Recordings:
Finn, Deborah Elizabeth
Recordings NOON & GLOOM DAVD BOWIE'S FRUSTRATED MESSIANISM ALMOST FIFTEEN years after his first hit single, David Bowie can still market best-selling records and fill Madison Square Garden at...
...Bowie's songwriting has often suggested that the potential for intimacy and connectedness is pitted against a desire for supremacy...
...Bowie, is a track that conveys the rawness of emotion associated with addictive love...
...Bowie's artistic intentions: these pieces are broken/ hope I'm wrong/ but I know...
...Bowie's world of modernity, is a disease of addiction...
...each time they prove to be too shattering to resolve, and solace is sought in whatever gratifications are available...
...It is not grace at all, but temporary relief that the narrator finds under the moonlight/ this serious moonlight (''Let's Dance...
...He has never been more apt in his description of the self-sustaining nature of obsession: /' ve been putting out fire with gasoline...
...By the end of the album, love has been de-natured and re-created as a transient dancefloor phenomenon...
...But when he gets excited by the grandiosity of his vision, it is the China Girl who soothes away the tension, substituting sexual release for the fulfillment of his global plans...
...DEBORAH ELIZABETH FINN...
...This reflects a pattern that is repeated throughout the album: crucial moral issues pertaining to religion and love are confronted...
...In the keynote song, "Modern Love," we are told that there's no sign of life/ it's just the power to charm...
...Bowie tells us: I feel like a sailboat adrift on the sea ("Shake it") . . . I'm feeling disconnected ("Shake It") . . . I feel a wreck . . . I feel tragic . . . I'm a mess ("China Girl...
...Let's Dance is a disturbing failure - if it is an attempt to trivialize what Mr...
...Bowie has called (in the 1982 single, "Under Pressure") the terror of knowing what this world is about...
...evidently life has been supplanted by something known as modern love...
...Although he has often made disclaimers of any didactic intentions whatsoever (while pausing for breath between bombastic philosophical pronouncements), he had led the way in popular music to the exploration of the themes of alienation and technology through folk music (Space Oddity, 1969), sexualized mysticism through heavy metal (The Man Who Sold the World, 1971), messianism and apocalypticism through blues-based rock & roll (Ziggy Stardust, 1972...
...Bowie, who in fifteen years of songwriting has seldom missed an opportunity to articulate the theme of naive but grandiose messianic aspirations, is not entirely successful in abandoning his preoccupation...
...He offers what is ultimately an unsatisfactory antidote to the tensions of secularized modernity: turn the holy pictures so they face the wall ("Ricochet") and let's dance to the song we're playing on the radio ("Let's Dance...
...the music consists of breathtaking and very nearly seamless exercises in several popular music sub-genres, with lyrics that are disturbing in their expression of an ambivalent religiosity...
...and it makes me sad/ so /' // dance my life away...
...no religion...
...The album's title song is in many ways an extended meditation on the transience of this kind of love: let's dance for fear your grace should fall/ let's dance for fear tonight is all...
...In his latest work, the sound of the devil breaking parole ("Ricochet") is very much in evidence...
...my love for you would break my heart in two ("Let's Dance...
...This theme persists throughout the album: I'm a mess without my China Girl ("China Girl...
...It is love as methadone...
...A song from the Scary Monsters album ("Because You're Young," 1980) may offer us a clue as to Mr...
...Diamond Dogs, 1974), the American Dream and totalitarianism through soul and disco (Young Americans, 1975...
...In the final song, "Shake It," the narrator recognizes the potential for seeking heaven or hell, but opts instead for a more familiar destination: the discotheques of New York City...
...Recordings NOON & GLOOM DAVD BOWIE'S FRUSTRATED MESSIANISM ALMOST FIFTEEN years after his first hit single, David Bowie can still market best-selling records and fill Madison Square Garden at will...
...I'm ready to throw in my hand . . .I'm willing to call it a day . . . I won't take another chance ("Without You...
...Although "Modern Love" establishes the album's evasiveness on the subject of religion, it also represents an explicit attempt to come to grips with the problem of love, which, in Mr...
...Heroes, 1977...
...any other manifestation would constitute too serious a spiritual threat...
...he has also provided some of the most exciting rhythm & blues-based dance music in years...
...Cat People," a new arrangement of the 1982 movie theme song with lyrics by Mr...
...It is a theme closely associated with a sense of anomie and despair...
...Perhaps it is time to think very seriously about his rhetoric...
...No religion seems to be a cry of denial that echoes throughout the album...
...Let's Dance is a strange and difficult album...
...you wouldn't believe what I've been through/ it's been so long ("Cat People...
...And in fact, the music has an exuberance that contrasts sharply with the anomie and fragmentation expressed by the lyrics...
...David Bowie has not merely enjoined us to dance...
...Station to Station, 1976), solipsism in tension with global consciousness through avant-garde expressionism (Low, 1977...
...I love you/what would I do ("Without You...
...Lodger, 1979) - and of late has signaled a return to rock & roll and rhythm & blues in order to confront modernity (Scary Monsters, 1980...
...In "Chorus Girl," the narrator has visions of swastikas in my head/ plans for everyone...
...He warns the China Girl that he is a man who wants to rule the world...
...The narrator tells us that he will never fall for modern love, but that it gets me to the church on time, which terrifies me . . . makes me party . . . puts my trust in God and Man, which in turn means no confession...
...Love is a drug that sometimes brings relief, but often the side effects are quite as severe as the initial pain...
...Bowie is an important indicator of trends of thought and musical genre in popular culture...
...Let's Dance, EMI America, 1983...
Vol. 110 • September 1983 • No. 15
