Review Summary: 'Share, bright failing star...'
We call it turning 30. Rock n rollers call it a ticket to the morgue. Somewhat socialist at heart but increasingly conservative of thought, the ill at ease rock star's life often fragments at this stage of their lifespan. A nighttime soujourn down the rural dirt path ambiguously named 'rock-star movie career' (Elvis)? Frantic evacuation from home before the tax squadron orders a deadline (the Stones)? Or a nude dive into the ice-lined rockpool of the avant-garde (post-Beatles Lennon)?
It was 1977. David Bowie was 30, and he'd done all three. He'd made his cinematic debut in the posturing, beautiful 'The Man Who Fell to Earth', a role that both forced Ziggy Stardust from Bowie definitively and showed us how much the two were inseparable; he'd already decamped to Los Angeles, via Philadelphia, to emulate the soulful convictions of the US pop scene with twisty British irony; then, having more or less sacrificed himself to emerge from the bewildering smog of LA, Bowie trekked Berlin-ways with cohort/idol Iggy Pop (surely one of the most idosyncratic stylistic/status relationships in all of pop). With his brains flooding from his nose with every blow thanks to his cocaine addiction, and the 'ice-demon soul' of Station to Station seeming less repeatable by the day, Bowie decided that it was time that he consummated his affair with Lennon (after all, he'd done it with Jagger, right?). Here lay stark confessionals and fragments that seem like relics, fossils of a life split in three. And warming the covers with them lay some instrumentals for which most superlatives seem perfunctory. A masterpiece? Why ever not?
Although the album's sensual body arguably rests on its second half, the 'Low Islands', the shards of avant-pop that scatter across the first half, define Bowie's scope and vision this time out. Those with an eye who are willing to delve will find much submerged glam and groove: Bowie had less graduated from Ziggy, the Thin White Duke and Newton than overhauled them all with Antheil-era sonics. 'Low', Bowie's least future-obsessed outing to date, boasts truly astonishing treatments, with cracked, hardback R&B like 'Breaking Glass' perpetuating an android blues. 'What in the World' is pure New Romantic, while the blasting, aggressive 'Speed of Life' and 'Be My Wife' presenting a type of heroin punk. Melody is also spare, often dismembered and divided between sections.
Lyrically, we find Bowie a man apart, beholden to family (estranged wife Angie and son Zowie), art (Glass, Eno, Nietzche and Kraftwek) and his own secret reality. Crucially, Low is one of the precious, fleeting snapshots of Bowie's own zeitgeist. A Burroghs-indebted junkie caught in neon headlamps against the cold brick of the Berlin Wall, everything is here for the listener to examine and privately congeal. The coming of the big 3-0 is a personal watershed for Bowie, where the man finally seems less ill-at-ease with his insecurity, less inclined to smother them completely (Thin White Duke seemed farther from the real David even than Ziggy) while keeping intriguing reticence thanks to the improvised-biographical nature of the lyrics.
'Warszawa', the first part of the Low Suite. Like the haunted facial expression of a city surrounded by a chalk outline, on the cusp of both purgatory and recovery, Bowie here begins to transcend his own limits and his own boundaries as a name (as an artist he has always been of limitless colour and imagination). The faux, synthetic bassoons and basset horns of the arrangement belie to honesty of the feeling;the power of the first impression.
What to make of 'Art Decade'? It's a clever pun, a witticism that is the only pawprint of David over the remainder of the section, aside from the dual irony and poignancy in the final song's instrumentation. The whole thing is a clever pun really, a fabulous falling out of radioactive ostinato and sedated groove-box. Of course, there's no room for the groove in the avant-garde. But Bowie's bag is being one step ahead, even when what lies ahead is the present.
'Weeping Wall', the third quarter of the Low Suite, is like viewing a contemplating row of crows, ravens even, nesting on the merlons of the Berlin Wall: hypnotic, inhuman, surreal. Weirdly, it conjures the image of empty dance halls, of old fashioned bands made of married men, only there are no more roaring 20s actors to hire them nor encourage their performance.
'Life on Mars'...'The Bewlay Brothers'...'Aladdin Sane'...'Young Americans'. The authentic lineage of Bowie classics, a throng of pure polyphonic immortality. To this list add 'Subterraneans'. Call it what you will: there is no superlative that can do it any justice. It portrays a scape far bleaker and sadder than any Berlin of any era. It is more akin to the barren surface of Thomas Newton's eye following his harsh X-ray experimentation; an eye that cannot see, it can only sing. Sing the song of the lost, doomed and damned. Hazard a guess as to what Bowie was thinking about when he sings the first mantra, 'Share bright failing star...'. Hazard a guess, while the vicarious atonement of a jazz saxophone sounds through the misery of the cold, what Low means as an album. Seems like a long time since it started playing, doesn't it?
