My Month of Bowie, day 13: 'Lodger' (1979)

Bowie get smashed on Lodger.

The album: Lodger (RCA, 1979)

A flattened David Bowie.

My thoughts: I didn't grow up listening to the music of David Bowie—except for a few intense months when I was about 14—but I did grow up listening to the music of Talking Heads. Their albums were dear friends to me when I was an adolescent. David Bowie's Lodger might as well be a Talking Heads album. It has that same sound: herky-jerky like New Wave but with more of a groove to it so it doesn't sound sterile or robotic. God, I wish I'd been smart enough to listen to this album when it could have done me some good. There are cuts on it that sound like they could have come directly from Fear of Music (1979) or Remain in Light (1980).

Obviously, the biggest connection between the two Davids (Bowie and Byrne) is Brian Eno. Now that I think of it, I've never actually listened to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) all the way through. I'm gonna put that one on the to-do list. No time for it this month. I think I'll enjoy it.

By all rights, Lodger should sound like an ending. It's the third part of Bowie's Berlin trilogy and his last album of the 1970s. And yet, it doesn't sound like the end of anything. When it came out, Bowie was only a year away from divorcing Angie, his wife of ten years. But Lodger doesn't sound like a breakup album either. Well, on the opening track ("Fantastic Voyage"), Bowie does sing, "I don't want to live with somebody's depression." That doesn't sound like a man in a happy marriage. 

The aforementioned Mr. Eno is a big part of Lodger, cowriting six of the ten songs. But unlike Low (1977) and "Heroes" (1977), Lodger doesn't have any lengthy, spooky instrumental passages. It's more rock-forward and down-to-business than the other two. In that vein, "Boys Keep Swinging" shows that Bowie never stopped trying to make the ultimate pop record. He's as obsessed with that goal as Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, or any of the half-mad Captain Ahabs of the music world, always chasing that white whale.

Somehow, I had this (wrong) idea in my head that Bowie's Berlin trilogy would be drab and difficult, with the songs averaging 50 BPM. I guess the word "Berlin" threw me off. Maybe that's why I'd been avoiding these albums for so long. But even though Bowie's lyrics on Lodger are labyrinthine as always, hinting at some kind of internal struggle we're never totally privy to, the music packs a wallop. He's not in a mellow mood on Lodger. The music here is punchy and aggressive, the sound of a man who has survived the craziest decade of his life and is readying himself for the fight to come.

Now he's only 32. And all he wants to do is boogaloo.

Next: Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980)