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INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Musician DECEMBER 1980 - by Chip Stern

DAVID BOWIE: SCARY MONSTERS

David Bowie is a hall of mirrors. By constantly refracting his mythology into double images and illusions, he'll occasionally serve as a reflecting pool for our (?) aspirations and fantasies. But take a look around. Who do you see? Which one is the real David Bowie? I wonder, after all the transformations, if even he knows. Or cares.

"I am banned from the event / I really don't understand the situation / so what's the moral," sings Bowie on It's No Game (first in Japanese, then in English), a stark prologue and epilogue to what may be his last pop album; a concession to all the eternal adolescents in his audience experiencing teenage mid-life, yearning for the operatic cosmology of Ziggy Stardust. And though Scary Monsters teases the pop audience with a slight return to the Hunky Dory/Diamond Dogs/Young Americans days (filtered through the jagged prism of the Eno-Bowie trilogy "Heroes"/Low/Lodger), Bowie withholds the reassurance that there is some sort of Starman waiting to relieve us of our burden. As Barbara Graustark pointed out, Scary Monsters is the first Bowie album in which he acknowledges a sense of his own mortality. The resulting pastiche of music and imagery is uneven, though not unpleasing.

Bowie's strongest suit has always been as an arranger, and Scary Monsters finds him moving away from the wide-open, pan-ethnic stylings of Lodger (his finest achievement) towards a dense wall of sound, painstakingly embellished with studio effects (such as the repetitive keyboard drones on Because You're Young and the shimmering, otherworldly synthesizers on Ashes To Ashes); for added interest there's the polytonal power of Robert Fripp, turning in some of his most unselfconscious, electrifying guitar solos in years. It's a good thing the music is so strong, because the songs are often thechildlike homilies of Up The Hill Backwards; the vague danger of the title tune, the operatic pomp of Teenage Wildlife; and on his one cover tune (Kingdom Come) Bowie completely misses the point of Tom Verlaine's majestic Americana, parodying the song like a drag queen. The standout songs, in addition to the epilogue of It's No Game, are the spatial Ashes To Ashes (an almost oriental reggae groove with Bowie's Major Tom reflecting sadly on the plight of those locked into someone else's mission), and the new wavish dance tune Fashion ( an R&B cousin of Fame which calls disco to account for its bland trendiness and overtones of fascism).

In short, I listen to Scary Monsters a lot, but when you go beyond the music and analyze Bowie's concerns it gets kind of thin. "Draw the blinds on yesterday / And it's all so much scarier," Bowie cautions, but as the body of work he's produced since Diamond Dogs shows, he's much more than just a teenage icon - and he knows it, too.