David Bowie’s continual shifting and remaking of his persona struck many as a case of someone trying too hard to convince the world that he was not simply a pop star, but was actually some kind of artiste.
Admittedly, for the longest time he was in step with the ever-changing pop scene; he always seemed to be riding the right trend at the right place and time. He went through his various phases: spaceman, androgynous glam rocker, techno Berlin nightclubber, and so on. Some of his albums were spotty, but it’s hard to deny he seemed to have a lot of great singles: “Space Oddity,” “Rebel Rebel,” “Suffragette City,” “Jean Genie,” “Golden Years” … well, pretty much everything found on Changesonebowie.
Regardless of his infatuation with pop presentation, Bowie showed an equally keen rock ‘n’ roll sensibility when he basically restarted Iggy Pop’s career after the Stooges imploded. He also gave Mott the Hoople a second chance when he passed along “All the Young Dudes” for a make-or-break album with their new record company. History shows how Mott’s fortunes changed when “Dudes” became the great single that up until then had eluded them.
After a point, however, David Bowie seemed to just carry on and fade away. He released some moderately successful albums in the 1980s and ’90s, but after 2003’s Reality he kept rather quiet, releasing no albums of new material. Until The Next Day arrived in March 2013.
Recorded on the sly, The Next Day took long-term fans by surprise. No one knew he had been working on writing and recording anything in recent years. The results sounded like a well-produced pop/rock album by an old timer – someone who’d been around long enough to deserve to do whatever they want, like Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Mick Jagger, to name a few.
Bowie’s version of what he thought the senior citizens of Rockville should do was pretty simple: Get some catchy songs that still fit your voice, get a good band together and come up with some good arrangements that are modern, interesting and can attract an audience willing to pay good money to see you on tour in your old age.
[SOMETHING ELSE! INTERVIEW: Tony Levin joined us to talk about keeping this David Bowie project a secret, along with collaborations with his Stick Men group, Peter Gabriel and the Crimson ProjeKct.]
Yeah, it was verses, choruses, guitars mostly here – very little in the way of bleeps and bloops and synthesizers. And very little in the way of jagged edges and harsh sounds, except when the band occasionally took it up a couple of notches. The Next Day was a pretty solid modern-rock album – and that was in its own way surprising.
Mainstream audiences had to decide whether David Bowie playing rock ‘n’ roll without theatrics and an “artsy” agenda was a good thing after all. Turns out, the Thin White Duke/Spaceman/Glam Rocker could still garner interest even after giving up it all up for something so mundane as making music.
- How David Bowie’s ‘The Next Day’ Stripped Away All of the Artifice - March 15, 2023
- Why Deep Purple’s ‘Who Do We Think We Are?’ Deserves Another Listen - January 11, 2023
- In Defense of the Often-Overlooked Mott the Hoople - November 10, 2022
just streamed the album in its entirety this morning. i could not be happier with it!
iTunes: http://smarturl.it/DBowieAlbumStream
Bowie has made it abundantly clear that he has no plans to tour. But an appearance here and there is not out of the question.
” David Bowie’s continual shifting and remaking of his persona struck many as a case of someone trying too hard to convince the world that he was not simply a pop star, but was actually some kind of artiste.”
lol @ this inane dichotomy. Pop music can be substantial, pop artists can be artists.
“Admittedly, for the longest time he was in step with the ever-changing pop scene; he always seemed to be riding the right trend at the right place and time.”
Oh. He didn’t RIDE the trend, for a long time – he was an integral part of starting them. Come on, now. Also if you can’t appreciate him as an album artist and think that Station to Station was ‘spotty’ then .. well, I don’t know why I’m writing this because it’s just going to be lost on you. Well, I guess that was clear in presenting this rock n roll vs pop distinction where Bowie falls on the pop side – have you not heard Ziggy Stardust? Honestly.
“They’ll probably like it — or maybe not: ”
lol wow. How is this an actual phrase in a review? And Bowie fans are actually more or less universally THRILLED from what I’ve seen.
“Will the mainstream audience decide Bowie playing rock and roll without theatrics and an “artsy” agenda is good thing after all, or will fans accuse the Thin White Duke/Spaceman/Glam Rocker of giving up his art for something as mundane as making music?”
hahaha, someone has clearly not being paying attention. Bowie hasn’t done characters since Thin White Duke which was 76. And this is a balliest, artier album than Bowie has released since Outside. But it’s also more consistent than Outside. Also it references his old albums all the time but in a strikingly refreshing way. The first track could be off Lodger as could the second (or The Idiot)… And as someone has said, Bowie isn’t touring. Your whole cash incentive thing just falls flat and kind of is a sad reflection on how poorly researched this article is – the not touring issue has been all over the news. Really, I don’t understand why you’d even bother writing this review.
Hey there, shades –
Thanks for your reply. I assume you’re a big fan of his work and can articulate why you think David Bowie is an important artist; however, there are other people who don’t think he’s particularly great and wonder what’s the big deal. As I tried to articulate, I have in fact have liked many of his singles; I have liked large chunks of some of his albums; on the other hand, I have found some of his work to not interest me at all. But I am very impressed with this new album; when I wrote, “In a nutshell: it’s a pretty solid modern rock album,” that was a compliment.
In your reply, you wrote: ¬“Bowie fans are actually more or less universally THRILLED from what I’ve seen.” Well, that’s one point on which I can’t disagree with you – there aren’t a whole lot of Bowie fans in my circle of acquaintances anymore to take a poll over this one. That’s why I also tried to point out that I was curious how this album will be received by the public: will people with mainstream tastes say, “I like this… because it’s not too weird?” And, will long-time fans get to a point where they say “Ooohh… he sold out?” Maybe they will – maybe not. That’s simply a “wait and see” comment, and has little to do with the album’s perceived quality – yet, anyway. It does bring to mind the Tin Machine project, where people went from, “Yeah! Bowie is fronting a rock band!” to, “Ho-hum… Tin Machine 2… could there be a duller title or a duller album?”
Yes – I recognize he’s already sold lots of albums in his day, so in that sense he is a mainstream performer already. But the fact is, he hasn’t had a new album for a long time, and the ones he did release in the 80s and 90s met with varying degrees of commercial and/or critical success. Interestingly, I checked a few reference sources that had an overview of his career, and found they usually spent about three quarters of their allotted column inches writing about Bowie’s stage personas and the accompanying albums, leaving only about one quarter of the written article dedicated to his work in the later 80s and 90s. One interpretation of that is this: that no matter what the quality of Bowie’s musical output, the general populace lost interest in his music quite some time ago.
As to touring… that’s how musicians make their money in these days of free internet downloading, isn’t it?
Lastly – as to why did I even bother to write about this album? First – I liked it. I thought it was good, and by writing about it, I thought a lot of people who might have avoided a new album by an old talent might be interested in hearing it instead of just ignoring it. Second – I think Bowie’s music deserves to be discussed without him needing an apologist. Consequently, I didn’t lower the bar because I want this work to be better than it is. Nor did I have overly high expectations. Finally – I don’t get paid to shill for Bowie any more than I get paid to shill for Jagger, or Springsteen, or anyone else. I do this because I like to do it…. which is probably why Bowie recorded and released this studio work after not having done so for ten years.
Well, if you’re lucky, maybe he’ll go out and do an occasional performance that might come close to your locale – I suspect he’s still got some rock ‘n’ roll (or pop, or AOR, or classic rock or whatever you wanna call it) still left in him.
Cheers and all o’ that,
Skeeter.
His first single “Where Are We Now” was cryptic. Was he literally showing us that the bottle is empty?