David Bowie will never have a ‘last album.’ Sure, in terms of time and effort, there may be a few more left in his corporeal being, but he’s the kind of dude who’s entire body of even half-hearted demos can last the demanding public centuries of musical debate. And that’s the other thing: when you’ve had a career as storied, legendary, and ever-changing as his, how do you cap it all off? It’s an impossible task, and I certainly wouldn’t ask him to.
But what to make of this J.D. Salinger-esque reclusiveness in terms of creative output, besides his many film and television cameos and the occasional word with the press? To, suddenly, release an album out into the world with barely a month’s worth of advance notice, with two music videos to appear prior to the album’s full release, and with a cover virtually irreverent to the man’s own body of work? That cover should be the stuff of debates, given the music on the record and its own presentation of a sort of in-joke, as if the input after Heroes wasn’t worth remembering, and this is exactly what was supposed to follow.
The Next Day doesn’t quite follow that blueprint, though the cover certainly influences it. You can’t say this is the return of Ziggy, or the Thin White Duke, or any other variation of Bowie you can think of. In fact, it simply is The Next Day, but what that says — either as comment on the past or a continuation of Bowie’s impressive oveur — doesn’t matter as much as media types want to have you believe. Yet, I can’t help but feel like there was a twinge of frustration with this record, a need to just release something, just to move on past the speculation about what Mr. Bowie’s been doing all this time.
After the jump, David Bowie takes us to some very familiar territories via strange routes.
Moreso than the fans who are equally aware of the era’s greatness, music critics have somehow made the 1970’s a hardfought discussion time and time again in terms of who were truly great and who are worthy of pedestals in each genre’s respective Hall of Fame. That would perhaps be true, if not for our current state of everyone and their mother being able to form a band, create a Reverbnation page, book a show in a tiny puissant venue, and hope that the money will roll right in. So the consensus seems to be that the most significant contribution to music from this time is that these bands were all creating impressive works that are so exciting, less for their own artistic merits and more for how these records were made. This was conventional wisdom (with certain exceptions, like Bruce Springsteen) to any critic if you asked them closer to the era than those who’ve picked up on the records of the era second-hand.
Electric Comic Book. 