David Bowie's Low
Authors: Hugo Wilcken
Low
Praise for the series:
These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—
Vice
A brilliant series …each one a work of real love—
NME
Passionate, obsessive, and smart—
Nylon
Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—
Boldtype
Each volume has a distinct, almost militantly personal take on a beloved long-player …the books that have resulted are like the albums themselves—filled with moments of shimmering beauty, forgivable flaws, and stubborn eccentricity—
Tracks Magazine
[A] consistently excellent series—
Uncut
The nobility—and fun—of the project has never been questioned …a winning mix of tastes and writing styles—
Philadelphia Weekly
Reading about rock isn’t quite the same as listening to it, but this series comes pretty damn close—
Neon NYC
The sort of great idea you can’t believe hasn’t been done before—
Boston Phoenix
For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our website at
www.continuumbooks.com
and
33third.blogspot.com
Also available in this series:
Dusty in Memphis
by Warren Zanes
Forever Changes
by Andrew Hultkrans
Harvest
by Sam Inglis
The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society
by Andy Miller
Meat Is Murder
by Joe Pernice
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
by John Cavanagh
Abba Gold
by Elisabeth Vincentelli
Electric Ladyland
by John Perry
Unknown Pleasures
by Chris Ott
Sign ‘O’ the Times
by Michaelangelo Matos
The Velvet Underground and Nico
by Joe Harvard
Let It Be
by Steve Matteo
Live at the Apollo
by DouglasWolk
Aqualung
by Allan Moore
OK Computer
by Dai Griffiths
Let It Be
by Colin Meloy
Led Zeppelin IV
by Erik Davis
Armed Forces
by Franklin Bruno
Exile on Main Street
by Bill Janovitz
Grace
by Daphne Brooks
Murmur
by J. Niimi
Pet Sounds
by Jim Fusilli
Ramones
by Nicholas Rombes
Born in the U.S.A
. by Geoffrey Himes
Endtroducing
. . . by Eliot Wilder
Kick Out the Jams
by Don McLeese
In the Aeroplane over the Sea
by Kim Cooper
Music from Big Pink
by John Niven
The Notorious Byrd Brothers
by Ric Menck
Loveless
by Mike McGonigal
Doolittle
by Ben Sisario
Daydream Nation
by Matthew Stearns
There’s a Riot Goin’On
by Miles Marshall Lewis
Stone Roses
by Alex Green
Court and Spark
by Sean Nelson
Forthcoming in this series:
London Calling
by David L. Ulin
Hugo Wilcken
2011
Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
© 2005 by Hugo Wilcken
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.
eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-3129-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilcken, Hugo.
Low / Hugo Wilcken.
p.cm. -- (33 1/3)
Includes bibliographical references (p.).
1. Bowie, David. 2. Bowie, David. Low. I. Title. II. Series.
ML420.B754W55 2005
782.42166′092--dc22
2005018992
Printed and bound in the United States of America
what can i do about my dreams?
Thanks to my family, particularly Patrick Wilcken, for his help with research and critical reading of the text. Thanks also to David Barker, for commissioning the book; to Nick Currie, for an interesting exchange of e-mails; to Chris from menofmusic.com, for locating and sending me material; and to everyone else who helped in the writing of the work. And a special thank you to Julie Street, for her significant editorial input and all-round support.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my friend
Peter Meyer (1964–2003).
I first heard
Low
in late 1979, soon after my fifteenth birthday. One of my older brothers had sent me a cassette, home-taped from the vinyl. I was far from my family and my native Australia doing a term of school in Dunkirk in northern France, ostensibly to learn French. Dunkirk was a grey simulacrum of a city. It had been destroyed during the Second World War, and entirely rebuilt afterwards according to the original plans. Every building contained the ghost of its bombed-out twin. At the city’s edge, a wide desolate beach stretched out for miles. At low tide, you could see the wrecks of boats that had never made it across the Channel, during the desperate evacuation of Allied troops in 1940. Flanders is only twelve kilometres to the east, and the landscape around Dunkirk is similar—fluorescent green fields that are unrelentingly flat, quite disorientating for someone from hilly Sydney. In winter, the northern, pewter skies hung oppressively low, and the drizzle
was constant. My French was approximate and communication difficult, accentuating the sense of isolation that is the natural state for a fifteen-year-old boy. Of course,
Low
was the perfect soundtrack.
Fifteen is the age of bedroom retreat, and three of the five
Low
songs with lyrics use withdrawal to a bedroom as a symbol for isolation. It’s also the age of ravenous intellectual curiosity, of devouring books and art and music to access new worlds of the imagination.
Low
seemed to be a glimpse into such a world, one that I didn’t really understand, subverting my expectations of what I’d understood a pop record should be. “Always Crashing in the Same Car” had the spooked feeling of a recurring dream; “A New Career in a New Town” had a yearning about it that looked both forward and back. The instrumentals on the second side weren’t pop music at all, and had allusive titles such as the punning “Art Decade,” “Weeping Wall” or “Subterraneans,” which suggested fading civilisations gone to ground. The album left a haunting impression.
In the eighties, David Bowie forfeited a fair chunk of his artistic mystique in exchange for megastardom as a stadium entertainer, and my interest moved on to other things. Lately, he’s redeemed himself somewhat, but it’s only in the past few years that my attention turned back to what now seems to me to be a fascinating moment in the mid-seventies, when people like Bowie, Brian Eno or Kraftwerk were redefining what it meant to engage with
the pop and rock genres. It was partly about injecting an experimental, European sensibility into a medium that was largely American in its conception. Of course, high and low art had been collapsing into each other ever since Warhol, Lichtenstein and the other pop art innovators had emerged in the early sixties. But if in the sixties it was art that was slumming it with pop aesthetics, the reverse was happening in the mid-seventies. Pop went arty. And
Low
marks the highpoint of this development, with its atmosphere of modernist alienation, its expressionism, its eclectic blend of R&B rhythms, electronics, minimalism and process-driven techniques, its suspicion of narrative.
I don’t want to put
Low
into any sort of canon of great works. That seems to me to be imposing notions of worth from another age and a different cultural enterprise. Not a lot of modern culture can be treated in that way any more, and pop culture certainly can’t. No single album can bear the weight of greatness, torn away from the support of all the other songs and all the other albums, the whole fabric of the hybrid culture that produced it. That’s pop culture’s strength, not its weakness. And that’s why in this book I’m going to talk around
Low
almost as much as I talk about it—looking at how it relates to the other points on the cultural matrix, where it came from, how it fits with Bowie’s artistic development. In short, what ingredients went into making an LP that Bowie once said captured “a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass.”
As far as the music goes,
Low
and its siblings were a direct follow-on from the title track of
Station to Station
. It’s often struck me that there will usually be one track on any given album of mine which will be a fair indicator of the intent of the following album.