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| Why did David Bowie never play a scary clown in a horror movie? |
The album: Scary Monsters (RCA, 1980)
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| Send in the clowns? |
That woman is Michi Hirota, Bowie's Japanese instructor at the time. What she's yelling is a translation of the lyrics of the opening track, "It's No Game." When David himself decides to join the song already in progress, his vocals are tense and strained, with a lot of little yips and yelps like David Byrne used to do. In fact, I'd say Scary Monsters is Bowie's second consecutive album, following Lodger, that sounds like an honorary Talking Heads record. I'm not sure if he was following their lead or they were following his. Looking at the timeline of various Bowie and Heads releases, I'd say they reached many of the same conclusions independently. Is it a mere coincidence that the 'Heads released an album called Little Creatures (1985) five years after Bowie released Scary Monsters?
This LP was supposed to be David's return to the pop mainstream. So is this album poppier and more radio-friendly than its predecessors? I guess so. David was a deeply weird guy drawing on many disparate musical influences, so this is about as "normal" as he was capable of being in 1980. Scary Monsters was never going to be another Off the Wall (1979), though I imagine David probably liked that album an awful lot.
Which brings me to another point. About halfway through listening to Scary Monsters, a thought occurred to me: David Bowie skipped disco. I mean, he just completely sidestepped it. While John Travolta was getting down to "Stayin' Alive," Bowie was off in Berlin, listening to krautrock and trying to kick his drug habit. Certainly, other British rockers of Bowie's generation—Mick, Paul, Rod, Freddie, Elton—flirted with disco to some extent. But David's time was taken up by working with Iggy Pop and Brian Eno. By the time he recorded Scary Monsters, the disco era was already ending.
An album is only as strong as its songs, and Scary Monsters has another batch of good 'uns. I'd say the most memorable ones here are the quasi-fascistic "Fashion," the spooky title track, and the mournful "Ashes to Ashes," which acts as a sort of sequel to "Space Oddity" and gives us an update on poor old Major Tom. If you were wondering whether "Oddity" was about an astronaut or just some guy doing a lot of drugs, well, "Ashes" makes it clear: Major Tom's a junkie. Or maybe he became one after leaving the space program, I don't know.
When you listen to an artist's entire recorded repertoire in one month, you really don't have time to appreciate the subtle nuances of each individual album, let alone each individual song. When these albums were first released in the '70s and '80s, there were months or even years in between them. If you were a Bowie fanatic, you could live with an album like Scary Monsters for a good, long time and really familiarize yourself with its contents—not just the singles but the deep cuts, too—before the next one came out.
I don't really have that luxury. I can only get a vague sense of the surroundings and move on. Based on that, I can't really say that Scary Monsters is an immediate favorite of mine. But maybe, if I spent more time with this album, the songs would burrow their way into my brain and take up residence there.
P.S. Since this was David Bowie's first album of the 1980s, I was going to write about how he had to reinvent himself, his music, and his image for the new decade. But that's not really applicable to Scary Monsters. The '80s hadn't quite become "THE EIGHTIES!" yet, at least not as we remember that decade. In particular, a certain American cable network hadn't started broadcasting. So we'll save that discussion for David's next album. Rest assured, a change is gonna come.
Next: Let's Dance (1983)
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