Plastered over city streets are photos of a black-and white
David Bowie summoning Erich Heckel’s Roquairol. It is a familiar photograph – almost: One palm faces Bowie as another rests on his heart, as Berlin memories resurface and as three of Bowie’s most seminal works begin to echo in our minds with fervent nostalgia. But there is a minor blemish to this reminiscence: Bowie’s face is indistinguishable. Those vacant, mechanical and faraway eyes are now covered by a white square, defaced; and the simple ironical word – “
Heroes” – is crossed out without a replacement. Instead, on the surface of that strange rectangle reads “The Next Day.”
Nothing else is said, not even alluded to. Does it mean that Bowie is invoking his past or straying away from it? Perhaps it means nothing at all?
There is no sense of newness in
The Next Day, no novel glimpse of the David Bowie that has risen from the ashes of his ten-year reclusion. But this lack of explicit originality is a not shortcoming. It is, actually, quite deliberate.
Bowie’s decade-long absence from the popular world has given him enough time to craft a persona entirely unintelligible in the blaring, ear-splitting world of short-attention-spanned celebrity. By simply rustling or evoking well-established themes and processes, Bowie has cast himself as a phantom in popular culture, a celebrity wrapped in silhouette, simply observing those interpreting him, talking about him, and pondering over him, without adding his own rejoinder. His legend is being furthered by his name and his veneers and his previous works simply echoing in the atmosphere all over again.
It is extraordinary how in this freakish, celebrity-obsessed world, it is Bowie’s silence that has recast the spotlight upon him. But the artist himself is not to be seen. All that one can come across under that gleaming light is the string of works already left behind by him: traces of Ziggy Stardust, some almost familiar sights of Berlin, and mere whispers from the Bowie of the new – crooning from behind a curtain, drenched in muffled mystique, refusing to reveal himself, and disinclined to add to the conversation.
This is how his legend will carry on: by the words of others.
Let others guess what new face snivels behind his iron mask, and let them mull over its impenetrable themes, and let them craft the artist they choose to craft based on the sole item they’ve been given – with its nostalgic yet defaced exterior and the scatter-brained multifariousness that ruthlessly careens inside of it.
Bowie wants no part in it. He is merely the artist, merely the name plastered onto the product. His legend is no longer dictated by his choice of words and characters, as it wasn’t when he tried to be in control of them, and just as it wasn’t when his legend swelled and intensified when he decided to quietly step into the shadows.
And
The Next Day begins without any such stillness. Bowie bellows that he is still alive, not quite dead, and he laughs off the lamentations over his sudden withdrawal, and commandingly sways his song forward. Suddenly, the ferocity of the title-track gives way to delicious sleaze as Bowie playfully shuffles through with
Dirty Boys. And at the onset it becomes quite clear that
The Next Day’s exterior isn’t at all about narrative or intelligibility. Instead, it is a web of truth and of invention, of honesty and deception, and of parables and candor. It is impossible to say which is which, and that is perhaps the magic of the record: it is not an easy listen. It confuses its audience just as it delights them, and one can choose what one wants from it. It could be for mere amusement or it could serve as something deeper, difficult, and more artful. It is both, as the artist masks his self and his intentions with allusions and with allegories, brutishly denying his audience even a moment of vicariousness, while concurrently feeding them with superficial puree. The downright distress of
You Feel So Lonely You Could Die could easily be contradicted by its somewhat jovial exterior, while the prophetic Heat could be taken as truth or shrugged off as another fallacy.
It is also clear that somewhere beneath the stories that
The Next Day tells, Bowie, too, is speaking. It is simply a matter of finding out which is which, and who is who, and simply involving oneself with Bowie’s now-meta mystique.
It is mystifying that a record could so heartlessly bemuse and perplex and bedazzle while at the same time delight and amuse in such a simple-hearted way. No wonder that Bowie alludes to Vladimir Nabokov in
I’d Rather Be High. Nabokov was the master of cruel high-art. He played his readers without ever making them aware of their imprudence or his own unkindness. Bowie seems to be following in the author’s footsteps, unyielding in his cunning, and so skillful at controlling his congregation. He directly admits to his fraudulence in
Heat, continually iterating that he is a dissembler, that he is a fraud, that he is a seer, as
The Next Day comes to a close, but his listeners are so much in his control by then, that nobody could possibly believe him.
Not a moment of
The Next Day is uncalculated, and not a second passes by without a missed reference or a neglected allusion to a past work, or a previous character, or to Bowie himself. It is impossible to tire from a record that pleases its audience so superficially with its sophisticated splendor, while also denying them the right to any trace of lucidity. It is as cruel as Nabokov was cruel, and it is doubtlessly Bowie’s most unsympathetic work, but
The Next Day isn’t simply harsh for the sake of cruelty. It is challenging, as popular art hasn’t been in a very long time. It is invigorating how the record refuses to give in or to reveal itself in however many listens, and perhaps, it never will.
The Next Day is a parable fabricated by an even-more-powerful one – its artist, who still dawdles in the shadows and sneers at the labyrinth he’s crafted and the lies he’s told. But liars tell the prettiest of stories, even when they hide their faces and even when they seal their mouths in quietude.