them or put them out of your mind or pretend they didn’t happen, or just say, ‘Oh, I was different then.’ ” But by 1990 he was different from how he’d been in 1980, and able to gloss over the ambiguity that had inspired this song. As he reminded us, we all know about Major Tom, but how did we know and how accurate was what we were told, by Ground Control or by Bowie himself?

  For example: Bowie once insisted that the musical inspiration for “Ashes to Ashes” had been Danny Kaye’s lilting children’s song, “Inchworm,” the chord changes of which were incorporated into his composition. Ex
cept that they weren’t: any resemblance was purely in Bowie’s mind (which is not to say that it didn’t exist, merely that it wasn’t audible to the listener). Bowie didn’t mention, however, that he had heard the traditional rhyme about the “gypsies in the wood”—the source of the chant that closes “Ashes to Ashes”—in Anthony Newley’s 1961 West End musical, Stop the World, I Want to Get Off. The tune reappeared throughout Newley’s score, just as Major Tom had resurfaced in Bowie’s career: once as tragic hero, then again as children’s bogeyman.

  Even the chorus was unreliable, its nursery rhyme melody offering only the illusion of safety and comfort. “Ashes to Ashes” was the title,* but first time through, Bowie sang “ashes to ash.” Likewise, the next line was delivered once as “fun to funky” and once as “funk to funky.” Did these words symbolize anything, or were they simply there as sound? And why did a spoken voice echo Bowie’s singing in the second verse but not in the first, where at the equivalent point it was clearly reciting something totally different from what was being sung, though it was incomprehensible? No wonder that none of the identities in the song was fixed, and Bowie’s vocal tone changed with almost every line—breathless and gossipy, then shocked but not surprised, joyous, resigned, each choice appearing almost random. Why were musical distractions mixed to the front, and the core of the track buried beneath them? Why did what sounded like a colonel from a Spike Milligan radio script for The Goons appear between verses, and then apparently take over as narrator for the second? Why so many questions and so few satisfying answers?

  “For me, it’s a story of corruption,” Bowie declared in a 1980 interview, before offering half a dozen entirely different interpretations in the next few minutes. “Ashes to Ashes” was certainly a confrontation with the past, a confession about the present, and a sense of misgiving about the future. All of which confusion was blurred when the video for the song was premiered on Top of the Pops, and the visuals pushed the words and music into the background. A song that reeked of the era’s dominant social philosophy—the triumph of the selfish individual, the death of mutuality—was reduced to a fashion parade, in which form it left a lasting impact on the New Romantic movement about to sweep through British pop.

  [185] FASHION

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February–April 1980; Scary Monsters LP

  * * *

  “I’ve always hated him so,” wrote rock critic Richard Meltzer in 2000 about Bowie, whom he described as “the man most responsible for the willy-nilly return to mass conformity under the aegis of hip: fashion, if you will.” That was a scathing verdict, and a naïve one—as if every other “star” (of whatever medium) hadn’t twisted fashion into his/her own shape, and every teenage rebellion wasn’t (in George Melly’s memorable summary of the sixties revolution) a revolt into style. Bowie’s crime was merely that he didn’t attempt to hide the corollary between individual example, cult acceptance, and mass imitation. After all, it had been the core of every youth subculture since World War II; my father’s complaint that “you all try to look different by looking the same” could have applied to teddy boys, punks, skins, hippies (his specific target), or mods.

  So here was David Bowie in 1980, years after he’d assured the Ziggy clones that they were not alone, now addressing “Fashion” as fascism*: a tyranny of taste, imposed by a goon squad (the secret policemen in Elvis Costello’s song of that title) issuing strict-time ballroom instructions. Yet ambiguity was now built into Bowie’s methodology: he had become the master of suggesting meanings without necessarily validating them. It was quite possible, for example, to detect some class snobbery in his verses about people from bad homes* dancing their way to conformity, while those from good homes chattered inanely. But that was simply a possible interpretation of his wordplay. As the song said, you could listen to him or not listen at all: it was just the same.

  Elements of the song suggested that Bowie had been impressed, consciously or otherwise, by the mechanical structure of the 1979 novelty hit “Pop Muzik,” by M. There were other parallels, perhaps; the nonsense syllables that filled the final choruses could have come from Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” (and before that from Otis Redding’s “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa,” or earlier still from Chris Kenner’s “Land of 1000 Dances”); while Robert Fripp’s acerbic guitar riff was in the nerve-jangling tradition of John Lennon’s “Cold Turkey,” which described—but unlike “Ashes to Ashes,” didn’t name—the life of a junkie. As Bowie’s voice became increasingly fey by the end of the track, so Fripp’s guitar provided rugged emotional balance. Other elements depended strictly on chance: the song had its origins as an impromptu chant called “Jamaica,” while the “whup-whup” bleep that opened the track was a reference signal from a sequencer, which not only established an entirely misleading rhythm at the start but then fell into time as what producer Tony Visconti called “a kind of reggae upstroke.”

  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.