Inurning all of those lupine bivouacs on the bleak flatlands of polyrhythm and alien tonality for the nonce, David Bowie’s latest sonic-scuddings, clumped under the collective title Scary Monsters, panders, without reservation, to the pampered ears of pop thralldom and the simoleon cabals. And this just might offend all of those hueless die-hard noise-junkies out there in rockland. The ones who’ve been completely bewitched by his dabblings into the outer realms of sound will cringe and sweat when they hear the likes of “Fashion,” a toon so psychographically tuned into the current hit-market that it just might be the scariest thing on the entire album. Cringe away!
Personally, it doesn’t offend me in the least. As a matter of fact, it’s a welcome change from all that greyish noise he’s been cawing out recently and hey, so what if he’s out to make a $, man’s gotta eat, don’t he? Anyway, his experiments should be subsidized. Like Todd Rundgren, whose talent was honed by producing such finger-in-throat bands as Grand Funk Railroad and Hall and Oates, etc. Bowie should be allowed a wide margin of success, just so we can get more glimpses of his spirited rock vision.
Bowie’s been a strange kind of rocker right from the start. His musical mind changes like a baby’s diapers after a week on diuretics--a living example of rock’s contradictory beauty. From the era of his homo glitterliciousness, on through the straight, “And I like girls too” phase, to his current incarnation as the freak’s freak, Bowie remains thoroughly consistent in his inconsistency. And that my friends is called stroking the spinal cord of rock philosophy with abandon.
But let’s digress a moment. Scary Monsters is a promising title, and coupled with Bowie’s current predilection towards the odd (he’s playing the Elephant Man on stage, a role of sublime grotesqueness), it portend much. Unfortunately, it delivers little along these lines. It doesn’t deal with too many scary monsters, oh, there are a few chimerical mental monsters squinting their way through the noise, but these are as convoluted and awkward as Robert Fripp’s guitar fripperies: a barrage of squat, sound chunks that get in the way, more than they enhance. These are day-to-day id-like monsters we all do combat with, nothing extraordinary. Nothing like John Carpenter’s Boogieman in Halloween or the skin-shedding creatures of Zombie, and nothing like what it’s gotta be like inside of Don Kirshner’s son’s head.
Bowie’s phantasms aren’t as viscerally oriented as all that. They are phantoms of the mind, cinerial ghosts kecking out the darker madness of the spirit. His scary monsters are wrapped up in a skirling, painful arrogance of intelligence. They dribble out concepts and attitudes that are paranormal when compared to the American mind, as it stands in its current state--which is confused. They make about as much sense to the American psyche as do jellyfish starlets from Saturn propositioning space travelers with the promise of cosmic blow jobs.
One of the more powerful musical spectres here is the title toon, a maddening look into the inner workings of Broca’s brain: the choke ’n’ puke of all knowledge. Ultimately, it’s the song that Ric Ocasek’s been trying to write since the first Cars album. It all harkens back to Bowie’s Diamond Dogs days, the days when his vision of the American landscape after the concussing buzzes of future shock settle down scared us all.
The fact that he opens up the album with a song done in Japanese, one of the better rock languages--French being the best--immediately contradicts that opening statement, which is, “It’s No Game.” It is, and the Jap patois proves it. Immediately all the latent racist imagery of Godzilla, Pink Lady and Hondas creep into the mind. Can you imagine being an out of work autoworker and having to hear this song blasting from your kid’s stereo every day? You’d probably take the little bastard outside and give him a shovelenema.
“Teenage Wildlife” is too much of an anthem to be really interesting and should be the flip side to the single, since we all know that anthems are best left for the B-sides of life. “Because You’re Young” sports Pete Townshend, how’s that for a contradiction in terms?
And revelation upon revelation: on “Ashes To Ashes” Bowie finally lets the cat out of the baggie when he tells us that Major Tom’s a junkie and Ground Control is being overrun by Squadrons of Sherman smokin’ rubber heads who’re busy massing for teenjunta and sonic-jihad of their own.
So, even though this here Bowiethonic canvas doesn’t leap ’n’ slide through the fragmentary spectrums of sound like Low or The Lodger, it still comes across as a good David Bowie album, full of the substance that makes Bowie a still vital, fascinating performer. Contradictions abound. Giggle. He’s lying on the kitchen floor, spaghetti sauce all over his face, Scary Monsters soundtracking his cool coma, whispering to the cat as it takes a shit in the litter box, “Oh, the horror, the horror!!!”
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