Music Review: David Bowie, The Next Day

By Cait Brennan

It takes a giant set of stones to deface, obliterate really, the cover to “Heroes”, the 1977 album that is often regarded as David Bowie’s masterpiece. You wouldn’t do it for a remix record, let alone a new album that heralds your return to music after a decade as far away from the music world as you can get, on this side of the dirt at least. You wouldn’t pay some guy a ton of money to just scratch out the album title and paper over the face with some words on a blank slate.

But then David Bowie has always been that blank slate. The Next Day equals “The Next Thing,” the tantalizing, elusive thing Bowie has restlessly, relentlessly pursued since the day he first imagined his pilfered name in lights. New sounds, new poses, new ideas, borrowed and digested and inhabited and discarded, with the artificial cool and sublimated panic of a man trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the law, sick inside with the feeling that any second, he’ll be exposed as a fraud, a con man, a cut-rate Tabarin in a rented clown suit that’s four days past due and damaged beyond hope of getting back the deposit. We mustn’t ever tell him that it’s all in his head, that he’s real and he’s good and that he’s saved us, the ones that he’s saved.

But now, no new pose, no fashion, no fame, just a blank slate, a screen on which to project your own version of the dream. Is this the end of The Prisoner then, where Bowie rips the monkey mask off the madman he’s chased, only to find his own true face underneath?

Oops, should have said “spoiler alert.”

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New David Bowie Single/Video: “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”

By Less Lee Moore

As if working on a new album for two years in secret wasn’t enough of a coup, now David Bowie has a new video for the song “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” featuring Tilda Swinton and models Andrej Pejic and Saskia de Brauw.

For fans of both Bowie and Swinton, this is fairly amazing, as their remarkably similar, androgynous looks have been the subject of endless Internet memes as well as the Tumblr blog Tilda Stardust, which seeks to prove that the two are the same person.

For those who follow fashion, the appearance of both Pejic and de Brauw is nearly as fascinating as the two are perhaps the biggest Bowie androgynes after Swinton herself.

Although Bowie has been declining various public appearances over the years (The Victoria & Albert Museum retrospective, the London Olympics Closing Ceremony), he’s clearly not been ignoring pop culture in his “increasingly reclusive” life. Not only does he include Swinton, Pejic, and de Brauw in the video, it’s directed by Floria Sigismondi, who is responsible for the decidedly Bowie- and Velvet Goldmine-influenced film The Runaways. (It’s all so meta!)

Intriguingly, Swinton doesn’t play Bowie in the video (that would be too easy), but Bowie’s wife. As they go grocery shopping together, she praises their “nice life” after he remarks that the people on the cover of a tabloid are “more exciting than anything we’ve got around here.” (For more self-referential material, check out the photo in the upper right corner of the fake tabloid.) The song’s commentary on celebrity, stars, and transformation is made manifest visually through some brilliant editing and costumes.

One can even imagine Bowie laughing at that Daily Mail article from last fall and that this video is his response. Clearly he’s pulled off the biggest transformation of his career and bested us all, yet again.

The Next Day comes out on March 12.

A Man Lost In Time: Bowie Returns With New Single, Album

By Cait Brennan

It came like a bolt of lightning in the dead of night: news of a new David Bowie album, his first in a decade, announced with no advance notice in the wee hours of his 66th birthday. The Next Day, Bowie’s 30th studio album, produced by Tony Visconti (!), will be released March 8 in Australia, March 11 in most of the rest of the world and March 12th in the US, with a new single, “Where Are We Now?” available on iTunes now.

Watch the full video on Vimeo.

After health issues sidelined Bowie in 2004, fans have been hoping against hope that the singular rock and roll icon would one day return to music, but there was scant evidence it would ever happen. His suitably theatrical return sent social media into a frenzy, putting him atop Twitter’s trending topics within minutes. Radio stations around the world scrambled to play the track first, with BBC 6Music earning honors as the World Premiere play, edging BBC Radio 2 by a few short minutes.

“Where Are We Now?” is a meditative ballad of “a man lost in time, walking the dead,” recalling in both lyrical geography and atmosphere his Berlin trilogy, coupled with a sound reminiscent of his most recent albums Reality and Heathen. The track is accompanied by a hearteningly weird video filled with expressionist imagery and the Thin White Duke himself transformed into a tiny malformed creature with two heads, one of which is a girl.

Henceforth, Christmas is officially moved to January 8.

The album is available for pre-order via iTunes in both standard and deluxe editions (the latter featuring three bonus tracks). Visit davidbowie.com/the-next-day for the latest.

Coal Porters, Find The One

By Cait Brennan

Sid Griffin is one of the great, unheralded musicians of the last 30 years.

How unheralded? Wikipedia, that self-styled arbiter of “notability,” doesn’t even have a page for him. If it did, it would do well to start by calling him one of the most important founding fathers of alternative country.

In the early ’80s, Griffin’s outfit the Long Ryders was a good decade ahead of the alt-country movement. Combining Gram Parsons-style Cosmic American Music with hard-edged, punk-influenced rock, Griffin, with guitarist Stephen McCarthy, drummer Greg Sowders, and a succession of bass players (notably Tom Stevens) brought a much-needed boot-kick in the pants to L.A.’s Paisley Underground scene, and influenced a generation of bands that followed.

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Oh Honey Watch That Man: The Chain Gang Of 1974 In Toronto

By Less Lee Moore

The Phoenix, Toronto ON
October 6, 2011

If you haven’t yet heard of The Chain Gang Of 1974, that’s likely to change very soon. Based on last night’s Toronto show at The Phoenix, they’ve got a big future.

Sandwiched between the exceedingly earnest (and exceedingly fresh-faced) White Arrows and New Zealand’s The Naked and Famous, Chain Gang were almost anachronistic. White Arrows sound a bit like The Strokes with a more sunny-California, reggae quality; while they weren’t exactly my cup of tea, they were so obviously thrilled to be on stage, it was fun to watch them. They made their own tie-dyed T-shirts for the merch table and singer Mickey Schiff encouraged everyone to “come talk to us after the show; we’ll be around all night.” It was quite sweet and endearing. I’m sure that The Naked and Famous played a great set, but I didn’t stick around to see it (no offense, guys and gals).

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A Brief History Of Black Sci-Fi Music

By Jemiah Jefferson

The earliest and greatest of them all was jazz bandleader Sun Ra. Best known these days for the extremely strange movie Space is the Place, released in 1974, a unique combination of concert film, parable, “blaxploitation,” and a lot of other just plain confusing stuff.
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Ground Control To Major Stardust: Ziggy’s Tale

By Christian Lipski

“I’m just a space cadet. He’s the commander.”
—Bowie fan, 1973

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Iggy Pop, Roadkill Rising . . . The Bootleg Collection: 1977 – 2009

By Less Lee Moore

Who is the target audience for Roadkill Rising, Shout! Factory‘s four-disc “official” Iggy Pop bootleg collection? Fans get excited about concert albums; diehards and lifers hoard bootlegs like those suffering from OCD. Certainly the latter will be thrilled by the improved quality of these remastered bootlegs.

However, trying to determine if Roadkill Rising will appeal to non-Iggy Pop fans is an exercise in futility. I can’t imagine not being a fan of Iggy Pop so I am incapable of thinking like one.

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A Little Bowie, A Little Bardot: The Runaways

By Less Lee Moore

The Runaways, Floria Sigismondi’s 2010 film about the seminal all-girl rock band, is not a documentary. That role, to some extent, has already been filled: Former Runaway Vicki Tischler-Blue made Edgeplay: A Film About The Runaways in 2004, even though Joan Jett declined to participate and refused to allow any original music from the band to be used.

Despite the fact that Joan Jett was an executive producer on The Runaways, do not watch it expecting a history lesson. Because the movie, although based on member Cherie Currie’s bio Neon Angel, is partly fact and partly fiction, but all fantasy: sex, drugs, more drugs, rock & roll, heartbreak, and dreaming.
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The Kid Is Slayed? The Crash Street Kids’ Supersonic Star Show

By Cait Brennan

Reductivism is the great tragedy of history. As the years pass and firsthand knowledge dies, the rough grain of history fades to white. Nuance is forgotten and arcane knowledge is lost. An infinite palette of color and shading fades, first to primary colors and eventually down to broad, ill-defined strokes—gouges in sandstone. Our life spans are too brief, our memories too quick to fade.

Thus in 2011, that perfect pop moment called Glam Rock is mostly reduced to flickering B-roll of Ziggy Stardust circa 1972, bless him. Or misremembered entirely as that thing Poison was doing in 1989, whatever that was. Some kid who fancies himself a music historian may mention T. Rex. But the amazing spectrum of bands and artists who made up the first glitter-rock era—from Sparks to Suzi Quatro, from Slade to the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, the Sweet, Mott The Hoople—what self-respecting 21st century boy, not even born when Marc Bolan died, could possibly hope to truly know that world?

Ryan McKay does. He’s the front man for Phoenix’s Crash Street Kids, and—along with band mates A. D. Adams, Ricky Serrano, and Ryan “Deuce” Gregory—the last, best hope for glam rock and roll.
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