My Month of Bowie, day 22: 'Hours' (1999)

Physician, heal thyself! David Bowie closes out the '90s with Hours.

The album: Hours (Virgin 1999)

An album for the VH-1 crowd.

My thoughts: "What the hell is this?!"

That's a question I've asked at the start of several David Bowie albums, and I asked it again when listening to Hours for the first time. I know that Bowie loves to switch things up and make each LP sound like the opposite of the one that immediately preceded it, but he still caught me off-guard with his 22nd record, his last major release of the '90s. What shocked me this time around was the opening track and first single, "Thursday's Child." Namely, I couldn't believe the erstwhile Ziggy Stardust would start an album with a track this, well, wussy and anemic. This is some background-y, VH-1 adult contemporary stuff. Bowie used to throw darts in lovers' eyes; now he's throwing cotton balls at lovers' feet. 

Worse yet, "Thursday's Child" is the first track I've heard this month in which Bowie's vocal seems noticeably off, like milk that has just started to go bad. As Randy Jackson used to say: "A little pitchy, dawg." My advice to Bowie and his producer, ex-Tin Machine bandmate Reeves Gabrels, would have been to rethink this entire track, using 1970s Memphis soul as the template. I'd want David to do his best Al Green impression, and I'd want Reeves to give me a nice, warm, Willie Mitchell-style arrangement. I don't want any synths within a hundred miles of this thing. (Frankly, I'm done with synths altogether on Bowie's records.) The song itself is otherwise perfectly acceptable in terms of its lyrics and melody.

In fact, the saving grace of Hours is David Bowie himself. Even on an off day—and I wouldn't count Hours among his best records—he's still an interesting guy to spend time with. Every once in a while, he'll hit you with a lyric or even just a chord change that you didn't see coming. I'd say that, on this album, David was thinking about old age, death, and what comes after that. He still had another 17 years to live after this, but 17 years isn't eternity. I think he was planning ahead when he made this LP. Call it estate planning. You can really hear this on "Seven" with its refrain: "I got seven days to live my life or seven ways to die."

Musically, Hours stays mired in that midtempo, middle-aged malaise that came to dominate Bowie's '90s output. Fortunately, from time to time, the guitars will come swooping in like Valkyries. The seven-minute opus "If I'm Dreaming My Life" even has a little bit of '70s Pink Floyd grandeur to it. But my favorite track on this disc was probably "The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell," largely because it made me want to write a "Weird Al"-style parody called "The Brady Kids Are Going to Hell."

Come to think of it, it's strange that "Weird Al" Yankovic never did a Bowie song parody or even a style parody. And I'm not the only one who's noticed this. Certainly, there are Bowie tracks that would have lent themselves to the "Weird Al" treatment. Nothing on Hours, but maybe "Rebel Rebel" from Diamond Dogs (1974) or "Modern Love" from Let's Dance (1983). For the former, I'm thinking "Robble Robble" (about the Hamburgler) or "Barney Rubble." For the latter, I'd suggest "Modern Lunch." Failing that, he could have done a polka medley of Bowie songs, like he did with The Rolling Stones on "The Hot Rocks Polka" (1989). "Polka from Mars," anyone?

Next: Heathen (2002)