David Bowie

David Bowie made marketing the essence of his art. All the great phenomena of popular music, from Elvis Presley to the Beatles, had first of all been marketing phenomena (like Coca-Cola and Blue Jeans before them), but Bowie turned it into an art form. With Bowie, the science of marketing becomes art; art and marketing interpenetrate. There were intellectuals who had stated this theory in subversive forms. Bowie was, in many ways, an heir—albeit a perverse one—of Andy Warhol’s pop art and the underground culture of the 1960s. He adopted some of its most blasphemous elements and turned them upside down to make them into exactly what they had been designed against: a consumer product.

A great personality, but a poor musician: to say that Bowie is a musician is like saying Nero was a lyre player (technically true, but misleading). Bowie embodies the quintessence of artificial art, elevates futility to a paradigm, exalts phenomenon over content, makes the relevant irrelevant, and therefore is the epitome of all that is negative in rock music.

Each element of his art is the emblem of a true artistic movement, but the sum of those emblems constitutes only a puzzle, however fascinating, of symbols, a reel of incoherent images projected at double speed, a dictionary of terms rather than poetry, and, at best, a documentary of the cultural fashions of his era. His work resembles a grand costume party of the intellectual elite.

Reading the chronicles, it is clear that what caused a sensation was not the music but the show itself. The show staged by Bowie was undoubtedly avant-garde, as it fused theater, mime, cinema, art, literature, and music. But Bowie simply picked up what had been happening for years in the British underground, particularly what had been propagated by the psychedelic bands of 1967. And he turned it into a consumer product: over and over, this is where his real merit lies.

A genuine product of 1970s London, from which he absorbed all cultural and social impulses, David Bowie (David Jones) embodies the ideal of continuous transformation of decadence. Influenced by Bob Dylan, showman Anthony Newley, the psychedelic summer of 1967, and the mimes of the Living Theatre, Bowie recorded his first album in 1964 (the early singles are all in the style of Anthony Newley), spent three years in the entourage of rhythm-and-blues bands, recorded a delicate folk-pop album, David Bowie (Deram, 1967), studied dance and mime with Lindsay Kemp, participated in several theatrical events, and converted to Buddhism. Some of his early recordings were later collected on Images 1966 – 1967 (1973). The most significant early song is probably one of the B-sides of his singles, The London Boys, an anthem to the mods.

Popularity came unexpectedly with Space Oddity, a science-fiction song with a psychedelic arrangement by Paul Buckmaster (the future arranger for Elton John and many others), composed in 1968 for a soundtrack and selected the following year by record executives to celebrate the first Moon landing. The song included mellotron (Rick Wakeman), cello, piano, flute, and kalimba. The album David Bowie (Philips, 1969), reissued as Space Oddity (RCA, 1972), also contained the serenade Letter to Hermione.

Entrusted to the care of producer Tony Visconti (the same who had just invented glam rock with Marc Bolan), Bowie changed face and became an eccentric and sophisticated homosexual. Bowie and Visconti withdrew into seclusion in 1970 for a few months at Bowie’s home, with guitarist Mick Ronson and other musicians. When Bowie emerged, he was a new character with a new sound: he had definitively abandoned folk-rock, and his band (led by Ronson) played a very tamed version of the hard rock that was fashionable that year. Man Who Sold the World (Mercury, 1970) employed one of the first synthesizers and featured a suggestive title track, All The Madmen, and Width Of A Circle (originally a three-minute song, but transformed by guitarist Mick Ronson into an eight-minute frenzy). Bowie, however, was only the singer of a rock band, whose contribution was limited to writing the melodies (which are indeed the weak point of the album). The band’s sound, on the other hand, was a banal summary of American rock from 1968–69, from soul-rock to Creedence Clearwater Revival.

The first album where David Bowie’s talent is truly felt is Hunky Dory (RCA, Dec 1971), a cycle of songs (with Wakeman again on keyboards) still reminiscent of music-hall (Changes, Oh You Pretty Thing) and psychedelic ballads (Life On Mars). The best track, Queen Bitch, was a powerful imitation of Lou Reed. On the esoteric meditation of Quicksand and the dark elegy of The Bewlay Brothers hovered the ghost of Nico. The album was certainly not on par with the records of contemporary singer-songwriters (echoed in the less original songs), but it demonstrated that Bowie was more than a simple pop singer.

Behind the scenes, Bowie's persona was being refined by a new manager, Tony DeFries, and by a new and more powerful label. The quantum leap forward in quality took place with the saga of Ziggy Stardust (1972), that still featured Rick Wakeman on keyboards and Mick Ronson on guitar, and boasted a much more sophisticated production. The concept (that was recorded at the peak of the fad for rock operas) is a cartoonish melodrama that recycles cliches of decadent and sci-fi literature. Its popularity was due as much to the choreographic staging as to the music.
The music in itself relied on magniloquent pop ballads (such as Five Years, the piano-heavy Lady Stardust, almost a sendup of Warren Zevon, the shrill gospel-y hymn Ziggy Stardust, Moonage Daydream, with a folkish sax solo reminiscent of the Hollywood Argyles and a shower of strings, and Ronson's best solo), arranged in such a baroque manner to make the Who's Tommy sound amateurish. Bowie's melodic skills shone in the grand soaring refrains of Starman and Rock And Roll Suicide, that were de facto tributes to the old tradition of Tin Pan Alley. The album displayed the half-hearted stylistic variety of a latter-day Beatles album, from the soul-jazz tune Soul Love to the martial Led Zeppelin-ian folk-blues shuffle It Aint' Easy, but it excelled at anthemic rock'n'roll. Hang On To Yourself, a whirling boogie dance, and especially Suffragette City, a quintessential hysterical breathless Who-style boogie and perhaps his career's standout, disposed with the languid existentialism of the ballads, and confronted Bowie's erotic futuristic cabaret from the vintage point of teenage angst. The whole certainly worked well as a postmodernist analysis of show business' cliches.
Credit for the production quality goes to Ken Scott too (Bowie lo definira` "il mio George Martin") e di nuovo al chitarrista Mick Ronson: tutti gli arrangiamenti furono ideati da loro (gli arrangiamenti d'archi sono tutti di Ronson). Scott fece tutto il mixing da solo.
Bowie's "heartbreaking" vocals were so exaggerated that they sounded like a parody of sorts. Ditto the kitschy arrangements. The concept was, first and foremost, a caricature of the star system. By fusing Scott Walker's melodramatic style, Jacques Brel's weltschmerz, zen mysticism, McLuhan's theory of the medium, Andy Warhol's multimedia pop-art and Oscar Wilde's fin de siecle decadence, Bowie coined the ultimate revisionist and self-reflective act of the revisionist and self-reflective decade.
For better and for worse, Ziggy marked the end of the myth of rock sincerity/spontaneity: the star was no longer a teenager among many, a "working-class everyman", and, above all, the star was no longer "himself" but rather a calculating inventor of artificial stances and attitudes. His show indirectly mocked and ridiculed the messianic aura of rock music.
Not much of a musical genius, but certainly a terrific showman, diligent student of Hollywood's mythology, living impersonation of the gothic iconography (Dorian Gray) and of the parnassian iconography (Pierrot), Bowie owed little to his fragile and facile compositions: he owed almost everything to the "image" that he had created and was nurturing with non-musical factors.

Compared to so much melodrama, Aladdin Sane (1973) is a hard-rock album. The tone remains the suicidal/titanic one of Ziggy (particularly in Cracked Actor and Time), but the sound is that of his musical roots. Jean Genie, Watch That Man, Panic In Detroit, and Drive-In Saturday resemble a pop version of the Rolling Stones or the Stooges. Mike Garson’s jazz piano created almost neurotic contrasts (his celestial touch on Aladdin Sane remains famous). It remains one of his most coherent and successful albums, and is considered by many to be his masterpiece.

After the cover collection Pin-Ups (1973), Bowie began jumping from one genre to another, always managing to craft a fashionable track that could also reach the charts: the anthem of the new decadent mods All The Young Dudes (1972), the anthemic hard-rock of Rebel Rebel, which is the highlight of the dreadful Diamond Dogs (1974), a futuristic concept album speculating on the fear of nuclear holocaust (originally intended as a musical adaptation of George Orwell’s *1984*), the soul ballad Fame, typical of the album Young Americans (1975), which also features Luther Vandross’ Fascination. The album marked the beginning of his collaboration with guitarist Carlos Alomar, probably the true author of Fame.

While the music was almost always embarrassingly banal, the stage design was charged with moods that were at once murky and solemn. His world was anguished, devastated, senseless, populated by alienated outcasts and human wreckage. From it, Bowie drew primarily his voice: he sang his existential horror with a tone capable of modulating detachment, cynicism, and poignant nostalgia. Bowie had rediscovered the “crooning” of 1950s pop and soul singers, perhaps the least innovative singing style one could imagine in 1975, but he placed it in a drastically different context, almost as Weill had placed cabaret songs within Brechtian theater.

Remembering his theatrical experiences (and Lou Reed), Bowie consciously employed the “Brechtian” technique of alienation that was fashionable at the time. Bowie’s singing deliberately calculated a striking contrast between music, lyrics, and image, pushing the audience to critically reflect on the “illusions” presented. Furthermore, inspired by Lou Reed (the alienated rocker), Iggy Pop (the Dionysian performer), and Brian Eno (the sound scientist), he forged a new type of mass ritualism, redefining through his constant metamorphoses both the concept of entertainer coined by Frank Sinatra in the postwar era and that of star coined by Hollywood in the 1920s.

Relocating to California, and fallen in love with the minimalist movement of the avantgarde (Philip Glass), Bowie recorded the ambitious and eclectic Station to Station (RCA Victor, 1976). The album is ostensibly a tribute to black music. In practice, it packages together a hodgepodge of pretentious prog-rock cliches, second-rate muzak and dance experiments. The ten-minute suite Station to Station is an amateurish take on Pink Floyd's futuristic anthem Welcome to The Machine (electronic overture, funky rhythm, psychedelic effects) watered down with a soul melody reminiscent of Cream's White Room and keyboards reminiscent of Yes, and then propelled by a sudden progression a` la Jethro Tull and a coda that mixes rock'n'roll piano and disco beat. Bowie is more intriguing when he toys with retrograde dance music (the mellow funky groove of Golden Years, and especially the piano-based rhythm'n'blues novelty TVC15). The misunderstanding (Bowie thinks he's being avantgarde when in fact he's the opposite) does lay a bridge between mainstream rock music and the new wave. The joint attack of hard-rock guitar (Carlos Alomar again), electronica and African polyrhythms in Stay, predates the Talking Heads. The album's character was more "confusion" than "fusion", although a few of the ideas were indeed original. But the album's weakest element, as usual, were Bowie's childishly decadent vocals.

The ambitions of Station to Station led to Bowie's most valuable period. In march 1976 Bowie visited Iggy Pop in the USA and witnessed in person the birth of the new wave, a phenomenon that greatly influenced his career (it was basically Bowie who discovered Devo). In may near Paris (the same "Chateau d'Herouville" where he had recorded Ziggy) Bowie produced Iggy Pop's album The Idiot using the sound of the new wave. In the fall of 1976 Bowie moved to Berlin and fell in love with Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. It was there that Bowie met for the first time Brian Eno, who was recording with Cluster, and Eno Eno was the final and decisive influence on the transformation underway.

The twin albums Low (1977), basically a continuation of Iggy Pop's The Idiot, and Heroes (1977) were composed and recorded in Berlin under the aegis of Brian Eno, who in the previous years had worked out a revolutionary concept of electronic pop music. The new style exudes the fundamental elements of Eno's Another Green World: electronic sounds become the true voice of the songs; the "sound" prevails on the melody; the composition becomes an abstraction; austere studio investigation replaces rock edonism. Even Bowie's vocals come to resemble Eno's emphatic vocals.
Low is still a transitional work, a continuation of the experiments of The Idiot. The best tracks are less "songs" than "mood pieces": the instrumental Speed Of Life (that sequences the riff of Jean Genie while loading it with orchestral colors), the mostly instrumental Sound And Vision, the surreal blues instrumental A New Career In A New Town. Rhythmic experiments abound, from the syncopated Breaking Glass to the bombastic and polyrhythmic What In The World. Always Crashing In The Same Car is the lounge ballad that shows the distance between Bowie's original soul and the Eno-retooled soul: there is little left of Bowie's sentimental pathos, replaced by a plain, almost robotic languor.
The last four pieces (either instrumental or mostly instrumental) display a stronger Eno influence and de facto constitute a separate entity. Warszawa, the epic and funeral zenith of the album, sounds like a neoclassical sonata until the ethnic/shamanic overtones become explicit. While retaining the same tragic atmosphere, Art Decade introduced an almost ironic electronic underbelly in line with Eno's dadaism. The hypnotic gamelan ballet Weeping Wall and another melancholy neoclassical excursion, Subterraneans (with mournful humming and jazzy saxophone phrases), closed the cycle on a somber note.
The chameleo quality of Bowie's art had found its alter-ego in Eno's ungrammatical and psychotic expressionism.

Robert Fripp's contribution turned Heroes into a continuation of sorts of the two collaborations released by Eno & Fripp in the 1970s. The overture, the bombastic and subtly atonal Beauty And The Beast, resurrects the Afro-funk-hard rock of Stay with a denser arrangement and stronger pulsation. The intensity remains high through Joe The Lion, another slab of neurosis planted on the usual variation of the Jean Genie riff, and Blackout, a limping cacophonic boogie that sounds more like the Rolling Stones than Bowie's earlier ego. The album's emotional centerpiece, Heroes, adopts both the martial beat and the solemn desolation of the Velvet Underground, and then sends it into orbit via Eno's electronic spleen and Bowie's pathetic shout.
Just like Low, Heroes too turns into a different beast towards the (mostly instrumental) end. Besids V2 Schneider, a modest tribute to Kraftwerk's disco music, Moss Garden, a pastoral duet for koto and sound effects, the apocalyptic ending is signaled by the abstract poem Sense Of Doubt, an instrumental that sends piano shivers down the electronic spine of the universe, and fulfilled Neukoln, a six-minute expressionist nightmare that weds post-industrial alienation and zen contemplation via electronic clusters, melancholy sax phrases and funereal organ drones. Bowie fared a lot better with no rhythms and no vocals. Heroes was, de facto, an appendix to Eno's Before And After Science.

Perhaps more important (certainly more original) were the videos that Bowie imagined, and that David Mallet directed: Boys Keep Swinging (1979) and Ashes To Ashes (1980).

Lodger (1978), commonly associated with the two previous albums in the “Berlin Trilogy,” is in reality a completely different record—a return by Bowie to the song. In short, Bowie resumed his pursuit of trends, moving from the baroque pop of Boys Keep Swinging and DJ to the alienated, self-parodic rock of Ashes To Ashes and Fashion, the cornerstones of Scary Monsters (1980), from the metaphysical disco of Let’s Dance, one of the hits from the album produced by disco master Nile Rodgers, Let’s Dance (EMI, 1983), to the tribal psychedelia of Blue Jean, the highlight of Tonight (1984). These were albums of embarrassingly mediocre quality for a star of his stature, but Bowie had at least managed to keep public attention alive. As he sang in Fame: “what you need you have to borrow.”

This continuous stylistic seesaw, however, ended up alienating his audience. A pathetic figure of an aging clown still desperately seeking fame, Bowie became more famous for his social life, a staple of the intellectual circles of the international jet set. Never Let Me Down (1987) seemed to mark the end of his career: beyond the usual patchwork of genres appropriated in a decidedly amateurish manner, it no longer retained the “appeal” of his murky atmospheres (Glass Spider is practically a children’s joke).

A colorful hybrid of kitsch cabaret and avant-garde art, of Bohemianism and Swinging London, egocentric narcissist and apocalyptic prophet, futuristic and nostalgic, fatuous and epic, vain aristocrat and vulgar clown, Bowie celebrates the crisis of civilization within crisis; he is an imaginary projection of alienation and disorientation, of the frustrations and complexes of contemporary man; he is a mass fantasy, a collective chimera, a myth from the Greek pantheon transplanted into the age of mass media. It is no coincidence that the myth he always drew upon is the Homeric myth of the eternal traveler torn between the desire to discover new worlds and the anguish of distance.

His art is based on suggestion, both visual and verbal, on the implicit allegories of his gestures, on the play of contrasts, and on continuous transformation. A central document of his era, Bowie manipulates the subversiveness inherent in rock to turn it into a form of total spectacle (see the colossal Glass Spider Tour of 1987, with a stage costing fifteen billion and a staff of 150 people). His theater of provocation actually represents the pathetic sunset of an era of illusions. As another famous lyric puts it: “Fame: what you get is no tomorrow.”

Bowie formed a classic rock quartet, Tin Machine, who released two albums I (1989) and II (1991), featuring the rhythm section of the Stooges, but the conversion to arena-style rock yielded little beyond Baby Can Dance. Bowie’s artistic career had hit rock bottom.

Black Tie White Noise (1993), again produced by Nile Rodgers, demonstrated at least that Bowie had not lost the desire to constantly change style. Having abandoned hard rock, Bowie returned to the world of the disco, but in a drastically different style from Let’s Dance. This time it was acid-jazz, best expressed in the instrumentals The Wedding and Looking for Lester (a trio with Lester Bowie on trumpet, Mike Garson on piano, and David Bowie himself on saxophone). The hit, Jump They Say, was smarter than the average Bowie hit, and indeed sold poorly. The album in fact marked an artistic revival.

The soundtrack for Buddha Of Suburbia (Nov 1993) did even better, remaining his most erudite essay on “dance music.” It is also the only album in which Bowie did not chase a hit single at all costs. The instrumentals may be the best of his career: South Horizon, The Mysteries (seven minutes), Ian Fish U.K. Heir (six minutes). At the same time, the mysterious Buddha Of Suburbia, the neurotic Sex And The Church, and the surreal Strangers When We Meet brush the heights of the songs from Heroes. David Bowie plays synthesizers, guitar, and saxophones, while Erdal Kizilcay plays keyboards, trumpet, bass, guitar, and percussion, and Mike Garson plays piano. It is the lowest-selling album of Bowie’s career (reaching only 87th place on the UK charts). Perhaps Bowie had truly become a consummate musician, but almost no one noticed.

Bowie was also active in film and theater, and perhaps those experiences helped him mature. At the same time, having abandoned the many “masks” of his art-fiction, Bowie could finally focus on the music.

Continuing on the path of renewal, Bowie recorded “his” electronica album, the new trend of the moment: Outside (Virgin, 1995), his first collaboration with Brian Eno since the Berlin period, a concept album devoted to a gallery of characters from the American provinces, and an experiment in composition based on John Cage’s “chance” and William Burroughs’ cut-up technique. Dense layers of sound, spectacular dynamics, and his usual fatalistic mood and decadent theatricality propel audacious fusions of hard rock, techno, and ambient (We Prick You, I Am Deranged), as well as ballads that have emptied the traditional ballad form (The Heart’s Filthy Lesson, The Motel). The post-rock chamber music of A Small Plot of Land contrasts with the overwhelming industrial music of Hallo Spaceboy and Voyeur of Utter Destruction, excellent imitations of Nine Inch Nails. Above all, the album is a work on “sound,” in which Bowie has never in his career layered, incorporated, and blended so many elements. Bowie may have been out of fashion, but in reality, as many words have been spent on the Berlin Trilogy, the same could very well be said of this album.

Surprises continued with Earthling (Virgin, Jan 1997), another meticulously crafted and overflowing-with-inspiration album, increasingly unusual for a figure who in the 1970s had survived on a few clumsy ideas stretched to exhaustion. The revitalizing factor is mainly the use of drum’n’bass production, underlying the sophisticated and complex arrangements of Little Wonder, Battle for Britain, and Telling Lies. While I’m Afraid of Americans tends to replicate his old show, the acid psychodrama of Looking for Satellites presents a far more mature artist. On the border between rhythm and blues, B-movie soundtracks, and industrial music, Seven Years in Tibet is the first track to revive the chills of Warszawa and represents one of the peaks of his career (still worthy of NIN). The aggressive KMDFM-style disco of Dead Man Walking crowns the sonic achievement. This is simply the same Bowie of Ziggy Stardust, with the same melodies, simply re-orchestrated for a new generation. But orchestration makes all the difference: Ziggy’s was pompous, dull, retro; in short, all surface. Earthling’s is lean and cubist, entirely underground and psychological. Bowie’s resurrection is nothing short of miraculous.

Hours (Virgin, 1999) marks a return to melodic songcraft, and although Thursday’s Child and The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell are well-crafted, there remains the regret that Bowie did not have the courage to continue the progress of the previous three albums. This is instead a return to Black Tie, without even the mitigating factor of a cohesive sound. Yet even here, alas, Bowie continues to reflect the prevailing trends of the moment: the general retreat of alternative rock and the revival of pop.

All Saints (Virgin, 2001) collects his instrumental works.

Heathen (Columbia, 2002), which marks the return of Tony Visconti, seems more like an excuse to present some covers he had in the drawer. Slow Burn and the other originals are ridiculous. Bowie had returned to being Bowie.

Skilled at riding trends but not at creating them, with the typical sensibility of a vaudeville showman, Bowie always arrived one or two years after someone else had invented the phenomenon (decadent rock, soul-rock, electronica). But, like the Beatles before him, Bowie knew how to spread the phenomenon to the masses of the middle-class and turn it into an international “fashion.” More a popular icon than a musician, Bowie probably did not write many songs worth remembering in the annals of rock music, but he popularized the figure of the eclectic and refined musician.

References to pop art, literature, or painting (which critics trace by scrutinizing minute details of this epigone’s career) could be made for a thousand other rock musicians (who perhaps explored those themes in a more in-depth and original way). That such references are made for Bowie does not mean he is great, but simply that those making them are unaware of others who did the same things before or better than Bowie: Bowie did not write the first “space ballad,” he wrote the first to be heavily publicized by the media (Spaceman and CTA 102 by the Byrds, who had invented space-rock a few years earlier, or 2000 Light Years by the Rolling Stones, to cite a contemporary example, and without even mentioning the inventors of space-rock, the Pink Floyd of Interstellar Overdrive, AD 1967). Bowie did not invent glam (at minimum Marc Bolan, but also Mick Jagger who wore makeup, Screaming Lord Sutch, John Twink, and even Genesis had done it before him), nor decadent rock (the Velvet Underground, the Doors, and a hundred others preceded him); he was simply the glam-rocker most publicized by the media. Sexual ambiguity had already been handled by Jagger, with far more disturbing effects for the masses, and the Fugs had used obscenity in music even earlier. His “experiments” naturally elicit a smile if one thinks of the experiments others had done from 1967 until he noticed them. And so on.
As often happens with pop stars, Bowie is credited with the achievements of an entire population of musicians, of which he is the “character” for the tabloids and the spokesperson in jet-set salons. As it often happens, rock stars are credited with achievements that actually belong to the musicians they were inspired by.

Reality (Columbia, 2003) is another terrible collaboration with Visconti. There is one song (New Killer Star) that could have fit on any of his previous albums (but would have been considered filler on most albums by other artists). Bowie used to be "style" for the sake of style, and he was briefly a real musician (no, not the collaborations with Brian Eno, but the mid 1990s). Now he seems after the ultimate definition of bad taste, while revealing what an incompetent musician he is. One of the most over-rated artists of his generation, David Bowie could have spared himself the embarrassing prophecy of "Never Get Old": as a matter of fact, he was born old.

The Next Day (ISO, 2013), Bowie's first album for a decade, produced again by Tony Visconti, boasts some classic operatic Bowie in The Stars and You Feel So Lonely You Could Die (which ends quoting Five Years); and Valentine's Day is basically a poppier version of All the Young Dudes; but Bowie surprises by impersonating ghosts of the past, starting with the Lou Reed-ian boogie The Next Day, which Bowie shouts like a parodistic musichall-disco anthem a` la We Are Family (Sister Sledge's disco-era hit). The hauting Love Is Lost evokes John Cale and Joy Division (but without enough dramatic power to stand up to those giants). The ranting sociopolitical bard of I'd Rather Be High falls somewhere between Bob Dylan and R.E.M.. The stomping hard-rock of Set the World on Fire is reminiscent of Rainbow's Since You Been Gone. These are actually entertaining moments, as if the aging rock star wanted to provide his own post-modernist critical commentary on the art he belongs to. Alas, most of the songs are unlistenable, beyond disposable. Very few people would have listened to this album if it had been done by a lesser known singer-songwriter; let alone reviewed it. It is especially Visconti who disappoints. Bowie's sound was largely Visconti's (or Eno's). Without that sound, Bowie remains a second-rate vocalist singing second-rate pop for a second-rate audience.

Nothing Has Changed (2014) is a career retrospective.

As usual with Bowie, Blackstar (RCA, 2016), produced again by Tony Visconti,, is mostly image and very little about the music. The ten-minute Blackstar, that was supposed to be the centerpiece, is little more than a funereal litany a` la Doors with jazz horns that goes on five minutes too many. Bowie crooning melodramatic in Lazarus (from his Broadway musical about an alien who falls in love) or romantic in Dollar Days is either delirious and pathetic, certainly not entertaining. His tedious voice interferes with the driving jazz jam of 'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore and with the frenzied and tense Sue (a 2014 single). Even when the voice is not a distraction, the rest is hardly intriguing: I Can't Give Everything Away boasts an awful distorted guitar against syncopated beats and layers of electronic drones: not exactly genius. This is trivial "music" that any amateur could make, except that most amateurs would be ashamed to release it.

Bowie died of cancer in january 2016.