My Month of Bowie, day 20: 'Outside' (1995)

David Bowie's Outside is a record that'll really get under your skin.

The album: Outside (Virgin Records, 1995)

Fire walked with him.

My thoughts: Normally, when I review these David Bowie albums, my strategy is to do no research whatsoever. I just press play and hit the road. I generally listen to these albums while I go for a nice, long walk in the park. I've gotten a lot of steps in because of David this month.

But today, as I listened to his twentieth studio album, Outside, I realized something was definitely amiss. First of all, the album didn't end after 45 minutes or so, like David's albums usually do. None of the individual songs were really sticking in my head but just sort of blurring together. Also, there were more spoken interludes than ever, seemingly all of them done in funny voices. And when I glanced down at the track list, I noticed there were at least five tracks designated "Segue." All these horrible realities began to dawn on me. Oh, jesus, is this another concept album? With characters and a story and all that crap?

So I looked into it and, yeah, this is another one of those. David the theater kid strikes again. Outside has a subtitle, The Nathan Adler Diaries, and a sub-subtitle, A Hypercycle. Oh, good Christ! I just want some goddamned tunes; I don't want to go looking for clues. And if that's not bad enough, this thing goes on for 75 minutes! But this is the album that reunited David Bowie with Brian Eno, so there must be something valuable about it, right? Right?!

David went through many phases in his career, but this was one I forgot about: his Twin Peaks phase. I guess he was really into that show. He was even in the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). It's now time for a confession. Although I consider myself a David Lynch fan and have seen pretty much all of his feature films, I've never gotten through even a single episode of Twin Peaks. I keep meaning to, but there's just too much of it. I don't have room in my life. I feel weirdly guilty about that.

Outside is not actually part of the Twin Peaks universe, but the album centers around a very Dale Cooper-sounding detective named Nathan Adler investigating the murder of a teenage girl named Baby Grace in a strange, fictional place called Oxford Town. Those spoken interludes I mentioned are monologues by eccentric townsfolk. Does all of this sound familiar? The album's cover, a smeary self-portrait of David Bowie, even looks like the iconic image of Laura Palmer's corpse. 

Wrapped in plastic: a side-by-side comparison of Twin Peaks and Outside.

Musically, Outside reminds me a lot of Nine Inch Nails' noise-rock epic The Downward Spiral (1994), except with weaker songs. And there are certain tracks (like the single "Hallo Spaceboy") that sound like they'd be on Tyler Durden's workout playlist. Which is remarkable because The Dust Brothers' landmark Fight Club soundtrack didn't come out until 1999. I guess what I'm driving at is that this album is very much of its time. You should listen to it on a Discman while drinking Surge outside a Blockbuster.

There's something paradoxical about David Bowie's career that I'm just realizing now, twenty albums into this project. He was so prone to experimentation, provocation, and self-indulgent oddness throughout his entire career that weirdness was his normalcy. What would be an anomaly in another artist's career—imagine if Bruce Springsteen had made this LP—is just another average Tuesday for David Bowie. After a while, the extraordinary becomes workaday. Do you suppose the Addams Family ever got bored of being the Addams Family?

You know what would have been a real experiment for David Bowie at this point in his career? An album of romantic ballads. Or a country album. That would have been daring.

Next: Earthling (1997)