On Bowie

by Simon Critchley

  BOWIE’S MUSIC IS VERY OFTEN VIEWED AS ISOLATED, withdrawn, solipsistic, and even autistic (as if we knew what that meant). This is a view that can be found in Hugo Wilcken’s fine little book on Low and which is most obviously expressed in “Sound and Vision”, with another couple of nothings:

  Pale blinds drawn all day

  Nothing to do, nothing to say.

  This electric blue mood is continued in the perfectly entitled “Always Crashing in the Same Car”. The latter apparently relates to an actual accident where Bowie smashed his Mercedes in a hotel garage in Switzerland. But it is more powerful as a metaphor for addictive, destructive loops of behaviour.

  I am not saying that this view is wrong and Bowie’s work is obviously marked by a profound sense of alienation from the very beginning. But it overlooks the longing for love that I see as more characteristic of Bowie’s art. It also ignores the fact that the track which follows “Always Crashing in the Same Car” is entitled “Be My Wife” (provided it’s not understood ironically as a reference to marital bliss with Angie Bowie). The song begins with loneliness: “Sometimes you get so lonely.” But the chorus articulates the wish,

  Please be mine

  Share my life

  Stay with me

  Be my wife.

  If Bowie’s music begins from loneliness, it is not at all an affirmation of solitude. It is a desperate attempt to overcome solitude and find some kind of connection. In other words, what defines so much of Bowie’s music is an experience of yearning.

  Bowie sings about love. But it is often marked by a question, riddled with a doubt, or tinged with a regret. Even when the title track of Station to Station shifts tempo entirely around five minutes in, with Bowie immersed to the extreme in the Magick of Aleister Crowley and the esotericism of the Kabbalah, he immediately asks the question, “Who will connect me with love?” And this is not just the side effects of the cocaine: “I’m thinking that it must be love.”

  “‘Heroes’” is a ballad on the transience of love, on stealing time, just for one day. And this is against a background of pain and addiction (“And I, I’ll drink all the time”). It’s a song of desperate yearning in the full knowledge that joy is fleeting and that we’re nothing, and nothing will help us. “Let’s Dance” is not just a floor-filling funk track with an addictively sparse Chic bass and drum pattern. It is an oblique and essentially desperate song about the same two lovers that Bowie describes in “‘Heroes’”. “Let’s dance,” Bowie sings, “for fear tonight is all.”

  The longing for love is so strong that it can also take the form of a demand, even a threat, as in “Blackout”, and note Bowie’s little nothings:

  If you don’t stay tonight

  I will take that plane tonight

  I’ve nothing to lose

  Nothing to gain

  I’ll kiss you in the rain

  Kiss you in the rain.

  The evocation of love turns on the elevation of the moment, the kiss in the rain, like the kiss at the Berlin Wall, which is then immediately followed by a desperate plea, “Get me to the doctor.”

  In “5:15 The Angels Have Gone”, from Heathen, Bowie once again uses the metaphor of travel to dramatise the scene of departure after the failure of love. The genuinely searing, polyphonic chorus of this torch song is “We never talk anymore, Forever I will adore you.” This is a more elegiac experience of love, dominated by the reality of absence, of a past that is unrepeatable and utterly gone. Never more.

  This is also the core of “Where Are We Now?”, which is perhaps a eulogy to Bowie’s loyal assistant in the 1970s and sometime lover Corinne “Coco” Schwab. But love finds a concrete focus in relation to a specific place and time: Berlin in the late 1970s. I am sure that there was some yearning on Bowie’s part to be twenty-nine again and move to Berlin with Iggy, to go to endless tranny clubs, puff on cigarettes, drink constantly and record music all night. It sounds great. But this isn’t any simple wallowing in the past. It is an engagement with the memories that often flay us alive as a way of raising the question: where, indeed, are we now?

  The closest we get to sheer nostalgia is in Bowie’s evocations of England and especially the London of his childhood and youth in the 1950s. “Absolute Beginners” from 1986, named after Colin MacInnes’ 1959 novel, deals directly with this period and is arguably Bowie’s best moment in the second half of the 1980s. Again, it is a love song:

  But if my love is your love

  We’re certain to succeed.

  But this is also a love of place, a yearning for England, seen in a certain light, under cloud naturally, amid decay and rubble, like the external shots of a desolate and broken city in Nicolas Roeg’s stunning Performance (1970). In an interview with Playboy in 1976, after having been absent from England for the previous two years, Bowie said that Britain needed a fascist leader and even suggested that he would make a great prime minister. These were remarks that Bowie very much regretted later on, particularly after the emergence of an authoritarian leader such as Margaret Thatcher, who was not known to be a big Bowie fan. But Bowie understood fascism as nationalism, which is a complex feeling, one that is much more easily denigrated than considered seriously. Perhaps the closest we get to chauvinism is Bowie’s Union Jack-based coat, designed by Alexander McQueen on the cover of Earthling, as David gazes a gazely stare over England’s green and pleasant land.

  How do we live with the kind of memories expressed in “5:15 The Angels Have Gone” without becoming prisoners of the past, crushed by regret, or simply deluded? Such is the conceit of “Survive”, which is one of the most beautifully simple songs Bowie has ever written. Addressed to someone identified only as “naked eyes”, Bowie sings, “I should have kept you, I should have tried”, and then punctuating the end of the first and second verses are the words: “I miss you… I loved you.” There is a frank realisation that “Who said time is on my side? / I’ve got ears and eyes and nothing in my life.”

  But this nothing is followed by the insistence that “I’ll survive your naked eyes” and then “You’re the great mistake I never made.”

  BOWIE’S MUSIC IS ABOUT YEARNING. ULTIMATELY, this is a yearning for love. His yearning touches something in ours, unlocking a bittersweet melancholy, for example the deliciously painful longing of exile. To be clear – and this is nothing short of miraculous when you think about it – this yearning is produced simply by the sound of words and music coming into contact with our bodies. Particularly in the early work, Bowie’s lyrics have a narrative drive and completeness, as with the story of the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust. But after his adoption of the cut-up technique, his lyrics become much more fragmentary, imagistic and modernist. Bowie’s words become synecdoches, parts that convey wholes but also the holes in those wholes.

  Cut-up allows a new way of seeing. It also speeds everything up. Cut-up matches the momentum of Bowie’s incredible productivity in the 1970s. It permits an aesthetic grasp of life’s speed and shifts, its amnesia, accidental conjunctures, creative shifts, and its gaffes. The lyrical style of Low (which contains 410 words) and ‘Heroes’ breaks with narrative and commonsense intelligibility. The words say more in saying less and in making less obvious sense. Bowie’s lyrics are at their strongest when they are most oblique. We fill in the gaps with our imagination, with our longing.

  Bowie hones this oblique compositional technique – imagistic in Ezra Pound’s sense – in his later work with great finesse and growing power. In a track like “Heathen (The Rays)”, we get a seemingly simple and random accumulation of city images:

  Steel on the skyline

  Sky made of glass.

  Before shifting to a series of indeterminate statements:

  Waiting for something

  Looking for someone

  Then questions are raised:

  Is there no reason?

  Have I stayed too long?

  And then, seemingly out of nowhere, we reach an explosive climax. Bowie impl
ores, in his best vibrato,

  You say you’ll leave me,

  Before returning to images now infused with a sense of disappointment and loss:

  And when the sun is low

  And the rays high

  I can see it now

  I can feel it die.

  Perhaps the irony of Bowie’s love-longing is that when he seems to find love, the results are a little boring, as with “Wedding” from Black Tie White Noise, which began life as the nuptial music he composed for his marriage ceremony with Iman Abdulmajid in 1992. As he sings on “The Loneliest Guy” (from Reality), although oddly belied by the melancholy lament of the accompanying music, “I’m the luckiest guy, not the loneliest guy.” While happy that Bowie was happy, I sneakily preferred the music he produced when he was at his unhappiest.

  WHAT IS THE REALITY OF DAVID BOWIE? I am thinking here specifically of the title track to Bowie’s 2003 Reality. What can I say? This is a very loud track, featuring the glorious guitar of Earl Slick and the insistent, almost military staccato drumming of “Hello Spaceboy,” but somehow it is even more claustrophobic and intense. We begin with an Aladdin Sane-like recollection of a random sexual encounter with “tragic youth”, which ends up with her “going down on me”. We quickly shift in the chorus to a series of seemingly autobiographical images:

  I built a wall of sound to separate us

  I hid among the junk of wretched highs

  I sped from planet X to planet alpha

  Struggling for reality.

  Although we must always be careful about conflating a song’s persona with Bowie himself, the wall of sound is both an allusion to Phil Spector but also to the wall of illusion that Bowie built in the early 1970s with Ziggy. He then hid behind that wall doing copious amounts of cocaine. The ceaseless movement from Planet X to Planet Alpha, from “Space Oddity” to “Starman” to “Ashes to Ashes”, is presented as a struggle for reality, which is followed by a hollow, hard laugh, a bitter and sardonic moment of ridicule: “HA HA HA HA”. This is what Samuel Beckett calls in Watt the risus purus, the pure laugh, the laugh that laughs at the laugh, “the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs – silence please – at that which is unhappy”.

  The next lines from “Reality” combine a reflection on ageing and failing powers, “Hey now my sight is failing in this twilight”, with an allusion to Jacques Brel’s ballad “My Death”, which Bowie regularly performed live from 1972 onwards, “Now my death is more than just a sad song.” But these insights are brilliantly interspersed and undermined by two flatly delivered sequences: “Da da da da da da da da da.” What does one say about reality exactly? “Ha ha”? Or maybe, “Da da”? The choice is yours.

  Against a background of apparent amnesia, the next chorus pulls the song’s themes together:

  I still don’t remember how this happened

  I still don’t get the wherefores and the whys

  I look for sense but I get next to nothing

  Hey boy, welcome to reality!

  Ha ha ha ha.

  The struggle for reality, which is how Bowie describes his entire artistic career, is shown to founder. There is no bedrock reality out of which we can make sense of the world. The more we struggle, the closer we get to nothing. Sense dissipates into meaninglessness. In a very good article from Sound on Sound from 2003, Bowie describes reality as “an abstract”:

  I feel that reality has become an abstract for so many people over the last 20 years. Things that they regarded as truths seem to have just melted away, and it’s almost as if we’re thinking post-philosophically now. There’s nothing to rely on any more. No knowledge, only interpretation of those facts that we seem to be inundated with on a daily basis. Knowledge seems to have been left behind and there’s a sense that we are adrift at sea. There’s nothing more to hold onto, and of course political circumstances just push that boat further out.

  So, Bowie declares that we appear to have entered a post-philosophical condition. Wheeling back to Warhol’s words with which I began, about life becoming TV, reality has become an illusion. Andy Warhol, silver screen, can’t tell them apart at all. Faced with the continual pressure of the illusory reality of the media, social networks and the rest of the bullshit with which we build the walls of our prison ever higher, access to any true reality seems to be hidden from us. All we can do is counter illusion with another illusion, move from their fiction to our fiction, and desperately hold on to the nothing of which Bowie sang in “After All.”

  Towards the end of “Reality”, there is an extraordinary moment when all of a sudden the slightly oppressive, almost desperate, noisy, thumping rockiness slips away, leaving Bowie stranded with just an acoustic guitar, like at the beginning of “Space Oddity”. Back where he started, Bowie concludes agnostically,

  I’ve been right and I’ve been wrong

  Now I’m back where I started from

  I never looked over reality’s shoulder.

  If Socrates is declared the wisest man in Greece because he claims to know nothing, then Bowie’s position with regard to reality might not be so much post-philosophical as post-scientific, or that which comes after the failure of a positivistic conception of science. It is too quick to identify philosophy with the quest for knowledge. It is better understood as the love of wisdom. Philosophy is that love of wisdom that comes before and after science.

  Bowie wrote in the press release that accompanied Reality,

  The basis is more an all-pervasive influence of contingencies than a defined structure of absolutes.

  This affirmation of contingency had been Bowie’s modus operandi compositionally and in the recording studio since the mid-1970s and the influence of Eno’s “planned accidents” (itself an early title for Lodger). But this also describes Bowie’s reality and arguably our own. The collapse of absolutes, death of God, or whatever one calls it, should not be met with either pessimistic nihilism or the construction of some new divinity, some superman or homo superior. That simply leads to the barbarism of the last century, which sadly shows little sign of abating in this one. If we replace ourselves with the God who has died, then we become heathen, and everything is just “big heads and drums, full speed and pagan”.

  IT IS IN OPPOSITION TO THIS HEATHEN existence that one might detect what I am tempted to call the religiosity of Bowie’s art. God has always played a big role in Bowie’s lyrical vocabulary from “God Knows I’m Good” on Space Oddity and “The Width of a Circle” on The Man Who Sold the World, where Bowie intones, “I realised that God’s a young man too.”

  To pick one example from among many possibilities, the 1999 album Hours… might be an allusion to the tradition of medieval devotional books of hours, which often contained seven penitential psalms. It is perhaps something more than a coincidence that “Seven” is the name of a track on the album, which includes the verse,

  The Gods forgot they made me

  So I forget them too

  I listen to their shadows

  I play among their graves.

  It might sound like fun to play among the graves of the Gods, but maybe it’s no game. The shadows can sometimes be long and frightening.

  Some of Bowie’s songs have a strong prayer- or hymn-like character, most obviously “Word on a Wing”, with its chorus addressed to some God:

  Lord, I kneel and offer you

  My word on a wing

  And I’m trying hard to fit among

  Your scheme of things.

  Just before this Bowie sings, revealingly,

  Just because I believe don’t mean

  I don’t think as well

  Don’t have to question everything

  in heaven or hell.

  “Station to Station” is the railway journey suggested by the opening synthesised locomotive noise. But it is also the stations of the via dolorosa of Jesus in Jerusalem from Gethsemane to Calvary. Bowie’s lyrics, steeped in Kabbalistic esotericism, concern the passage between the
divine and the human and the possible divinity of the human, which is the entire tragedy of Christ’s Passion. From the hidden, supreme crown of God, or Kether, to the kingdom of God on earth in Israel, or Malkuth, “One magical movement from Kether to Malkuth.”

  Of course, this might just be the side effects of the cocaine. But if one finds a Magus-like identification with the divine in “Station to Station”, then God elsewhere can sound downright oppressive, inducing paranoia. Bowie’s 1995 album 1.Outside is pervaded by this sense of being watched, for example in “No Control”:

  Sit tight in your corner

  Don’t tell God your plans

  It’s all deranged

  No control.

  Control, or rather its absence, is a big theme in Bowie’s music, which can evoke a real sense of menace. The world is out of control and the resultant paranoia is intense. In the words of “Slow Burn”: “The walls shall have eyes and the doors shall have ears.”

  There is a persistent anti-clericalism in Bowie and an opposition to all existing forms of organised religion, with a particular vehemence reserved for Christianity. One can even see this in one of Bowie’s most awful, and awfully over-performed, songs, “Modern Love”, where the church that terrifies is played off against the relation between God and man. But this divine–human relation requires “no confession” and “no religion”. This line of thought reaches a kind of iconoclastic peak with “Loving the Alien” from 1984 that uses the motif of the Crusades to criticise the political savagery implicit in claims to Christian faith. To succumb to the delusion of loving the alien is simply to make war, invasion and torture more palatable. One can kill for such alien love. One can even enjoy killing, for it is righteous.