Drop David Bowie in a post-harvest cornfield with little to stimulate his eyes and ears beyond the leaden sight of fleeing magpies and the inaudible sound of his own cellular atrophy, and there’s still a good chance he’ll somehow manage to make a muse of the landscape and produce a respectable album from its scant fuel.
That’s Bowie almost by definition: a singular artist whose reinventions aren’t preconceptions, but rather artistic reflections of his reinvented muses.
Regardless of the moniker he preferred at any given time, the garb he fancied to express each new identity or the response both drew from fans and critics, Bowie has always been a master of making the most of his surroundings, be they weighted in disco, androgyny or communism.
So, what happens when you give such a resourceful man a bevy of bountiful resources including a book and the mini-series it inspired?
If that man is David Bowie, he sits down in Switzerland, writes an album in five days and names it after the book and mini-series behind it: “Buddha of Suburbia.”
Here’s the story – in semi-shorthand:
Hanif Kureishi writes brilliant book about actor stricken with wanderlust.
BBC options book into mini-series, commissioning Bowie to do soundtrack.
Bowie writes soundtrack.
Soundtrack is unreleased.
Bowie expands on ideas used in original soundtrack, makes new album (his 19th) calls it – why not – “Buddha of Suburbia,” releases it in 1993.
15 years later, album is re-released, because (?)… um, albums need to get re-released every other decade, lest label heads lose their jobs?
Who knows… the point is the album’s back out and it’s good – jumpy and eclectic, but good.
Over the LP’s ten tracks, Bowie covers a whole shit-ton of genres and ideas, bouncing from spacey, robotic trance on “Sex and the Church” to jazzy, bop-ish waves that melt into hip-hop-like drums on the very next track, “South Horizon.” An obvious protégé of Brian Eno, Bowie uses “The Mysteries” to blend in some ambient tuning not dissimilar to the mellow-meets-synth portions of “Music for Airports.”
For the most part the music is palatable. For the most part the flaws are admissible. The portions of the ensuing tracks cut with pitfalls are those that tie themselves too tightly to the era in which the album was written. Born in the early 90’s, “B of S” reeks at points of overly-melodic guitar noodlings and bad Genesis-esque beats. Entwined beside these faults in the disc’s midsection are some weak voice-distortion measures that plot somewhere between the outputs of a malfunctioning talk-box and a voice-scrambler you’d find in a children’s toy spy kit.
As far as the themes go, well, let’s face it, you never saw the mini-series or read the book, so what does it matter? Maybe they’re tied to the plot, maybe they’re more, maybe they’re less. (If you can’t figure it out and speak intelligently on the topic, you shouldn’t be reading this review, but rather writing it.)
This is more about the music and, in case you couldn’t tell, it’s really a style free-for-all. The title track offers an emotional anthem packed with plenty of dishes to feed from, while others such as “Ian Fish, UK Heir” lend a listener little more than what could be called musical breathing, over which they must plant their own unique ideas.
If they’re short for ‘em, they needn’t look farther than the album’s liner notes, where Bowie paints a booklet of white pages with a smattering of terms drawn from his freely associated thoughts pertaining to the album. It’s a poem, a painting, an homage to peers and predecessors and a confusing gaze into a confusing artist. (You gotta see it yourself to know what to make of it.) In short, it’s the perfect liner for the album; one which, after a listen or two, will find the relations and favor of fans of the man, the book or the mini-series.
As for outsiders, they might not pick it up as quickly and might require a few more spins and maybe a peek at the program and the novel to get into it – but that goes with the territory. If you want to appreciate the art of a man who can be inspired by a soundtrack he himself arranged for a miniseries that was adapted from a book, you’re gonna have to put in a little work.
Come on, now… You’re visiting the cornfield 15 years after its crop’s planting with a mindset far removed from the field’s farmer.
That ain’t Ziggy on the tractor.
That ain’t disco in the air.
You’re gonna have to work to reap this heavy crop. |