NEW BOWIE:
A DOG - Rolling Stone Magazine August 1, 1974
By Ken Emerson
Clearly, David Bowie is not the homo superior he once claimed
and many believed him to be. That claim and belief were based on Hunky Dory and Ziggy
Stardust, two records of startling genius which will be among the great
albums of the Seventies. But since then Bowie has dissapointed even his
most rabid devotees. Aladdin Sane was
frustratingly uneven, Pin Ups was trivial,
and now comes Diamond Dogs, perhaps Bowie's
worst album in six years.
....It would be presumptuous
to pretend to explain Bowie's deterioration-he is a remote man whose mind
remains mysterious-but two considerations are worth entertaining. First
Bowie's earlier records did not sell particularly well in the U.S. despite
his successes in England, which certainly must rankle so vainglorious a
man. And this may have prompted Bowie to hope that if America didn't eat
him up when he was good, it might when he was bad.
....From Aladdin Sane on, Bowie has tended to pander to
what he thinks the public wants and to imitate those who have been more
successful than he-Alice Cooper and Mick Jagger, for instance. He has deliberately
cheapened himself and his music.
....Secondly, as it
continues to elude him Bowie has become more and more obsessed with superstardom
and its trappings, which is why he has dropped his forename and now styles
himself, in emulation of Garbo and Brando, simply Bowie. Hunky
Dory and Ziggy Stardust were conceived
with care in solitude; since then Bowie's energies have been directed toward
stardom at the expense of his music, which he now seems to regard almost
with contempt.
....Why else would
he elect to play lead guitar on Diamond Dogs?
Guitarist Mick Ronson was always one of the best things about Bowie and
for Bowie to replace him is like Mick Jagger filling in for Keith Richard.
....Hunky
Dory and Ziggy Stardust were great
because of the challenges they presented. Bowie dared listeners to confront
a novel and alien sensibility; dared them to reexamine their smug sexual
assumptions; dared them to question their comfortable relation to rock'n'roll,
which had become merely a commodity little different from mayonaise or aluminum
siding. He promised that music could again matter, as it had before Dylan,
the Beatles and so many others maundered into what was at once middle age
and second childhood. In short, Bowie challanged us to and our music, both
mired in a deathly complacency, to change:
............Look out
you Rock'n Rollers
............Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
............Turn
and face the strange
............Ch-ch-Canges
............Pretty
soon you're gonna get a little older.*
....Bowie was never
very specific about the nature of these changes, but at least he saw their
necessity, and the proof seemed in the pudding-in the zest, energy and originality
of Hunky Dory and Ziggy
Stardust. What made the challenge so inviting were Bowie's prodigious
talents as a writer, arranger and producer. His best songs were deft, vivid
constructions, utilizing all the tricks of the Sixties trade and recharging
them with the force of his personality and imagination, pushing them into
the Seventies. While Don McLean sang that the music had died and almost
every major figure of the Sixties seemed intent upon proving McLean right,
Bowie was giving them all the lie.
....But unfortunately,
it was a lie, for Bowie led his followers into the desert and left them
there. No sooner had he proclaimed a new age than he turned his back on
it and retreated to nostalgia. Aladdin Sane
pined for the good old days, when people stared in Jagger's eyes and scored,
and Pin Ups travestied mid-Sixties pop.
Rebel Rebel, Bowie's recent single
and, typically, a hit in England but not here, is an attempt at a 1964 smash.
So much for ch-ch-Changes.
....On Diamond
Dogs Bowie shouts, This ain,t Rock'n Roll- this is Genocide. Suicide
is more like it, for it's Bowie, not the listener, who,s in trouble. First
the guitar: Mabye Bowie plays it himself to get a raunchy, untutored feel
the more polished Ronson couldn't capture, but the result is merely cheesy.
When debuted on The Midnight Special, 1984 was a powerful song, most of
whose strenght and sweep Ronson provided. The version on Diamond
Dogs, without Ronson, is sickly, and a fluttery string arrangement cannot
beef it up. And there's his voice: Once Bowie's high, dry vocals, brittle
and angular, were remarkable for their wit, phrasing and credibility. But
now he's withdrawn to his anonymous lower register, and when he strays from
it he sounds campy and forced, never compelling. Finally, where Bowie's
songs used to be signalized by their rich complexity and, simoutaneouselt,
their sparkling clarity, Diamond Dogs
is at once simplistic and murky. Once heard, the songs on Hunky
Dory and Ziggy Stardust were almost
impossible to forget: The melodies were fascinating and sharply defined.
But these tracks are muddy and tuneless, and their sloppiness cannot be
ratinalized as spontaneity.
....Diamond
Dogs depicts a not-to-distant future in which the remnants of the human
race live out their dying days in frantic pursuit of sleazy sex. What seems
to interest Bowie here is not the future but the sex. Most of the songs
are obscure tangles of perversion, degradation, fear and self-pity, whose
nightmarishness occasionally recalls The
Man Who Sold The World, Bowie's most frightening album. It's difficult
to know what to make of them. Are they masturbatory fantasies, guilt-ridden
projections, terrified premonitions, or is it all merely Alice Cooper exploitation?
Unfortunately, the music exerts so little appeal that it's hard to care
what it's about. And Diamond Dogs seems
more like David Bowie's last gasp than the world's. |