I’m still in my underpants and I’m full of salmon and carrying on with my newly discovered and short-lived bachelorhood in the girls absence. I’m moving on to finish up David Bowie‘s “Berlin Trilogy” then with the often forgotten and misunderstood album ‘Lodger‘ released almost 2 years later in 1979. Oh, and I’m playing it LOUD.
Contrary to it’s inclusion in the trilogy, ‘Lodger‘ was actually produced in Switzerland and New York, even though it carries on with the free form weirdness started off with the first two Berlin-inspired albums. ‘Lodger‘ has an edgier, more minimalistic bent making it a more accessible album than its immediate predecessors, having no instrumentals and being somewhat lighter and more pop-oriented, yet it was still considered an experimental record in many ways and was not, by Bowie’s standards, a major commercial success. Indifferently received by critics on its initial release, it is now widely considered, along with other albums such as ‘Diamond Dogs’, to be one of Bowie’s most underrated albums even though I do not share that same enthusiasm. I am, however, a very thorough obsessive-compulsive creature when it comes to my music and I figured I needed to listen to it anyway given that it’s a “trilogy”.
Though missing the songs/instrumentals split that characterized ‘Low’ and “Heroes”, ‘Lodger’ has been interpreted as dividing roughly into two major themes, that of travel (primarily Side One) and critiques of Western civilization (primarily Side Two). The final track on “Heroes”, ‘The Secret Life of Arabia‘, anticipated the mock-exotic feel of this album’s travel-inpired songs. ‘African Night Flight‘ was a tribute to the music and culture of the veld, inspired by a trip to Kenya that he took with his then-small son Zowie; its musical textures have been cited as presaging the popularity of world music, Bowie considering it a forerunner of the sounds developed by Brian Eno and David Byrne for ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts ‘(1981). ‘Move On‘ was lyrically Bowie’s ode to his own wanderlust, sonically his earlier classic ‘All the Young Dudes‘ played backwards. ‘Yassassin‘ was an unlikely reggae song with a Turkish flavour and ‘Red Sails’ was inspired in part by the ambient motorik of German band Neu!; for Bowie, it combined “a German new music feel” with “a contemporary English mercenary-cum-swashbuckling Errol Flynn” to produce “a lovely cross-reference of cultures”.
Isn’t that nice?
Of the album’s critiques, ‘Boys Keep Swinging‘, the first single, was seen partly as a witty riposte to the Village People but also, combined with its cross-dressing video clip, a comment on ideas of masculinity. The second single, ‘DJ‘, another lesser-known Bowie fav of mine, took a sardonic look at the world of the disc jockey. ‘Repetition‘, Bowie’s exploration of the mind of an abusive partner, was sung in a deliberately unemotional tone that highlighted the lyric and the unnatural slur of the bass guitar. ‘Red Money‘ added new words to a Bowie/Alomar tune that had originally appeared as ‘Sister Midnight‘, with lyrics by Iggy Pop, on the latter’s album ‘The Idiot‘.
And with that, my first evening of male freedom has come almost to an end and I’m settling down now in my EZ-Boy with Tina the Cat to watch, shit, whatever I want I guess (i.e. NO DISNEY). Preferably something with a mindless plot, lots of explosions, car chases and boobies. Or, a documentary on Nina Simone will do nicely as well.
Music in Motion 