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BY RICK MOODY
April 25th, 2013
(…)
So here’s what David sent me (and I should thank him for doing it, and so I fervently thank him here):
Effigies
Indulgences
Anarchist
Violence
Chthonic
Intimidation
Vampyric
Pantheon
Succubus
Hostage
Transference
Identity
Mauer
Interface
Flitting
Isolation
Revenge
Osmosis
Crusade
Tyrant
Domination
Indifference
Miasma
Pressgang
Displaced
Flight
Resettlement
Funereal
Glide
Trace
Balkan
Burial
Reverse
Manipulate
Origin
Text
Traitor
Urban
Comeuppance
Tragic
Nerve
Mystification
Bowie’s list was left-justified, but probably because he didn’t want to take the time to center justify, and also his list was purposefully double-spaced, and so came with the same amount of white space that you’re seeing, and, you have to admit, it’s an incredibly provocative list of words for the album.
I was really excited to speak to this list, and to apply this list to the songs of The Next Day, but the very first thing I had to do was simply to enjoy the list, because it’s a great list, and it has the word chthonic on it, and this is one of my very favorite words, and you have to admit, additionally, chthonic is a great word, and all art that is chthonic is excellent art, and art that has nothing chthonic about it, like, let’s say, »Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” that is art that’s hard to withstand.
But in this case, when Bowie says chthonic, it’s obvious he’s not just aspiring to chthonic, the album has death in nearly every song, and Bowie, after the angioplasty, can deploy his word choice with a newfound sense of confidence, though we can wish that this were not the case, we can wish that the artist didn’t have to suffer. But confidence is always a good thing as regards the intricacies of lyrical composition, and so chthonic has personal heft behind it, as does isolation, which is a word a lot like Isolar, the name of David Bowie’s management enterprise, and there’s also vampyric, succubus, violence, funereal, effigies, and burial, just in case the chthonic part were not clear enough, as well as hostage, manipulation, traitor, and the incredibly grim resettlement.
And there, near the close, is the difficult if not impossible to use word tragic. But I’m jumping the gun a bit.
Effigies
One thing that is beautiful about The Next Day is David Bowie’s face. David Bowie’s face is a thing that has often been written about, and which has been often fetishized in the context of his work, especially in the period between ’72 and ’77 or so, when he was more than beautiful, when he was radiantly beautiful and oddly casual about how beautiful he was (what else could he do). The David Bowie of The Man Who Fell to Earth was so beautiful that it was almost hard to look at, but his beauty was remarkable enough to lend him a certain amount of power that he might otherwise not have had, a power that he was penalized for in certain circles (some of Lester Bangs’s carping about Bowie, in those days, seems to me to be about Bowie trading on the perfection of his beauty). Having interviewed him myself once (I think it was 1995), I can say that in middle age (he was younger than I am now as I write these lines) he was still startlingly good looking, but he was no androgynous naiad. He was an older guy who looked great. What he is now, meanwhile, is a man in his sixties, and there’s no point in disputing that, though he is as beautiful as a man in his sixties could be and looks years younger. Still, the package of The Next Day casts off the earlier Bowie. And the jacket of The Next Day, which uses a cocktail napkin, a white square, to block out the David Bowie of »Heroes,” lies in wait for those who would make the mistake of looking for David Bowie the fetish; likewise, the highly stylized photograph of Bowie in the package makes him look about as haunted and rough around the edges as he could possibly look, and it’s the beautiful Bowie that seems like an albatross now, even to Bowie himself, it’s the whippet thin androgyne from outerspace wearing a g-string or a dress that’s the effigy, orall those suicidal coke-addicted paranoids who can’t even remember making Station to Station, who gave interviews high saying things much regretted later on, those effigies are bodies left to rot in a hollow tree, and the challenging part of the metaphor is that Bowie can still, apparently, feel the too-famous-for-his-own-good young man back there, in the wreckage, and feels him like a sequence of ghosts informing what he has to write, and he keeps trying to kill them off (like on the back cover of Scary Monsters), the effigies, the undead, they keeping coming back, because everybody has to come to some compromise with the early work, you know, when it’s produced in public, and the effigies, here, haunt the enterprise, in the lyrics and occasionally in a wafting of melody of texture from the past, which drifts over the dark landscape …
on the rumpus, here