DAVID BOWIE: "Aladdin Sane" (RCA Victor). Homo supirior or The Man Who Fooled The World? I'm begining to wonder. . .
....Oh, he's good all right. Image-wise, he carries it all off with a dazzling, effortless sense of style which makes every-other band in the glam/glit/outrage/theatre-rock field look like something out of a Camping For Beginners. And musically, he and Mick Ronson and Mick Woodmansey and Trevor Bolder and the rest are light-years ahead in their cruel precision.
....But how deep does it go? Is David Bowie really saying anything much at all? As Ziggy Stardust, rock and roller, he gets it on, no doubt about it. But judged against the standards of the astral image which he and his followers have nurtured - the whole Starman, Stranger In A Strange Land aura - his achivements have been disapointing.
....This was brought home forcibly the other week by Bowie's appearance on the Russel Harty TV show. While he was singing he was perfect: the whole scintillating bisexual image, guaranteed to throw the entire population of straight Britain into panic. And musically, he and the band were machine-tooled perfection. But as soon as he sat down to talk, the whole image dissolved like runny mascara. What he had to say was in no way futuristic, or profound, or controversial. He was as The Prettiest Starlet.
....It's not that I expect profundity from a rock star. But when your songs deal in cosmic concepts you are inviting judgement at a pretty high level. And the sad truth is that five minutes of a film like 2001 or one chapter of Asimov or Clarke says more about what Man can or will become than the entire body of Bowie's "futuristic" songs.
....It's the same story with this latest album, which is superficially stunning and ultimately frustrating. The title is a pun, of course, and a deadly accurate one: the lyrics are more intense, more strung-out, more fragmented than anything he's done before: splintered nightmare images of a journey across America. At times the lyrics reach that level of obscurity which it is fashionable to describe as "oblique" but which sound to me merely confused and hastily thrown together.
....Musically, the songs are executed with a brutal panache which puts this album closer to satanic "Man Who Sold The World" than "Hunky Dory" or "Ziggy Stardust." Meleodically the songs have Bowie's usual flair - "The Jean Genie" and Drive-In Saturday" have already proved themseleves as singles and most of the others here are just as catchy, especially "The Prettiest Star," a very poppy reworking of an old song from "Space Odyessey" days. "Watch Tat Man" and "Panic In Detroit" are stormers with a strong Rolling Stones feel - although Bowie's version of "Let's Spend The Night Together" is very un-Stonesy, precise and asexual. "Cracked Actor" is probably the most successful cut: a vividly powerful tale of Hollywood, heroin and sexual cruelty. But the two key works here, I supose, are the title track and "Time." Both have a strained alienated feel, heightened by the fractured jagged piano of new man Mike Garson, but the lyrics promise far more than they actually deliver - which is the way I feel about the whole album.
....There is much to dazzle the eye and ear, but little to move the mind or heart. It is clever, but icy cold, and I have a feeling that the songs here will not be long remembered.
....But maybe that's the way Mr Bowie wants it, as he makes his plans to go into movies and talks about farewell tours. Perhaps, as his spirit Andy Warhol once said, everybody should be famous for just 15 minutes.

Aladdin Sane's title song is this album's "Five Years". Ominously, within parentheses after the title, are the dates "1913-1938-197?". The first two are the years before the outbreak of the first and second World Wars, respectively, and we have no reason to think that 197? represents anything but a year prior to the date of the third. The music is hothouse orientalism, jagged, dissonant and daring, yet also wistful and backward-looking. Phrases like "battle cries and champagne" evoke images of earlier, more romantic wars. The impatient chug of the machine (the electric guitar) gently clashes with the wilder, more extreme failings of a dying culture (the piano). We have been deposited in the realm of Ives and Stravinsky. Mike Garson's long piano solo is fabulously imaginative and suggestive, incorporating snatches of Rhapsody In Blue and "Tequila". Only a couple of words of the lyrics indicate over what point the song title's question mark must be hovering. The reference to sake, the Japanese drink, in the first verse, and the last verse's "Millions weep a fountain/just in case of sunrise" suggest the land of the rising sun as a potentially significant future locale. While writing this album, Bowie decided to tour Japan (where he has recently been performing), and Ziggy was described on the last album as "like some cat from Japan". The relationship of Aladdin's visitations to the outbreak of war is not clear. Is it his appearance, or our failure to embrace him, which plunges us into strife?

....Although a good portion of the songs on Aladdin Sane are hard rock & roll, a closer inspection reveals them to be advertisements for their own obsolescence -- vignettes in which the baton is being passed on to a newer sensibility.

...."Watch That Man ", the album's opening number, is inimitable Stones, Exile vintage. Mick Ronson plays Chuck Berry licks via Keith Richard, Garson plays at being Nicky Hopkins, Bowie slurs his lines, and the female backup singers and horns make appropriate noises. Like Ziggy, one of the subjects of Aladdin Sane is rock & roll (and its lynch pin, sex), only here it is extended to include its ultimate exponents, the Stones. Taking up the warning he gave in "Changes" - "Look out you rock & rollers/Pretty soon you're gonna get a little older" - David presents "an old-fashioned band of married men/Looking up to me for encouragement". To emphasize the archaism of these fellows, there are references to Benny Goodman and "Tiger Rag". Jagger himself has become so dainty "that he could eat you with a fork and spoon".

...."Let's Spend The Night Together" continues the Stones preoccupation. Here, one of the most ostensibly heterosexual calls in rock is made into a bi-anthem: The cover version is a means to an ultimate revisionism. The rendition here is campy, butch, brittle and unsatisfying. Bowie is asking us to re-perceive "Let's Spend the Night Together" as a gay song, possibly from its inception. Sexual ambiguity in rock has existed long before any audience was attuned to it. However, though Bowie's point is well taken, his methods are not.

...."Drive-In Saturday" was conceived during Bowie's passage through the Arizona desert. It is a fantasy in which the populace, after some terrible holocaust, has forgotten how to make love. To learn again they take courses at the local drive-in, where they view films in which "like once before...people stared in Jagger's eyes and scored".

...."Panic In Detroit" places us right in the middle of a battered urban scape. Ronson deals out a compelling Bo Diddley beat which quickly leads into a helter-skelter descending scale. The song is a paranoid descendant of the Motor City's earlier masterpiece, Martha and the Vandellas' "Nowhere To Run". The hero is "the only survivor of the National People's Gang", the revolutionary as a star (shades of Sinclair), Che as wall poster. By the end of the song, all that is left to claim his revolutionary immortality is a suicide note, an "autograph" poignantly inscribed "Let me collect dust". Rock and revolutionary stardom are not the only varieties which are doomed. In his work Bowie is often contemptuous of actors, yet his is, above all, an actor.

....His intent on "Cracked Actor", a portrait of an aging screen idol, vicious, conceited, mercenary, the object of the ministrations of a male gigolo, is to strip the subject of his validity, as he has done with the rocker, as a step towards a re-definition of these roles and his own inhabiting of them.

...."The Prettiest Star", the album's other slice of cinematic life, again asserts the connection between secular and celestial stardom. But the song itself is too self-consciously vaudeville.

...."Time " is a bit of Brecht/Weill, a bit of Brel. All the world's not a stage, but a dressing room, in which Time holds sway, exacts payment. Once we're on, as in all theaters, time is suspended and will no longer "In Quaaludes and red wine" be "Demanding Billy Dolls" - a reference to the death of Billy Murcia in London last summer. The appeal to an afterlife, or its equivalent, which is implied in this song, using the theater as its metaphor, is further clarified in

...."Lady Grinning Soul". The song is beautifully arranged; Ronson's guitar, both six-string and twelve, elsewhere so muscular, is here, except for some faulty intonation on the acoustic solo, very poetic. Bowie, a ballad singer at heart, which lends his rock singing its special edge, gives "Lady Grinning Soul" the album's most expansive and sincere vocal.

....Aladdin Sane works over the same themes that were raised in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - issuances from the Bowie schema that date back to The Man Who Sold The World. Bowie is cognizant that religion's geography - the heavens - has been usurped, either by science or by actual beings.

....If by conventional lights Bowie is a lad insane, then as an Aladdin, a conjurer of supernatural forces, he is quite sane. The titles may change from album to album - from the superman, the homo superior, Ziggy, to Aladdin -- but the visions (the elimination of gender differences, the inevitability of Armageddon, and the conquering of death and time as we know them) - and Bowie's rightful place in them - remain constant.

Aladdin Sane, conversely, was David Bowie at his innovative best, outraging with his lyrics (Time falls wanking to the floor) and spawning a thousand lookalikes with flashes of lightning down their faces. With the dancing beat of Jean Genie and Let's Spend The Night Together, the originality of Time and Lady Grinning Soul, and the sheer power of Panic In Detroit and Watch That Man, Aladdin Sane is not only a shining beacon of light in the leaden grey of early '70s rock music but also displays the best of David Bowie: simultaneously accessible and thought-provoking.
Q Rating: ****

Combine raw energy with explosive rock and the end result is this newest effort. With three LP's already on the chart, Bowie can easily make this number four. The English production smacks of a high polish and a gut level fervor. Nine of the tunes are by Bowie. Mick Jagger and Keith Richard's "Let's Spend the Night Together" is the 10th. Bowie's imagery is often obtuse but it doesn't seem to matter for the production is what matters: the sonic impact is all important, and there's plenty of vocal exertion and instrumental exuberance for pzazz. Best cuts: "Watch That Man," "The Jean Genie," "Lady Grinning Soul" (slow and delicate). Dealers: an important sales offering from England's top musical import. The cover is an off-beat painted face.