six songs related to Rip It Up and Start Again

originally written for Largehearted Boy website, 2006

1/ Sex Pistols, “Bodies” (Never Mind the Bollocks, 1977)

Well, without punk, there’d be no postpunk, right? And it was the Sex Pistols (specifically this song and “Anarchy in the UK”) that first snagged me off whatever path I was on aged fourteen and into the world of taking-music-too-seriously. Mainly, because I’d never heard anything that sounded so deadly serious before. Not so much anti-abortion as a protest against life, “Bodies” is a song that reminds you that a big part of punk’s appeal was its pure wanton evil--destruction for destruction’s sake. Almost orchestral in its grandeur (those huge backing vocal chants), “Bodies” sounds appalling and glorious. In Rip It Up and Start Again, part of my rhetorical pitch is challenging punk’s inflated historical status and bigging up “the aftermath”. This involved criticizing punk rock as a backward step, a return to basic rock’n’roll. Which is true for much of it, but the best punk was actually the distillation of rock into something that hadn’t, actually, been heard before. You go back a few years before Buzzcocks and X-Ray Spex, and really there’s nothing that has that monolithic blam-blam-blam-blam feel, even the heaviest metal or hardest-pounding Stooges had more swing to it. Still, there was a sense in which, once punk had staged this reductionist process, it couldn’t be taken anywhere, it could only be repeated with diminishing returns. Hence postpunk’s drive to expand and experiment.

2/ Public Image Ltd, “Death Disco” (single, 1979)

A protest against death: John Lydon singing (although that word seems inaccurate and inadequate for the harrowing noise unleashed here) about watching the light go out in his mother eyes. As much as the sound of the single, which made the Top 20 in Britain, what was life-changing for many, me included, was the matter/anti-matter collision of “death” and “disco” in the title. Disco, subverted by content too heavy and dark for the brightly lit celebration of the dancefloor; “death” (rock’s seriousness, its grappling with “the human condition”) subverted by disco’s hedonism and levity. Ian Dury & The Blockheads--another of my favorites back then--did something similar, albeit in a more accessible and conventionally musical way: “My Old Man” (on New Boots and Panties) was a poignant reminiscence of Dury’s own dead dad over taut funk, while “Dance of the Screamers” (from Do It Yourself) turned disco into primal scream therapy for the interpersonally challenged.

3/ Talking Heads, “Seen and Not Seen” (Remain In Light, 1980)

I got PiL’s Metal Box for Christmas 1979, and Remain In Light for Xmas the following year. I remember spending Christmas morning lying on the carpet in our living room as close to the speakers as I could get, lost in its jungle of glittering texture-rhythm. “Seen and Not Seen,” the least groove-oriented track, is actually my favorite song on the record, though. Although I didn’t realize this at the time, it’s one that bears a really heavy Eno imprint in terms of its near-ambient atmosphere, the way the synths glint and waver like heat-haze rising over a sun-baked highway. It’s similar to the “4th World” music Eno was making around this time with Jon Hassell. I love the lyric--the story of a man who learns how to change his facial appearance by gradual exercise of will, only to realise that he’s made a terrible mistake halfway through the metamorphosis--and the hesitant cadences of Byrne’s spoken delivery. People typically have a fairly limited idea of what postpunk was about--angular, stark, punk-funk, angsty--but there was a whole other side to the music that was ethereal, dreamy-drifty, and gorgeously textured, and “Seen and Not Seen” is an exquisite example. I wanted to get the track for the Rip It Up compilation, which is coming out this spring and showcases the atmospheric, blissy-eerie side of postpunk, but we couldn’t get the rights.

4/ Scritti Politti, “PAs” (from 4 A Sides EP, 1979)

There was just something really mysterious and intriguing about Scritti Politti. Somehow I’d got wind of the idea of them as this fabulously uncompromising outfit skulking in the margins of the UK postpunk scene and operating at some outer limit of politics-in-pop. I guess that was their reputation, their image, their glamour in a way, and it made them both attractive and vaguely intimidating, like a challenge that you ought to put yourself through. And then when I actually heard Scritti for the first time--it would have been “Bibbly-O-Tek,” also from 4 A Sides, on John Peel’s radio show--I was struck both by how unusual it was (the fractured song-structures, the odd chord-changes) but also how instantly beguiling the song was (the sweetness of Green’s voice, the sheer melodic beauty--which came, I realized many years later, from his childhood love of the Beatles). There was a loveliness that I completely had not expected. And when I got 4 A Sides, and the two other early EPs, I gradually became convinced Green was a pop genius. All this was well before he’d made his big turnabout and decided to go “pop” with “The ‘Sweetest Girl’”. I was such a fan that I nearly wrote him a letter telling him that he should just forget all the Scritti ideology about avoiding musical conventions and just go for it, that pop stardom was his destiny. It was “PAs,” this fantastic funk groove with a gorgeously insinuating and serpentile melody, that really sold me on this idea. This would have been the summer of 1980, when Green actually was holed up in a Welsh cottage ruminating over his musical future. But as much as it was great when he did go pop, first with the lover’s rock reggae of “Sweetest Girl” and then with the electrofunk hits like “Wood Beez,” “Absolute” and “Perfect Way”, part of me wishes he stuck with his original band and just kept on making things like “PAs” for ever.

5/ Tenor Saw, “Ring the Alarm”, 1985

I wanted to include something to register the extent to which postpunk depended for its very being on the amazing black music of the late Seventies and early Eighties--funk and disco, reggae and electro. This tune is from just outside the period Rip It Up covers, but, well, I’ve been listening to it a lot this week, and it seems as good an emblem as any for the massive effect Jamaican music had on UK postpunk. I played it yesterday and had one of those moments. It’s a midtempo skank, sweetly sung, but it hit me with the impact of The Stooges; the tension in the rhythm suddenly had this quality of tectonic violence. The line in this song that always slays me, makes my head spin, is “sweet reggae music ‘pon the attack”. If you think about what the song is actually about, it’s grim--the market struggle of sound system against sound system (“ring the alarm, another sound is dying”). It’s pitiless, Hobbesian, and yet there is such exultation in the song, same as in “War in A Babylon” by Max Romeo, another tune I’ve been playing recently.

6/ La Dusseldorf, “Dusseldorf” (La Dusseldorf, 1976)

Not strictly postpunk; indeed this album--the brainchild of Klaus Dinger of Neu!-- was recorded in 1975, making it pre-punk. But I’m including it A/ because I’ve been listening to it incessantly, and B/ David Bowie cited this album, along with Neu 75, as a huge influence on Low, which in turn was a massive LP for the postpunk bands. La Dusseldorf could therefore be seen as the Source in terms of the Neu Europa vibe that swept through so much postpunk, from Simple Minds’ Empires and Dance to The Associates (“White Car in Germany,” etc). There’s this clear-headed atmosphere of nobility and splendor to “Dusseldorf”, panoramic vistas reeling by as you head at speed into a world that’s cleansed and newborn. You get a tiny foretaste too of the glisten and uplift of early U2 and Echo & The Bunnymen, the postpunk breed of bands I call “glory boys” in Rip It Up. In Neu!, Dinger was one of the great rock drummers, he invented the motorik beat, this amazing combination of caveman primitivism and ever-shifting subtlety, a white version of Amiri Baraka’s “changing same.” One of the cool things about La Dusseldorf is that, in what seems like an act of supreme perversity, Dinger handed over the drum kit to his brother Thomas, who then proved to be just as good as Klaus. The latter, meanwhile, took up guitar and almost out-dazzled Neu! guitarist Michael Rother. I think he was trying to prove a point, that he was the real mastermind in Neu! Lyrically, “Dusseldorf” is wonderfully inane, just a chant of the city’s name, a one-word anthem of civic patriotism; sonically it’s 13 minutes of rolling motorik majesty, something I could happily listen to for fives times that length.

Hypnagogic pop and Southern California / James Ferraro interviewed

‘Hypnagogic pop’ and the landscape of Southern California

Frieze, Issue 137 / March 2011

by Simon Reynolds


I’m sitting on the AstroTurf lawn of The Grove, a ‘retroscape’ shopping mall in Los Angeles, listening to 1980s covers band The Copycats deliver immaculate counterfeits of bygone MTV hits. A 19th-century trolley car clanks by, passing the Art Deco movie theatre, and heads towards the Farmer’s Market, a vintage food court with clapboard stalls and hand-painted signs. Wandering over to an ornamental pond, I watch the outsized fish, so shiny they resemble miniature porcelain submarines. As The Copycats launch into ‘Billie Jean’, I suddenly think: this is like living inside a hypnagogic pop song.


Coined by The Wire magazine’s David Keenan in 2009, ‘hypnagogic pop’ is a term for a new generation of American lo-fi musicians who channel the 1980s sounds of mainstream radio rock, New Wave mtv pop, sedative New Age and the peppy synth-driven soundtracks of Hollywood blockbusters. Released as limited-edition cassettes and vinyl but reaching a larger audience through blogs and YouTube videos, hypnagogic pop shimmers with motifs and textures that flash back to the slick hits of artists such as Hall & Oates and Don Henley. The musical and conceptual pioneers of this movement, Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, are both based in LA, as are other rising figures like Sun Araw, LA Vampires and Puro Instinct. Ferraro’s frequent collaborator Spencer Clark lives in another sun-baked Southern California sprawl town, San Diego. Other key hypnagogues such as Matrix Metals and Rangers reside elsewhere but seem SoCal in spirit.


Hypnagogic is the term for a state between being awake and falling asleep, associated by some with hallucinations that are hyper-real rather than surreal. Life in LA – also the title of an Ariel Pink song, as it happens – does lend itself to a kind of ‘wide asleep’ trance, as your gaze falls under the sway of the sheer numbing beauty of the landscape and the weather – the way a certain slant of late afternoon light makes lawns glow eerily. Even the less attractive aspects of this town – strip-mall vistas that seem so desolate in the non-Sun Belt zones of the US – get softened by the bright lit blue skies (another Pink song) and by the peculiar mingling of utterly denatured built-up zones with outright wilderness.


LA is a city where Spectacle (in the Situationist sense) and the Spectacular (in the geological sense) are freakily entwined. As a recently arrived resident, I’m yet to tire of the juxtaposition of, say, an In-N-Out Burger drive-thru against the near-kitsch splendour of the San Gabriel Mountains. ‘Collage reality’ is how Spencer Clark describes the effect, adding that his music is a byproduct of living in ‘a zone that has beaches and mountains and hills as well as skyscrapers […] A lot of my music I see as landscape music.’


Hypnagogic is a 21st-century update of psychedelia. Like its 1960s antecedent, it looks to the West Coast, but its primary focus is LA rather than San Francisco; ’60s anti-urbanism has been supplanted by an ambiguous exaltation of suburbia. Hypnagogic retains the original psychedelia’s fixation on childhood but this lost innocence has been contaminated by pop culture: mtv one-hit wonders and ’80s cartoons replace the Winnie-the-Pooh and Alice in Wonderland references of Jefferson Airplane.

The scrambling of pop time is a culture-wide phenomenon in the West, but it feels unusually strong in LA, where pop radio is dominated by old music: classic rock, New Wave and eclectic stations like Jack fm that mimic a 40-something’s iPod Shuffle. Flicking between stations, there’s a visual analogue to what you hear in the endless interplay of different eras of commercial signage and shop-front décor. In no other city have I had such an overwhelming sense of the erosion of a cultural timecode, that pulse that once synchronized the sectors of the contemporary scene (fashion, design, music, etc.) and constructed a sense of epoch.


Last year James Ferraro posted a YouTube video to promote his albums Wild World (2009) and Feed Me (2010), but which also served as preview of a full-length movie he’s making (Touch Screen Splatter Punks of Digital Tokyo due to be completed in 2013). The excerpt concatenated low-budget horror (Ferraro as decomposing corpse, TV dinners that come alive) with archival snippets of President Reagan and hand-held footage of Hollywood street scenes: leather-booted vamps from the Valley, businesses like Happy Nails and LA Tanning, gossip mags with ‘plastic surgery shockers’ cover stories. By email, Ferraro told me about his future projects, the most striking of which is a ‘live webcam water birth viewable online with interactive chat functions’. The idea was inspired by witnessing ‘a lady give birth in a Starbucks at The Grove in Hollywood, surrounded by smart phones and digital cameras. So you see this reality will always be a part of my work.’


This reality is hyper-reality. In what may be a deliberately ’80s-retro gesture, Ferraro frequently sounds like he’s channelling Jean Baudrillard, talking of wanting to be ‘simulacra’s paintbrush’. Other ’80s totems spring to mind during his patter: David Cronenberg, when Ferraro talks of getting burned out on Hollywood, recharging his batteries in more earth-toned, bohemian zones of LA like Eagle Rock, then ‘jumping back into the movie screen’; Jeff Koons, for the aesthetic of kitsch sublime running through Ferraro’s work and the inscrutable ingenuousness with which Ferraro delivers his lines. He says he moved to LA to become an action movie star, just like his heroes Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone.


Also part of this iconic cluster is J.G. Ballard: Ferraro echoes the late novelist when he talks of movie stars as modern deities embodying qualities that human beings have admired since the dawn of time. High Rise (1975) and Kingdom Come (2006) spring to mind when you read the sleevenote description of ‘Headlines (Access Hollywood)’ from 2010’s album Last American Hero. The song is about people who get trapped in Costco (a bulk-buy, budget-price hypermarket) and devolve into a mutant tribe whose children, ‘born within the settlement’, grow up with ‘no conception of a world beyond’.

Not that you can really derive this from the track, a frayed instrumental that resembles the blues if its foundational figure wasn’t Robert Johnson but Harold Faltermeyer of ‘Axel F’ and Beverly Hills Cop (1984) fame. Elsewhere in Ferraro’s most SoCal-themed releases – Wild World, On Air (2010), and the brand-new Nightdolls with Hairspray (2011) – he explores a sound that draws on ’80s rock at its most artificial: shrill, garish textures like you might at hear in a guitar shop where some Eddie Van Halen wannabe is trying out too many effects pedals at once.


Like a modern-day Devo, Ferraro never lets on whether he’s reviling or revelling in the decadence and grotesquerie of US culture. The cover of Last American Hero is a glossy photograph of a Best Buy store, described in the sleevenotes as ‘the modern Gomorrah temple’. But Ferraro also enthuses about ‘the primal fantasies and fetishes, hedonistic urges, mouth watering narcissism and dreams manifested into plastic surgery in our digital age Whole Foods candy land’.

Shopping malls, celebutainment, cosmetic surgery, a consumer culture orientated around bipolar rhythms of bulimic bingeing and anorexic/aerobic purging – all this really took off in the ’80s. (And was taken to the extreme in California – for Baudrillard, America’s vanguard, a sort of hyper-America.) Perhaps the secret idea buried inside hypnagogic pop is that the ’80s never ended. That we’re still living there, subject to that decade’s endless end of History, killing time as we wait for something (seismic, subaltern) to rupture the dream.

David Bowie circa The Next Day and David Bowie Is @ the V&A

DAVID BOWIE

New York Times, March 6 2013

by Simon Reynolds

On “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”, the new single from David Bowie’s comeback album The Next Day, one line jumps out:  “We will never be rid of these stars.”  The original typed lyric sheet, recently posted on Bowie’s Facebook page, features a hand-scrawled annotation sketching out an idea for the video:  “stars like Greek gods, cruel and controlling”.  The promo turned out slightly differently, although at the start  Bowie, looking and sounding like a doddery old gent, enters a grocery store and catches sight of a celebrity gossip magazine called Pantheon. The singer and actress Tilda Swinton play an elderly couple whose “nice life” is disrupted by a pair of demonic stars, who  stalk and spy on them, then  invade the house and  control them like marionettes.  

 But the song itself is less literal.  “The Stars” portrays celebrities as an overlord class of vampiric and tyrannical beings “soaking up our primitive world,”who “burn you with their radiant smiles”and “trap you with their beautiful eyes.”  But stars are also faintly pitiable creatures, “jealous” of the quiet lives and grounded existence of nonentities.  “I hope they live forever”, Bowie sings, a nod to the notion of fame as immortality, the compensation for its otherwise distorting effects.  Death and fame are closely braided themes shadowing The Next Day, a dark, melancholy and surprisingly harsh-sounding album that’s receiving acclaim as Bowie’s strongest effort in decades.

A superstar critiquing celebrity culture could be taken as somewhat hypocritical, of course. Especially given Bowie’s full-spectrum assault on the public’s attention this year.  For most of the 21^st Century, Bowie had disappeared from view, even as the glam theatricality and gender-bending he pioneered in the 1970s was dominating pop through figures like Lady Gaga. Most assumed that he’d effectively retired, physically exhausted after a life-threatening heart attack and surgery in 2003 and creatively spent after four decades of self-reinvention. But in a brilliantly organized stealth attack, Bowie returned without warning in January with “Where Are We Now”, the herald for The Next Day.  That album, his first in a decade, asserts Bowie’s continued relevance as a musician. 

Meanwhile, his stature in pop history as the performer who has most convincingly bridged the gap between the worlds of art and rock is being shored up by a retrospective at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a celebration of his mastery of all the non-audio aspects of pop, from clothes and stage sets to record artwork and video.

Bowie has always had an ambivalent attitude to fame. His biggest American hit of the Seventies, “Fame” was a harrowing dispatch from inside the paranoid bubble of superstardom. He’s returned to the subject frequently, from his 1999 album Hours, an exploration of “fame as injury” according to  Bowieologist Nick Stevenson,  to his new album’s “(You Will) Set the Earth on Fire,” the sales pitch of a svengali to a potential protégé.  Bowie’s career has been governed by a bi-polar rhythm, alternating between relentless pursuit of the limelight and shattered retreat from it. Now, after his longest period of seclusion ever, the 66 year old Englishman and New York resident is back for what could well be his last blast, the supernova of his stardom.

Yet while Bowie himself has been virtually absent for a decade, the Bowie-esque has been omnipresent.  After the Nineties, a period dominated by the authenticity and “real-ness” of grunge and gangsta rap, the 2000s saw the return of glitz and artifice. All the things that Bowie, alongside fellow glam rockers like Roxy Music and Alice Cooper, explored to the hilt during the early 1970s— over-the-top theatricality and spectacular staging, extremist fashion and sexual androgyny—became the defining principles of 21st Century pop.

Lady Gaga is the most visible inheritor of Bowieism, from her freaky costumes to her gender games (the male alter-ego Jo Calderone, the artfully concocted rumor that she’s a hermaphrodite).  But there have also been figures like Adam Lambert, the American  Idol star, who called his first major tour Glam Nation, and, on a more alternative level,  cult performer Amanda Palmer and her punk cabaret outfit The Dresden Dolls.  You can see Bowie-like currents in recent black pop too, from rappers like Drake who make their own fame the primary subject of their music, to the sharply styled theatricality of Janelle Monae, to Beyonce’s Ziggy Stardust-like gambit of creating the alter ego Sasha Fierce as a vehicle for her walk-on-the-wild-side impulses. Above all, there’s Nicki Minaj, who has her own alter-ego, the gay male character Roman Zolanski.  While it’s unlikely that Minaj is directly influenced by Bowie, the parallels between his serial personae and her constant image changes are clear. As one presenter on a video pop channel put it, “there isn’t a single ‘Nicki Minaj’...  she says she’s just being herself, but who she is changes every day.”  

Among Bowie’s most famous pronouncements in his early career were “I feel like an actor when I’m on stage, rather than a rock artist” and “if anything, maybe I’ve helped establish that rock’n’roll is a pose.” Before Bowie came along, rock defined itself against show biz and Hollywood. There was meant to be a more or less direct correspondence between the performer and their real-life personality.  But Bowie talked about playing characters, such as the fictional rock god Ziggy Stardust, or the cold, remote Thin White Duke.  Like a movie star taking on different roles that refract a fundamental unchanging charisma, Bowie was paradoxically the same and yet different each time he came before the public with a new album and tour.

Bowie embraced metamorphosis from the start. In his pre-fame 1960s, he hopped through five bands and a variety of musical styles and looks before connecting with the public circa 1970.  Once his career took off, the shape-shifting took on a new urgency.  Pop taste is fickle. Some stars manage to become hardy perennials, but most are lucky to eke out a living playing their hits to an audience of nostalgic diehards. Bowie circumvented pop’s cruel turnover by turning himself into the New Thing, again and again. As he said in 1977, “my role as an artist in rock is rather different to most, I encapsulate things very quickly...  my policy has been that as soon as a process works, it’s out of date. I move to another area.”  Perhaps the fashion world has so lionized Bowie (Gucci co-sponsored the Victoria & Albert exhibition) not just for his cutting-edge style, but because he’s so thoroughly assimilated fashion’s own logic of remorseless supercession.

But there’s more to Bowie’s compulsive self-reinvention than a career strategy.  It’s an artistic impulse (the desire to challenge oneself) and it relates also to existential anxiety (a fantasy of perpetual rejuvenation).  What Bowie was really developing during his Seventies heyday was a new postmodern psychology based around flux and mutability.  His great precursor and influence here was Andy Warhol, the inspiration for his song “Andy Warhol” and a role he would actually play in the 1996 movie Basquiat.  Analysing Warhol, the critic Donald Kuspit wrote of “the protean artist-self with no core”—a description that fits Bowie perfectly.  Likewise David Bowie Is, the intransitive title of the V & A exhibition, signifies “how wondrous ‘tis to live in a world that contains this polymath genius!” but also “fill in the blank space”. His career has seen that emptiness filled up, then erased, then filled up again, repeatedly.

But living like a cross between a chameleon and a magpie (Bowie is a voracious assimilator of influences and borrower of ideas) has its downsides.  Read the biographies or the vintage interviews, and it’s striking how often intimations of hollowness occur, the sense of a man who is outwardly super-confident but who battles feelings of self-loathing and doubt.  “I honestly feel that there is something incredibly lacking in my life”... “I’m not an innovator. I’m really just a Photostat machine. I pour out what has already been fed in.” ... “When I heard someone say something intelligent, I used it later as if it were my own. When I saw a quality in someone that I liked, I used it later as if it were my own”.   As much as artistic hunger or artful career management, a continuing, returning feeling of inadequacy over what I've done” has propelled the restless remaking of self, the endless switches of sound and style.  

Perusing the lavish book that accompanies David Bowie Is, with its dazzling procession of poses and images and its weighty critical essays tracking the dense cross-references to pop culture and high art, you get a sense of how much hard work it must be to be Bowie.  Director Julien Temple, who made some videos for Bowie and cast him as an advertising executive in his 1986 movie Absolute Beginners, has spoken of the “grueling nature of reinvention... the huge creative surge required to do that again and again. It takes its toll, psychically.”

During the Nineties, Bowie did seem to be running almost on empty. (Indeed it’s noticeable that David Bowie Is features little material from after the mid-Eighties). For a while he subsumed himself in the collective identity of a hard rock band, Tin Machine. Then he tried reverting to earlier successful stages of his career. For Black Tie White Noise, Bowie reunited with Chic’s Nile Rodgers, the producer of his 1983 blockbuster Let’s Dance.  For the adventurous but confused Outside, he re-enlisted Brian Eno, his foil during the experimental mid-Seventies Berlin trilogy of Low, ‘Heroes’, and Lodger.  Switching strategy, Bowie attempted to refuel using cutting-edge electronic dance ideas on Earthling, a charming if semi-successful dabble in drum and bass. Finally he regrouped with Tony Visconti, the producer on several of his classic Seventies and Eighties albums, for the solid but subdued Heathen and Reality, records on which he seemed to reach a kind of settlement with himself.

The Next Day sees Visconti at the helm again, but this time Bowie seems galvanized by a desperate energy that over-rides the frailty palpable in his haggard vocals.  Imagery of decay, debility and dejection pervade the record: “here I am/not quite dead/my body left to rot in a hollow tree”, “just walking the dead”, “I gaze in defeat at the stars in the night/the light in my life burned away/there will be no tomorrow.” Some of the morbidity-- references to “a room full of bloody history” in “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die”—may be influenced by books on Medieval tyrants that Bowie has reportedly been reading obsessively.  But elsewhere the imagery seems obviously inspired by his own brush with mortality.

The Grim Reaper is no stranger to the Bowie songbook. He covered Jacques Brel’s “My Death, while his big UK hit “Ashes to Ashes” derived its title from the Anglican burial service.  “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” on Outside, addressed “the fact that life is finite,” Bowie has explained. “That realization, when it comes, usually later in life, can either be a really daunting prospect or it makes things a lot clearer.”

But judging by The Next Day, Bowie’s close encounter of the near-fatal kind has only muddied things. There is little evidence of serenity or enlightenment.  The climactic song, “Heat,” is a homage to the existentialist balladry of Scott Walker, who covered “My Death” before Bowie did and whose own recent work includes songs about the human body’s abject vulnerability and doomed dictators like Mussolini and Ceaucescu. “My father ran the prison,” Bowie intones enigmatically, moving through ominous lines about missions grown dark and worlds ending, before confessing “ I don’t know who I am” and “I am a seer/But I am a liar”. 

Warhol believed “superstitiously” that fame could “keep at bay” Death, claims Donald Kuspit. When Bowie declares “I hope they live forever” in “The Stars”, it this a gesture of bitter solidarity with “the dead ones and the living”, all those stars who believed and who still believe in fame as salvation? You can reinvent yourself over and over, but Death, the Great Uninventor, will catch up with you. The naked torment of such apprehensions has shaped David Bowie’s twilight masterpiece.