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IVH: David Bowie / Diamond Dogs [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-27
Tonight’s selections from David Bowie’s 1974 album, Diamond Dogs.
After a 1977 performance that still ranks among the wildest, most manic musical performances to ever hit daytime TV, Iggy Pop chats with talk show host Dinah Shore, the top-charting female singer of the ‘40s, with his collaborator pal David Bowie by his side; jazz vet Rosemary Clooney flanks Shore. Their interview is mutually respectful and endearingly sincere even as the host tries to navigate Pop’s nihilistic answers. Aiming to steer the conversation in a positive direction, she asks her guest if he’s influenced anybody, and the punk pioneer—much to everyone’s delight—nonchalantly replies, "I think I helped wipe out the '60s." Great quote, but here’s the thing: Pop never sold enough to do that directly. Instead, it was Bowie, his most ambitious student, who revolutionized '70s music and style by uncovering the discomfort and despair of urban life that hippie idealism denied. His third consecutive UK chart-topper and U.S. Top 5 breakthrough, 1974’s Diamond Dogs—Bowie’s first record of original material since killing off the Ziggy Stardust character that made him an instant superstar back home—remains rooted in his still-reigning glam scene that knocked most utopian '60s rockers off the UK charts with glistening shards of pansexuality, sci-fi fantasy, and bespangled spectacle. His bleakest album until recent swansong Blackstar, Diamond Dogs is a bummer, a bad trip, "No Fun"—a sustained work of decadence and dread that transforms corrosion into celebration. Whereas Ziggy features its titular messiah, Diamond Dogs has jackals that live on corpses the way Bowie fed off rotting urban culture and reckless rock'n'roll. The last glam gasp of Bowie's English years, Dogs also sprawls toward Bowie’s forthcoming Thin White Duke persona, embracing Blaxploitation funk and soul, rock opera, European art song, and Broadway. The album cracked FM radio with "Rebel Rebel," an Iggy Pop-like blast aimed at America’s teenage wasteland. Recapitulating his earlier achievements while raising their stakes, it stomped on whatever good vibes remained in British rock, and cleared the stage for punk and goth. As Bowie noted decades later, the tribal "peoploids" that rummage through the album’s fantastically bleak Hunger City like the orphaned pickpockets of Oliver Twist presaged a generation of Johnny Rottens and Sid Viciouses. Dogs envisioned a no-future future just before the next breed of pop stars lived it. — Pitchfork
Rebel Rebel
It’s not an album for purists or genre-junkies, but that was never Bowie’s shtick. Rather, Diamond Dogs is an assemblage of styles, a montage. It is symphony and cacophony. It opens with spoken word accompanied by synths (Future Legend), pays homage to the Stones (Diamond Dogs), and closes with the hypnotic Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family. In betwixt, we move from Frank Sinatra-like crooning to German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. When you listen to Diamond Dogs, it ain’t just your mother who’s in a whirl. The best part of Diamond Dogs, and arguably the greatest piece of music Bowie ever produced, is the nine-minute triptych that lies in the middle of side one: Sweet Thing, Candidate, Sweet Thing (Reprise). These songs are highly emotional. They trade in vulnerability and longing, but they also transport and delight. This is Bowie at his best, accompanied by Mike Garson’s sublime piano. “If you want it, boys, get it here, thing.” [...] Bowie is the tasteful thief and the studied faker, laughing at the hubris of the hippies and the prog rockers, at their illusions of “authenticity”. Yet, while preferring surface to depth, he captures a deeper embodied truth, one we feel riff after riff. It just feels so right. The fragmentation of his music and his lyrics are us. They point both to the multiplicity of who we are and who we might become. They call us to move beyond ourselves, our received identities. This is especially so in relation to gender and sexuality, themes that loom large on the album. — The Conversation
Diamond Dogs
No other figure in classic rock history has gone through as many varied transitions—personally, professionally and artistically—as David Bowie. All throughout his career, but especially during the first half, David Bowie was the king of reinvention. For a large number of his earlier albums, his modus operandi was to create and inhabit a brand new character for each, in order to fully embody and transmit his art in a way that was unprecedented before him. Naturally, he was a fan and pioneer of the concept album, especially when it featured a science fiction-esque theme. For his eighth studio album, 1974’s Diamond Dogs, David Bowie assumed the character of “Halloween Jack”, denizen of the dilapidated Hunger City. What originally started out as a musical based on George Orwell’s paranoid classic, 1984, ended up morphing into one of the strangest and most revolutionary turns in the always inspiring artist’s career. David Bowie first came up with the idea for a musical based on 1984 while recording his 1973 album, Pin-Ups. However, after being denied the rights to the book by Orwell’s estate, David Bowie was forced to scrap his idea. Nevertheless, he remained fascinated by the concept of a post-apocalyptic world like the one described in the novel. Eventually, David Bowie Diamond Dogs became his own glam-trash expression of such a world, and the songs he had already written for his musical wound up on the latter half of this album, in which the 1984 theme is most prominent. — Classic Rock History
1984
The next three selections are best taken as one piece of music. Backwards tapes (a mellotron?) introduce the 'Sweet Thing'/'Candidate' triptych, a startlingly visual tremor, like a Edward Hopper painting coming to life, a vast Fritz Lang cityscape rising to obliterate the skyline, the start of Gershwin’s 'Rhapsody In Blue' played in slo-mo. An exquisitely layered, emphatically urban torch song begins. Bowie croons in basso profundo before gliding into a higher register, wringing every drop of emotion from each word. It’s his most expressive singing yet, a well of loneliness as profound as that of the cinemagoing girl in 'Life On Mars?' or the London Boy. “Scared and lonely”, the figure rushes to the “centre of things” but here he only finds “love in a doorway”, a cold caress casually given by the multitracked voices, strangers rushing by offering only temporary relief. They are phantoms, like those that dwell in [T.S.] Eliot’s Unreal City: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” [...] The music conjures details from a movie screen – saxes ooze, smoke rises. The mood of elegant refinement is evocative of the vintage romances of Tin Pan Alley, and Bowie comes on like a gothic Johnnie Ray, but here the gutter is in full view (that scuzzy guitar runs below the cascading wall of sound). A grand, trashy solo is unleashed, like the glitter-strewn casualty [Marc] Bolan offered on 'Teenage Dream'. If this was Hunger City, then it was at one with Eliot’s Unreal City, a place where lovers depart unnoticed in hotel rooms. Perhaps the triptych is best seen through the prism of 'The Waste Land', where a series of voices offer a panoramic survey of a disenchanted world. (Eliot’s poetics were given pop appeal on the Pet Shop Boys’ 'West End Girls' and Radiohead’s 'Paranoid Android' owed much to him.) — The Quietus
Sweet Thing / Candidate / Sweet Thing (Reprise)
WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
All repeats
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