My Month of Bowie, day 19: 'The Buddha of Suburbia' (1993)

David Bowie released two albums in 1993. This was the second.

The album: The Buddha of Suburbia (Arista, 1993)

An obscure Bowie LP.

My thoughts: Okay, here's a weird one, a little glitch in the matrix. When David Bowie was promoting his big comeback album Black Tie White Noise (1993), he sat down for a chat with British novelist Hanif Kureishi for an article in Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. Kureishi had written a novel called The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), set in the 1970s and at least partially influenced by Bowie. When Kureishi's novel was adapted as a four-part miniseries on the BBC in 1993, guess who ended up doing the music? That's right: our man, David Robert Jones.

So the album I'm reviewing today is the soundtrack to a miniseries I haven't seen based on a book I haven't read. Maybe Kureishi's novel was more popular over there than it was over here. It must've been, since the miniseries didn't even make it to American TV in 1993. Honestly, I was almost tempted to skip this one. After all, I didn't review David's soundtracks for Christiane F. (1981) or Labyrinth (1986) either. (Those LPs both exist.) But Wikipedia counted The Buddha of Suburbia as one of David's 26 canonical studio albums. And besides, David himself has said it's his favorite of his own records. What the hell? Let's do this.

You might figure that, since it's meant to accompany a TV miniseries, The Buddha of Suburbia would be mostly instrumentals. And, yeah, there are a handful of those on the album, including a curiously quiet, six-and-a-half-minute piece called "Ian Fish, U.K. Heir." As for the other instrumentals on this album, "South Horizon" and "The Mysteries," I'd describe them as a combination of jazz and techno influences. Both of them go on a bit too long for my taste, unfortunately. You could think of these tracks as updated versions of the ambient music Bowie made with Brian Eno in the late 1970s. But they also sound like they could work in the context of a fashion show, with models in expensive, uncomfortable clothes strutting up and down the catwalk on impractically high heels.

What really distinguishes The Buddha of Suburbia, though, are its vocal numbers. These are as strong as anything on Black Tie White Noise, for my money, though I'm not 100% sure we needed to reprise the title song in its entirety at the end of the album. Supposedly, the second iteration of the song features Lenny Kravitz, but I was hard-pressed to tell the difference between the two versions. There are also some interesting ideas, musically and lyrically, on the track "Sex and the Church," but this one drones on for six-and-a-half minutes as well and doesn't have much new to say in its last couple of minutes.

Was The Buddha of Suburbia worth investigating? Sure, but it's probably not one I'll be returning to once this project is over. At least not for a while. Frankly, if I'd been Bowie's manager in 1993, I might have suggested he ditch the instrumentals altogether, pare the vocal numbers down a little, and release the whole thing as a scrappy little EP instead of a rather bloated LP. Bowie is often cited as a forerunner of punk, but punk tends to get to the bloody point.

Next: Outside (1995)