His own Bowie

Earthling is good pop-art fun

by Richard C. Walls

Since his time spent in the '80s as a simulacrum of pop/rock normality, David Bowie has been slowly morphing back into an amalgam of his various E.T. personae: The Man Who Fell From The Charts. On his new Earthling (Virgin, in stores Tuesday) the transformation seems complete. It's not that he's finally rearrived at his futuristic past; Bowie's much too conscious of current trends merely to rehash old stances (even if he now operates from behind instead of ahead of the curve). Rather it's as if, no longer worried about being in the commercial running (been there, done that), he'd decided to go with his impulse to be a pop/art dude and have some fun in the process. The result is his least calculated and most naturally eccentric release since Lodger -- musically coherent and energized and something that longtime fans can enjoy rather than just settle for.

The signature sound of Earthling is a densely aggressive jungle/techno/industrial backdrop, metallic slabs of electronics over a quick pulse. Embedded in this cold hard-ass sludge are such reassuring touchstones as co-songwriter Reeves Gabrels's solid rock guitar, pianist Mick Garson's Cecil Taylor homages (or whoever, with his free-form pointillist gewgaws), and Bowie's familiar disembodied crooning. Although the songs are paced by pressure-drop textural changes, most of them go on a bit too long, thanks to the singer's tendency to milk a hook until either the trance kicks in or you pick up a book.

His lyrics are as opaque as ever. An overarching theme is easy to detect, something along the lines of "We're all fucked but it doesn't really matter." Or maybe it's "They're all fucked and we should keep that in mind." The songs suggest ideas or feelings without pinning anything down -- certainly without elaborating. Sometimes it's simply gibberish. Bowie has a committed Surrealist's belief that what burbles up from the unconscious is richer and stranger and could have an even greater value than linear thought, and so we get a lot of stuff that should have been left in the notebooks -- dead-end wordplay, snippets of faux poetry ("There's nothing in our eyes/As lovely as a wound"), and random High Priest mumbo-jumbo.

Of course, Bowie's pretentiousness, like Dylan's adenoids, is part of his charm. Besides, it's not all meaningless bosh. "Seven Years in Tibet," one of the relatively slow ones, rides over an appealing, funky riff; it begins, "Are you okay?/You've been shot in the head/And I'm holding your brains/The old woman said" -- which is a great opening, though there's no story to follow. Instead, Bowie's eager to get to the punch line, "All praise to you/Nothing ever goes away," repeated until one begins to concur. "Telling Lies" is equally unprofound, but in a somewhat mocking manner. With it's repeated refrain "Ooh, ah visionary/Feels like something's going to happen this year," Bowie seems to be sending up his own longstanding pose as harbinger of an unspecified apocalypse.

On "The Last Thing You Should Do," Bowie evokes another in a long line of internalized dystopias, using his most sepulchral voice: "Nobody laughs anymore/It's the worst thing you can do." "Dead Man Walking" is about turning older, or possibly just old -- in any event, "Older than movies . . . older than dreams" ("Older than movies"? I'm working without a lyric sheet, so be patient), all over a gussied-up disco beat.

I realize that in cold print this sounds kind of awful, but as songspeak it works fine. "I don't want knowledge/I want certainty," Bowie sings on "Law (Earthlings on Fire)" but he's never given the impression of being interested in either. What he really wants is elusiveness, elision, and the suggestion of an ominous but humanistic worldview. Bowie's long been beyond irony; it's sincerity he uses as a distancing device. "I'm afraid of the world/I'm afraid I can't help it" is the message of "I'm Afraid of Americans," and the double meaning suggests both the terror of helplessness and the pain of wanting to help, all neutralized by his trademark archness. It's hardly a new approach, but Bowie has paid so much attention to the sonic/'tronic details on Earthling that one can still get a charge from the music's dramatic heft, even if the androidal text seems a little rusty.