Before there was Ziggy, Aladdin, Halloween Jack, the Man Who Fell to Earth, the Thin White Duke, Major Tom, the Goblin King, The Dame, the Mid-Life Crisis Soul Patch, and all the rest, there was the Mask. In 1969, when David Bowie was just another struggling London songwriter desperate for a break, he shot a promotional film to showcase his particularly dramatic brand of performance. Along with a handful of songs-- including an early version of "Space Oddity" in which a tinfoil-helmeted Bowie is seduced by a couple of space sirens-- the reel included an original mime piece called "The Mask". It shows Bowie, looking like the least intimidating pirate of all-time in tight white tights, a frilly top, and a pageboy wig, stealing an invisible mask and proceeding to charm his family, co-workers, and eventually entire concert halls by simply placing it on his face. "Autographs, films, television-- the lot!" he says, in voiceover, describing the opportunities afforded by his mysterious new facade. "Had a very strange effect on me, though." The mime ends with the white-faced "star" giving his biggest performance yet-- and then he can't get the mask off. It strangles him. "The papers made a big thing out of it," he continues, "funny though, they didn't mention anything about a mask." Even before David Bowie gained a smidge of notoriety, he was well aware of its pitfalls-- and his own susceptibility to the lure of disguise.
To put it mildly, this self-aware attraction to reinvention has served him well. In the 1970s, he rifled through looks, genres, and band members without hesitation, from space-age glam, to cocaine funk, to harrowing ambience, to name a few. In more modern terms, consider Radiohead's whiplash transformation between OK Computer and Kid A... and then consider how Bowie pulled off equally radical shifts at least five times between 1970 and 1980 alone. This malleability astounds because it runs so counter to the way most of us think and behave. It's non-conformist, uncomfortable, and irrational, without any of the detrimental consequences that are supposed to come along with such rule-breaking. Granted, a stupendous coke habit nearly killed him and he wasn't able to be a present father to his young son during that time, but even those disappointments led to the despondency that fueled his oblique Berlin trilogy. While many artists claim to despise the status quo, only a few have discarded previous successes with the abandon of Bowie, especially during that flawless decade-long stretch. "Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming," read the tagline in an ad for 1977's "Heroes". It was anything but hyperbole. Back then, Bowie may have had many masks, but he knew exactly how long to wear each one.
The following couple of decades weren't quite as fulfilling, with Bowie reaching stadium success, over-diluting his art, and then doubling-back and over-corroding it. Whereas the 70s run was marked by unpredictability, the 80s and 90s were more transparently reactionary, with Bowie eventually following trends rather than leading (or ignoring) them. But this is what happens to rock stars, right? They age, they wither, and they eventually play 30-year-old songs to 50-year-old people who are doing their best to avoid nostalgia's bittersweet aftertaste while nursing an $11 Bud in the back of a basketball arena. Bowie could've gone that route. He didn't.
Following the death of his mother, the birth of his daughter, the decision to lay down roots in New York City, and a reunion with Tony Visconti, the producer who helped him hit career highs like Young Americans, Low, and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), came 2002's Heathen. The album found Bowie in a contemplative mood, finally finding peace by twisting up his own past in a way that did service to his accomplishments without overtly repeating them. The following year's Reality pulled off a similar trick, and it seemed like David Bowie was settling into a respectable late-career renaissance. And then, on June 25, 2004, he collapsed backstage after a show in Germany, and had to undergo emergency heart surgery. "I tell you what, though, I won't be writing a song about this one," he joked, following the angioplasty. "I can't wait to be fully recovered and get back to work again."
Nearly a decade of silence followed. Rumors of retirement or serious illness came up once in a while, but that's about it. In Paul Trynka's 2011 biography Starman, a friend of Bowie's was quoted as saying, "If you were in hospital after a heart scare, would you be wishing you'd spent more time flogging yourself on tour? Or would you be wishing you could spend more time with your five-year-old?" The explanation seems reasonable; Bowie was going to avoid rock'n'roll fogey-dom by avoiding rock'n'roll altogether while making up for his early fatherly failures. But then he figured out another way to move ahead.
On several levels, David Bowie's 24th studio album is a cunning act of sleight of hand. On The Next Day, he hasn't only come to terms with his past-- he's making his old material work for his new material. For Bowie, the always-savvy son of a public relations man, it's good for business and good for art. The "Heroes"-erasing cover is an admission, a boast, and a provocation ("how dare he!") all at once. And by keeping the album's recording sessions a tight-lipped secret, the back-from-the-dead exclamation of its announcement was that much more pronounced. Also, by abstaining from any new interviews and only releasing a few drab black-and-white promo photos, he's all but forcing the press to go back through his archives to fill the inevitable cover stories from all across the globe. So, there's long-haired Hunky Dory Bowie on the cover of France's Telerama, a lightning-eyed Aladdin Sane fronting the UK's Q, a "Heroes" outtake peering out from Japan's Rockin'On. He turned the "David Bowie is dying!" worry into a thousand fawning would-be obituaries that instead build excitement for his new album-- all while he's likely sitting at his computer, sipping tea and enjoying the coup.
The music found within is also something of a bait-and switch; on the surface, many tracks are uptempo rockers that recall various moments of Bowie's near-50-year career-- hopeful fodder for a tour that looks unlikely to take off-- but delve into the lyric sheet and you'll find death, war, graves, murder, and ghosts at almost every turn. Admittedly, this is not new subject matter for the singer-- his 1967 debut album ended with the theatrical "Please Mr. Gravedigger", an essentially a cappella tale of a child killer and a man re-digging holes for bodies after a bomb tore up their original resting places. And there's the glam apocalypse story of 1974's Diamond Dogs. But while those yarns could be fanciful and campy-- the musings of a young man glamorizing or sensationalizing the ultimate end-- The Next Day's deathly bent is more blunt.
Inspired by English medieval history books, the title track tells of a man being dragged and maimed by an angry mob. "Here I am, not quite dying/ My body left to rot in a hollow tree," sings Bowie, in a husky voice. The simmering "Love Is Lost" observes a troubled, perhaps suicidal 22-year-old girl whose "fear is as old as the world." It builds to a clenched-fist climax with Bowie ruefully pleading "oh, what have you done?" "Valentine's Day", meanwhile, is a Ziggy-style romp... about a tiny-faced school shooter; "How Does the Grass Grow?" offers a quasi-sentimental graveyard tale in which Bowie quips, "Remember the dead/ They were so great/ Some of them"; "You Feel So Lonely You Could Die" wishes comeuppance upon a heartless Cold War assassin. You get the point. It may very well be his bleakest set of lyrics to date, words that don't glorify death as much as they detail its cruel inevitability throughout history. So while "The Next Day" could be seen as an optimistic phrase on paper, on the title track its describing nothing less than eternal brutal violence: "And the next day, and the next, and another day."
Musically, The Next Day isn't as radical or dreary, as it bounces around from style to style, casually suggesting past greatness while rarely matching it. The production is clean and crisp, almost to a fault, leaving little room for the off-kilter spontaneity that highlights Bowie's best work; it's no coincidence that two of the album's best moments, on the skulking "Dirty Boys" and the taut "Boss of Me", feature glorious sax solos from longtime collaborator Steve Elson. Too often, though, the instrumentation sounds museum-ready. This is a shame, especially considering Visconti's pedigree-- this is the same guy who revolutionized the way rock drums sound on Low by pitching them down using a device that, he boasted to Bowie at the time, "fucks with the fabric of time." The same effect teasingly shows up ever-so-briefly on The Next Day, at the start of "Love Is Lost", and the Scott Walker-style closer "Heat" nails a disconcerting ambience, but otherwise, the album's sonics could've certainly been fucked with a bit more.
In 1974, Rolling Stone sat a 27-year-old Bowie down with a 60-year-old William Burroughs to discuss accelerating technologies, the uselessness of love, and the quality of porn films from country to country: "The best ones were the German ones," Bowie concludes. (In one of the few Next Day press photos, the 66-year-old Bowie sits beneath a photo of himself and the famed author from that '74 interview.) They also touch on the trappings of public perception. "They want to see their picture of you," says Burroughs, "and if they don't see their picture of you they're very upset." David Bowie has made a career of walking that line between the picture people want to see and the one he wants to give them. In this way, The Next Day finds him as astute as ever, casting a ghoulish shadow over sounds and images we know and love. In fact, there was at least one exclusive magazine cover photo to go along with the new record; according to an editor's letter, the image that appeared on the front of last week's NME arrived in his inbox with the message, "This is just for you. No-one else has seen this. David would like to be on the cover." The photo, shot just last month, shows two eyes-- one pupil bigger than the other-- behind a stark white mask.
