They know God exists for the Devil told them so
David Bowie sees desecration everywhere. No wonder he's angry
Of all the albums we have explored so far, The Next Day may be the hardest to write about. This is not because it’s a particularly weird record, or because its sound is indescribable, or because its lyrics defy analysis. Far from it, in fact. It’s more because of the nature of writing, which is typically linear and goes one word at a time. The Next Day typically does about a dozen things at once, hurtling in all directions, spraying out constellations of references; a song might begin with an allusion to one point in Bowie’s career and end with a quote from another; it spins a web that is unique in that it has many layers, like floors of a building.
Its Wikipedia entry is perfectly serviceable. This is how it begins:
The Next Day is the 25th studio album by the English musician David Bowie. Released in March 2013, it was Bowie's first studio release in ten years, as he had retreated from public view after undergoing a procedure to treat a blocked heart artery in 2004. Co-produced by Bowie and Tony Visconti, the album was recorded in New York City between May 2011 and October 2012. It featured contributions from session musicians, some of whom he had worked with in the past, including Gerry Leonard, Earl Slick, Gail Ann Dorsey, Steve Elson, Sterling Campbell and Zachary Alford. Recording took place in secret; all personnel involved signed non-disclosure agreements.
This is accurate, as is its description of The Next Day as “primarily an art rock album” with lyrics that “draw from his reading of English and Russian history and examine themes of tyranny and violence”. Fair enough; there you go. Fourteen songs, 53 minutes or so.
Except the experience of listening to it goes more like this:
[Presses play]
This sounds like Repetition/these are actually the chords from Repetition/he’s basically singing one note, this is like Repetition/but he’s doing it with a lot more anger and these two people genuinely love each other/blimey, we’re suddenly in some kind of brutal Medieval world/he’s just sung ‘listen’ like he did on Breaking Glass/it’s all getting a bit crankily intense like something from Scary Monsters/he’s singing about corrupt priests, this is about his fear of organised religion again/he’s singing “Here I am, not quite dying” which sounds like it might actually be responding to that Flaming Lips song/he sounded just like Lou Reed there/
And so on. Each reference brings its own colour and texture and reference points. Just look at the first: Repetition and The Next Day share a violent pounding relentlessness, one claustrophobically domestic, the other frigidly wild; the effect of both is like a boot stamping on a human face— forever, as George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which inspired Bowie to write a musical which became the album Diamond Dogs, and hang on, the first video released for a song from this album features a diamond and a dog. And so on.
All this is overlaid, underlaid, interwoven with Bowie’s own words about the song. He had long given up giving interviews; the last time he spoke properly about his music was 2004. But he did provide a list of 42 words about The Next Day to the novelist Rick Moody, who wrote The Ice Storm, which became a film to which Bowie contributed a song. It soon became apparent that each song on the album was represented in sequence by three words on the list. So the three words for the title track, which opens the album, are:
Effigies
Indulgences
Anarchist
So we have a word that seemingly refers to the “paper sculptures” being made of the “whores” in the song; a word seemingly referring to one of the more corrupting practices of the Medieval Catholic church; and a word that may describe the man whose body has been “left to rot in a hollow tree” as punishment. But there could be more to it than that.
And of course, anyone who had already devoted this much attention to the album will have noticed its cover. It is the same as the cover of “Heroes”, only with a white square slapped on the front and back, giving space for the new album title and track listing, and with the original words crossed out. In itself, it is a striking act, a kind of auto-iconoclasm in which the outline of the icon survives. But a whole load of other associations spin off it too: the white paint daubed over classical art in the packaging for Heathen, which also has words struck through; the manner in which the covers of Low, “Heroes” and Lodger are depicted on the sleeve artwork for Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). And so on.
Then there are songs on the album that refer directly not only to songs by Bowie, but to songs by other artists. Then there are songs on the album that refer to other songs on the album. Then there are songs on the album that refer to songs that were seemingly recorded for the album but do not appear on the album.
Then there is Emma Lazarus and her poem inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and there is a musical Bowie wanted to write.
Tony Visconti described the songs on The Next Day as “engraved”. They go deep, sure enough. And there, in the substance chiselled from the stone: the sacred.
The album was going to be called Love is Lost. As a title, it is perhaps less helpful commercially than The Next Day, which suggests a fresh start, a new chapter, for an artist who many thought had sung his last. The artwork reflects this, too; it is all quite bracing. But Love is Lost is a far more satisfying title artistically, for the album depicts time and again the horrors that ensue from love’s absence. It therefore stands as an oblique celebration of love, a force that inspired in Bowie a deep sense of awe and was essential to his metaphysical beliefs.
The exception that proves the rule is Where Are We Now?, which stands apart from every other song on the album in that it shows us love unabashed in all its transcendent glory. But that song, simple as it sounds, is again replete with ghosts and echoes and foreshadowings. ‘Where are we now?’ happen to be the first words that appear on the screen in the film Moon, which was released in 2009 and is a work of existential science fiction, set in space, exploring ideas of identity and doppelgangers, directed by Bowie’s son; one of Bowie’s final videos would also allude to it. The video for Where Are We Now? has Bowie wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the phrase Song of Norway, long associated in Bowie’s mind with his heartbreak at being left by his first real love, Hermione Farthingale.
But there is something particularly telling in the music itself. It evokes Robert Wyatt’s version of the Elvis Costello song Shipbuilding, one of Bowie’s favourite recordings; even Bowie’s vocal, uncharacteristically fragile, sounds like Wyatt’s. The song concerns the Falklands War and its effect on life in Britain’s decaying shipyard communities. The war brings work, but it also brings fear among the families whose sons may be killed in the conflict. And here we have the beauty and joy and hope of youth, destroyed:
With all the will in the world
Diving for dear life
When we could be diving for pearls
Which takes us, via the album’s network of mycelium, to I’d Rather Be High, about a young soldier:
I'd rather be high
I'd rather be flying
I'd rather be dead or out of my head
Than training these guns on those men in the sand
This in turn brings to mind Bowie’s various songs about reluctant servicemen, whose penchant for independent thinking puts them at odds with their superiors. From Bombers, recorded in 1971:
Die, said the General
Cobblers, said the man
From I’d Rather Be High:
I flew to Cairo, find my regiment
City's full of generals
And generals full of shit
And Running Gun Blues, a perky-sounding song from 1970 about the brutalising effect of a violent culture upon a young man:
It seems the peacefuls stopped the war
Left generals squashed and stifled
But I'll slip out again tonight
'Cause they haven't taken back my rifle
For I promote oblivion
And I'll plug a few civilians
I'll slash them cold, I'll kill them dead
I'll break them gooks, I'll crack their heads
I'll slice them till they're running red
Which takes us back a couple of songs on The Next Day to Valentine’s Day (Bowie’s three words: Isolation, Revenge, Osmosis) about a boy who embarks on a shooting spree:
It's in his tiny face
It's in his scrawny hand
Valentine sold his soul
He's got something to say
It's Valentine's day
The rhythm of the crowd
Teddy and Judy down
Valentine sees it all
He's got something to say
It's Valentine's day
Valentine told me how he feels
If all the world were under his heels
Or stumbling through the mall
But the music here is a clear reference to the Kinks song Waterloo Sunset (Bowie once covered it himself). It tells of innocent love between a Terry and a Julie. Bowie again shows us what might be, but what is not, and the effect is quite devastating. (And another association: Valentine is the name of the protagonist of Stranger in a Strange Land, a novel about an alien who comes to live on Earth, in the USA; it was announced in 1973 that Bowie was to play Valentine in a film adaptation. It never materialised.)
We can spin off in other directions from I’d Rather Be High. We can explore its numerous literary references, including a likely allusion, via Clare and Lady Manners, to Evelyn Waugh, whose Vile Bodies influenced Aladdin Sane and sets youthful love and spiritedness against the brutality of war, culminating in a party in a Rolls-Royce on a battlefield. We can jump forward a few songs to How Does the Grass Grow?, where war once again obliterates hope:
How does the grass grow
Blood blood blood
Where do the boys lie
Mud mud mud
Somewhere here may be the story of his grandfather, Robert Haywood Jones, a private who was killed on the last day of the Battle of the Somme. The song repeatedly quotes Apache, a galloping instrumental by the Shadows, inspired by a Western. It ends with a lengthy quote from one of Bowie’s own songs, Boys Keep Swinging, a tongue-in-cheek celebration of youthful masculine vitality.
Then a flashback to a more shadowy song about youthful masculine vitality near the start of the album. The track is called Dirty Boys and reflects Bowie’s enduring fascination with stylised, stylish gang violence. He was a fan of Peaky Blinders; he modelled the look of the Spiders from Mars on the Droogs from A Clockwork Orange; the Mods to which he claimed affiliation blended suavity and savagery. It’s encapsulated in a line from the song:
I will buy a feather hat
I will steal a cricket bat
Smash some windows, make a noise
We will run with dirty boys
And so from the twisted familial embrace of the group to the pain of utter isolation and You Feel So Lonely You Could Die. But this is not a song of sympathy; on the contrary, such a horrifying fate is one the narrator wishes upon the subject. Some undescribed act of vileness has been perpetrated:
Some night on the thriller's street
Will come the silent gun
There'll come assassin's needle
On a crowded train
I bet you'll feel so lonely
You could die
Again, the song points beyond itself: to Heartbreak Hotel, whose first verse ends “I'll be so lonely, I could die,” and whose every subsequent verse ends with a variation of those words.
At its heart, the idea that a life without love is the worst end imaginable:
Oblivion shall own you
Death alone shall love you
I hope you feel so lonely
You could die
These enraged songs speak of the annihilation that comes upon a man when love is lost. But when the victim is a woman — well, that may be even worse.
Some of the songs on The Next Day seem a little aimless and pointless. Foremost among them is Boss of Me. Taken on its own terms, it’s probably the worst song Bowie recorded this century. Its chorus is singularly unprepossessing:
Who'd have ever thought of it
Who'd have ever dreamed
That a small town girl like you
Would be the boss of me
We might hope that Bowie would be above this kind of casually belittling sexism. He sings it over and over again, every me sounding uglier than the last.
There’s some weird stuff about flying in the night, and her crying. But it’s crowded out by this all “boss of meEEEeegh” stuff.
Still, we all know Bowie could be bad, and the album has been good so far, so we can let him off this one. Although Bowie’s three words for this are
Displaced
Flight
Resettlement
Hmm.
There is another song which isn’t very good. Its verse is promising but the chorus is all bland stadium-strutting man-rock. It is called You Will Set the World on Fire and it is set in a music club in Greenwich Village in New York. From the names mentioned - Baez, Kennedy, Van Ronk - we know it’s the 1960s, and a young female talent has impressed the song’s narrator. He promises stardom:
I can work the scene, babe,
I can see the magazines
I can hear the nation
I can hear the nation cry
You will set the world babe
You will set the world on fire
We don’t actually hear from her in the song. All we know is that, in the opinion of the narrator, she says too much. He tells her this twice.
Anyway, a generally inoffensive but inconsequential number. On we go. Bowie’s three words for this, though:
Manipulate
Origin
Text
The original version of The Next Day came with three songs stuck to the end. Just bonus tracks. Bowie didn’t even give us three words for them. One is called I’ll Take You There. It’s got another bland and uninspired chorus. The words go:
What will be my name
In the USA?
Hold my hand and
I'll take you there
Who will I become
In the USA?
Hold my hand and
I'll take you there
And there’s another song that didn’t make the album but which was released initially as a bonus track in Japan and later on an expanded version of The Next Day. It’s a decidedly catchy and upbeat number called God Bless the Girl. You can find yourself singing along; it’s bouncy and joyous and infectious and might have been a hit, you know.
Jacqui loves her work, and her work is love
For there is no other
She says "God has given me a job"
Jacqui loves her work
There is no other
Except, hang on:
Sitting in her corner too afraid to run away
Like a slave without chains
The wonder turns to danger, spring turns to winter
God Bless the Girl
But I will treasure, treasure every single moment
God Bless the Girl
Fire turns to water, light becomes darkness
God Bless the Girl
And I don't wanna hurt you, just wanna have some fun
God Bless the Girl
Maybe Jacqui’s work is not love, at least not in a healthy, life-giving sense. Maybe one of the narrative voices here is indifferent to her suffering.
I don't wanna hurt you, just wanna have some fun
Maybe something is very wrong here.
And suddenly, those forgettable and somewhat off-sounding songs start to make a kind of sense. Something significant is happening.
These are songs of women being patronised, denigrated, manipulated, trafficked, exploited, terrorised by men who claim to care for them; they exist in a climate of fear; they are promised a new life, but it’s a living death.
Which brings us to the album’s rightful title track.
Hostage
Transference
Identity
Bowie’s three words for Love is Lost. Hostage describes the young woman’s situation. Identity is a constant theme: her voice is new, her accent is new, even her eyes are new. Transference however is where the emotional devastation has been wrought. It is a term from Freudian psychoanalysis, describing the phenomenon whereby someone effectively superimposes a memory of a particular person onto a different person. It is more profound and potentially dangerous than someone merely reminding you of someone else; it is more like a form of mistaken identity.
The lyrics suggest a deep tragedy, and an abominable betrayal of the woman:
Say goodbye to the thrills of life
Where love was good, no love was bad
Wave goodbye to the life without pain
The music is harsh, ruthless, unyielding.
And the man from God Bless the Girl returns, singing a melody that promises freedom but brings incarceration:
Say hello
You're a beautiful girl
Terrifying voices, from the outside, from the inside, blaming her for all this: What have you done?
Love has been twisted into a weapon. Love has become a means of cruelty. Love has been desecrated.
This is what happens when love is lost.
This album being what it is, Love is Lost again directs the listener here and there. Its most distinctive sonic element is the effect applied to a drum; it is the sound pioneered on Low. The first side of Low has three songs where there are women and confined spaces: the woman in whose room the singer has been breaking glass; the woman who is so deep in her room, who never leaves her room; the woman in the car peeping as the driver puts his foot down to the floor on a manic drive round and round a car park. The chorus of eerie voices, sounding like psychic disintegration, has been summoned various times, perhaps most potently at the end of The Bewlay Brothers. The first line - It's the darkest hour, you're twenty two - may put one in mind of Bowie at that age, disconsolate at the loss of his love with Hermione.
Love is Lost, and the songs to which it is surely related on this album and on its fringes, also resurrects one of Bowie’s more disturbing tropes: the suffering of certain women and girls at the hands of men. It goes back all the way to his first album and one of his strangest songs, Please Mr Gravedigger:
Mary-Ann was only ten, full of life and oh so gay
And I was the wicked man who took her life away
There is the woman abused by her partner in Repetition; there is the woman colonised by her lover in China Girl; there is Julie, who it seems has been shot by a man out of jealousy; there is the woman accused of “pushing for a fight” in Too Dizzy, a song Bowie all but disowned; there is Baby Grace Blue, the teenage girl drugged and killed on 1. Outside. There will be more disturbing examples in the few years remaining.
Male violence against women and girls, often in the context of purported love, is a frequent source of horror in Bowie’s writing. But it feels different on The Next Day. There had been times when it seemed to be employed to construct a story, to conjure a mood; made into an instrument in order to achieve a particular artistic end. Here, the point is the act itself. It is the difference between a woman being killed in order to start a detective story, and a story about a woman in which the woman is killed.
We can speculate as to why this theme is so prevalent on The Next Day. Bowie’s daughter Alexandria was growing up into the world, and it would be natural for this to make her father more alert to the dangers facing girls and women.
And we are back to You Feel So Lonely You Could Die. Bowie’s three words:
Traitor
Urban
Comeuppance
The lyrics:
Love is thrown in airless rooms
Then vile rewards for you
You've got a dangerous heart
You stole their trust, their moon, their sun
What if the subject here is the trafficker, the abuser, the exploiter whom we have previously encountered? What if this is the man upon whom Bowie wishes a grisly and dismal end? It may sounds strange to associate Bowie, the thoughtful and sensitive artist, with a desire for violent vengeance against an evildoer; but consider his words from the song Crack City:
And you the master dealer
May death be on your brow
May razors slash your mainline
I'm calling you out right now
May all your vilest nightmares
Consume your shrunken head
May the ho-ho-hounds of paranoia
Dance upon your stinking bed
From You Feel So Lonely You Could Die:
I can see you as a corpse
Hanging from a beam
I can read you like a book
I can feel you falling
I hear you moaning in your room
Oh see if I care
Oh please, please make it soon
Musically, the song refers to Bowie’s own Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide, whose distinctive guitar line the song quotes, and to Bowie’s own Five Years, whose distinctive drum beat is repeated at the song’s end. The songs were respectively the last and the first tracks on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. You Feel So Lonely You Could Die is not the last song on the album, but it represents the end of a cycle.
Something else was going on too: Bowie had begun working on a musical, and he wanted it to be about the alien in the most fundamental sense, the idea of beings from elsewhere, and their resettlement and identity, and he wanted it to allude in some way to Emma Lazarus, whose words have welcomed generations of the hopeful to the USA:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
So, there is a lot happening on The Next Day. A lot.
All this, and we haven’t really mentioned God. At least, not by that name.
There’s the song The Next Day, and its depiction of debased religion, its “purple-headed priest”; there is its video, which is a parade of Catholic and broader Christian imagery presented in a vaguely satirical manner. The video is a little tiresome, and drew a predictably tiresome response from a former Archbishop of Canterbury. Worse still, it chops up the song and saps its power. It tells us nothing new about Bowie and organised religion; we know he didn’t like it.
Yet there is a subtle dimension to the song that is easily overlooked. The shocking sights of a man being chased, whipped, hauled, dragged, of his body being left to rot in a hollow tree; these are what tend to lodge in the mind. But the song starts with a small scene of great tenderness:
Look into my eyes he tells her
I'm gonna say goodbye he says yeah
Do not cry she begs of him goodbye yeah
All that day she thinks of his love yeah
Immediately, there is violence apparently inspired by religion: another way in which love is lost, at least as sinful as any other.
There’s the song If You Can See Me, a disorientating, unstable, unpleasant-sounding creation. It is a return to one of Bowie’s oldest fears, the Tyrannical Messiah:
I have seen these bairns wave their fists at God
Swear to destroy the beasts, stamping the ground
In their excitement for tomorrow
I will take your lands and all that lays beneath
The dust of cold flowers, prison of dark of ashes
I will slaughter your kind who descend from belief
I am the spirit of greed, a lord of theft
I'll burn all your books and the problems they make
If you can see me I can see you
Bowie’s three words: Crusade, Tyrant, Domination.
Another song uses the gods of antiquity and the spirits of folklore to explore the phenomenon of celebrity. It is called The Stars are Out Tonight:
Waiting for the first move
Satyrs and their child wives
Waiting for the last move
Soaking up our primitive world
Stars are never sleeping
Dead ones and the living
Bowie’s three words: Vampyric, Pantheon, Succubus.
But we have seen throughout this series that Bowie’s work can be intensely spiritual without talking in direct and conventional terms of God. This album may be the most potent example.
There are not many love songs by David Bowie. Few were his straightforward odes of romantic adoration; it is hard to imagine any song by David Bowie being confused with a song by Chris de Burgh.
But some of Bowie’s most significant works were love songs. It’s just that the object of this love was love itself. “Heroes” is one, as is Let’s Dance, as is Where Are We Now?. They celebrate love as a transcendent force, in terms similar to Christian theology and doubtless other faith traditions: this is love at least as strong as death, passion at least as fierce as the grave, love that casts out fear, a force that compels us and can change the world.
The song Under Pressure ends with something of a treatise on the topic. Having lamented that love has become “so slashed and torn”, he sings:
Love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Soul Love, written a decade earlier, also describes love as a kind of spirit or entity, albeit one of fearsome power:
Soul love, the priest that tastes the word and
Told of love, and how my God on high is
All love, though reaching up my loneliness evolves
By the blindness that surrounds him
Love is careless in its choosing
Love descends on those defenceless
Bowie seemed wary of romantic love after Hermione left him. “I shelter from it incredibly,” he said in 1979. Only after meeting Iman did he appear comfortable with it. In Soul Love, he distinguishes between love as act and love as force:
All I have is my love of love
And love is not loving
Soul Love has an affinity with The Mirror of Simple Souls, which was written by the Christian mystic Marguerite Porete at the turn of the 14th century. It explores the relationship between human love and divine love; here are its most startling words:
I am God, says Love
As an album, The Next Day is essentially an affirmation of love; but, this being Bowie, the affirmation comes via negation. It could be called Bowie’s own work of apophatic theology, which asserts that language is inadequate to describe what God is, and that God must therefore be understood by speaking of what God is not.
It is akin in some way to a line yelled by Bowie in The Next Day:
They know God exists for the Devil told them so
The sacrilegious presupposes the sacred.
The Next Day did pretty well. It topped charts in numerous countries and became a platinum-selling record in the UK, where it was also nominated for the Mercury Prize. In the US, it was nominated for two Grammy awards.
Its reviews were typically of the four-star, 8/10 kind. It is frustrating to listen to: it sags between the sixth song and the thirteenth. It is hard on the ears: pretty much everything is loud, as if the music is being forced at you through a narrow tube; the sound typically lacks subtlety and suppleness; the playing is often stiff and lacking in playfulness, spontaneity or inspiration. It has been overshadowed almost entirely by what came next.
Yet there is no other album quite like it. That can be said about pretty much every Bowie album, but there is something especially studied and intentional here. This is not one of those records of his that harnesses chaos, or results from a bunch of experiments, or captures a moment of spiritual desperation or creates new musical worlds or anything of the sort. Nor is it in any sense a pandering record, a crowd-pleaser. No, it is superficially quite simple and straightforward, seemingly somewhat scattergun, while being almost endlessly dense and complex and not far off a concept album. It is an album on which Bowie is the paint and the brush, the marble and the chisel. It might be as close as he came to taking what went on in his head and putting it on a record.
Which perhaps shows where he was now, because he was about to take what went on in his head and put it on a stage.
If you enjoyed reading this, I’d be really grateful if you would please share it with others by clicking the button below. Thank you.
Next on Bowie/God:
David Bowie puts his dreams to work, and takes flight
I'd love to have a conversation with you one day. Did you ever read "confronting Bowie's mysterious corpses?".