THE UNGLOVED
HAND - Rock Around The World Nr.18/March 1978
By Gavin Francis.
Look at the hands. They're a dead giveaway. The typically
collarless boheme-kraut style leather jacket. The wan austere features,
waxen with no particular expression outside of a sort of a dislocated puzzlement.
But the hands - the focal point of the picture. Their stiff, mannered pose
belies the anxiety behind the stretched tendons. Rigid, yet expressive like
the hands in the works of Kokoschka and Von Schiele to which this cover
photograph bears a strong resemblance.
....Expressionism
perhaps being the key word in the deciphering of the "real Bowie,"
the title of his most recent incarnation. The way, however, in which the
present Bowie differs from all the preceding reflections in his hallway
of mirrors is his use of point-counterpoint with regard to personality and
music. Obviously Bowie has always been a very visual head. But whereas in
past worlds of the Sensitive Folkie, The Intergalactic antichrist, the black/white
eleganza of a Man Ray disco-cool, the music was an extension of the image.
Now the image is an extension of the music.
....Sound treater
Brian Eno is responsible for more than
just a small part of this transition. Present in both name and spirit on
"Low" and "Heroes,"
his own music has taken on an increasingly tropistic nature in both substance
and execution. "Another Green World" his last LP, was more a catalogue
of possibilities and textural diagrams than anything else. His new album,
"Before and After Science," is a bit less outre in parts, but
Eno is so fond of the visual projections that his sonic scenarios create
that he has taken the time to include four nominally related offset lithographs
by Peter Schmidt within the jacket of the new LP.
....Bowie has certainly
incorporated a great deal of the philosophical stance of Eno into his own
music. In a manner of speaking it is history repeating itself. Starting
in the London of 1910, Ezra Pound influenced almost every major poet of
the century, yet was never really able to get his own complex, mood oriented
verse to as large an audience as his protégés. He was a "poet's
poet." So it is with Brian Eno and his "oblique strategies."
Chances are his music will never reach the sizable audience that has been
afforded Bowie. But beginning with Bowie, his ideas have already begun to
diffuse, and will continue to do so. Bowie has always been a translator
of ideas. When he began his exuberant quest, his music smacked of clever
imitation. It became apparent that he had a way of catering to the audience
while still utilizing an occasionally original touch, one that he would
usually insinuate upon the audience through a cult of personality that eventually
became a veritable propaganda machine.
....His toying with
the odd illusion in and out of direct-vision of the public eye reflected
certain truths. People believe whatever they choose to believe. Give them
both a smorgasbord of music and a handful of separate realities from which
to pick and choose and they will most likely put together a composite picture
that they somehow feel is just right for their own attitudinal decor. Thus
he took the translator of ideas a step further than had the Beatles. While
their transitions were a direct reflection of the forefront of social change,
Bowie turned the politics of image into a studied kind of expressionist
zeitgeist. He has repeatedly proved that one need only short term bursts
of image for purposes of conveying all that is implied.
....As is usually
the case in which a staged situation revolves around the public image of
a strong character, real or imagined, we were given privy to all aspects
of the disguise that he oft-times wore. He seemed to have an opinion on
everything, and usually changed them with the same frequency that most people
change their socks. He has had fun with the image manufacturing, press releasing
paid-to-do-it rationalizers for a while.
....Now there emerges
according to the same star-making machinery, the "real David Bowie,"
as if in open admittance that there had never been a "real" David
Bowie. Reality at best being only temporary, this new attempt at retail-rationale
is laughable. Since the man has already answered the question of "Who
cares about the image?" with quite a great number of them, and since
the press continues to find fascination with such earthshaking factotum,
as Bowie drinking beer right from a can already, the question remains "Who
cares about the music?" While critics founder over the possibilities
of a no-image/image, Bowie seems to answer that question--quite simplistically
in this case, which is to say Not At All. Because he has been able to make
people care about his music simply on the basis of what he says and does,
it seems quite plausible that he can make them care about it by what he
does not say and does not do.
....He has made a
break. While working along the conventional linear terms of attack-and-proceed
as prescribed long ago by Western culture, he was music via theatre. Now
his music is quite blatantly a subjective image, and It is What is said
and rather than just How that is the most desired result. This has already
alienated the diehards that still yearn for the return of 1973.
....It also explains
a lot of the mixed reviews that have been the basic critical reception for
"Heroes." The album, to paraphrase Max Ernst, "Intensifies
the irritability of the mental faculties." The Fripp guitar on the
first two cuts of side one is both well placed and inarguable, like a stainless
steel hieratic head centered in a stark white plaster gallery. The title
track is the showpiece of side one. It keeps a low, intense profile while
it cruises steadily like a Lotus Sprint flat out on a long stretch of Autobahn,
hugging all the curves beneath a rain-cold sky. Bowie's voice is centered
like a driver in the cockpit, occasionally hitting the toggle-switch of
emotion for a little supercharge. Fripp's guitar literally soars like a
jet stream, and Eno's monotone harmonies only serve to underscore the intense,
desperate quality of Bowie's voice as he implores the lady not to leave,
not to take the easy way out... It is the idea of taking a chance in what
appears to be a dying world, one in which the first step toward The End
or Absolute Zero is the death of love. It is an appeal to the inhabitants
of an Age that demands a savior on whom it will wage nothing. It is perhaps
the most magnificent bit of rock and roll he has ever committed to vinyl.
....It is also a precursor
to side two. Kind of a preparatory mantra for the onslaught. Nothing is
quite as intense as "Heroes," but one suspects this to be stuff
of his dreams. "V-2 Schneider" is a fast moving tribute to Florian
Schneider of Kraftwerk-fame and his Pynchon-inspired "Gravity's Rainbow"
posturings. The next three tracks, "Sense of Doubt," "Moss
Garden" and "Neuköln" are the core of the second side.
"Sense of Doubt" fluctuates with the heaviness of teutonic purgatory,
a side-stepping close-up shot of Northern Man and his anxiety. "Moss
Garden" moves with a wafer-like delicacy like a trout pausing in the
sunlit shallows of a mountain stream. Its airy Zen pastel of color and light
combines Japanese koto with a synthesizer that diffuses slow, sensual textures
like an aerator dispensing perfumed aether.
...."NeuKöln"
is just that--a double entendre. It is both a murky descriptor for the neighborhood
in Berlin where the mostly Turkish gastarbeiter dwell, and it resonates
with the same expressionist energy of artists like Ernst in Koln before
the war and after, finding its way into the works of Pollock in post-war
New York. Between Paris and Berlin, between the first and second wars, the
"real" Koln, or Cologne was a crossroads of ideas for the anxieties
preceding the rise of Nazism and the final terrible release of the Second
World War.
....Bowie takes these
charged elements straight off canvas. He translates them on the sax with
an Ornette Coleman stylization that is as ugly and disparaging as it is
painfully, beautifully, beat-existential. Lastly, there is "The Secret
Life of Arabia" which rings like the last scene of an overblown tragedy
set amidst The Desert in which as the refrain says, "...the heroine
dies..." Romantic, eh? Valentino meets Camus.
...."Heroes"
is Bowie's journey into the interior. Sometimes it is sweepingly majestic,
other moments are unbelievably depressing. But so is most honest-to-God
art, and "Heroes" is more than a kind of period piece. It is a
flawed masterpiece.
....With "Heroes"
Bowie has apparently made a decision for the future. It is a future rife
with possibilities for real change, the kind of trial and error any artist
must make if he is to survive both as an artist and a person.
....The question remains,
will he take the gamble? Or will he let the less-than-phenomenal sales of
"Heroes" deter him? It would be refreshing to the extreme to see
him put it all on the line, to be a hero "just for one day." But
word has it that his set for the upcoming tour will be the same as it was
for "Station To Station," something to which he has agreed to
with what one hopes is a certain reluctance. If he has any cojones at all
he'll change his mind. He has it within his power, right at the moment,
to change the face of music. But maybe he's still lying to us. Then he'd
better not stay.
....He can negate
himself forwards and backwards, but "Heroes" still makes sense.
With or without him. The cry seems pure enough, the pain genuine. The suffering
amidst one rose-thorn plea is absolute. If it isn't the truth, it ought
to be. |