Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 287: 'Songs from the Ed Wood Zone' (2007)

The gang's all here! (artwork by Libby Reid)

There's something about Ed Wood, specifically the low-budget sci-fi/horror films he made in the 1950s, that inspires creativity in others. But why is that? I think it's because artists look at Ed and see a man who created highly distinctive, idiosyncratic work despite every conceivable obstacle. People watch his cheap but endearing movies and think, "He somehow got this insane movie made and released. What's my excuse?"

Even in his prime, Eddie had little money or access to resources, so his films feature laughable props, wobbly sets, and frequent continuity errors. His actors are often misfits and eccentrics, people who look and speak so strangely that they barely seem to belong to the human race. And Eddie's scripts, both in their plots and their dialogue, represent the deeply weird and personal sensibility of the author. Ed Wood just had a kooky, cockeyed way of looking at the world, and he managed to incorporate his own off-kilter ideas into stories of aliens, zombies, monsters, and flying saucers. Add to this the fact that Ed Wood was a cross-dressing alcoholic, and it's a minor miracle that his movies exist at all. But they do.

Over the years, I have reviewed numerous Ed Wood-inspired works, ranging from comic books to short films. Today, however, I am turning my attention to an obscure EP from 2007 called Songs from the Ed Wood Zone, which contains ditties about Tor Johnson, Bela Lugosi, and more. What, you've never heard of it? Well, I only encountered it because it kept turning up in my search results when I was looking for other Ed Wood-related material online. At first, I'd find it a little annoying ("Oh, not this again!"), but then I realized I should actually listen to the damned thing.

My Month of Bowie, day 21: 'Earthling' (1997)

And David Bowie surveyed his kingdom. And he was pleased.

The album: Earthling (Virgin, 1997)

Don't turn around!

My thoughts: Boom-BAP-ba-doom-a-doom-BAP! Boom-BAP-ba-doom-a-doom-BAP! Remember when that sound was everywhere? For a while in the 1990s, it seemed like every other song you heard on the radio or on MTV began with those same overcaffeinated drums. Jungle music, they called it. Or drum and bass. Were those the same thing? I forget. Whatever you call it, David Bowie was certainly paying attention in 1997, because the boom-bap-a-doom drums are all over his twenty-first studio album, Earthling. The whole thing sounds like an episode of The Powerpuff Girls. (That show debuted the very next year.)

You could accuse Bowie of merely following some late '90s musical fads on Earthling, and you wouldn't be wrong, necessarily. But I think you'd also be missing out on one of the most fun records he'd done since Let's Dance (1983). Goddamn, even that was 14 years old by the time Earthling came out. How time does fly. This is another one of those albums where I think it actually pays to be a Bowie novice rather than a Bowie expert. Uncultured dumdum that I am, I can appreciate the sci-fi sugar rush of these nine songs. Lyrically, Bowie is pouty and pessimistic as usual—always a rain cloud, this guy—but the music isn't lugubrious or morose in the slightest. It's propulsive.

The one song I already knew from Earthling was the album's penultimate track: "I'm Afraid of Americans." Bowie cowrote this doomy, paranoid ditty with Brian Eno, and it might be one of his very last songs to have a life outside of the album it originally came on. Part of the reason for that is because the single version was remixed by Bowie acolyte Trent Reznor. But I think "I'm Afraid of Americans" stands on its own as one of David's catchiest and most purposeful songs of the entire decade. It's one of the rare times in the '90s that David Bowie sounded like a man on a mission, the way he did in the '70s.

But I was entertained by Earthling all the way through, even if those aforementioned drums do tend to become repetitive over the course of nine songs. I'd never describe this LP as "pretty," but there are some exquisite barbershop harmonies on "Looking for Satellites" that my ears appreciated. Elsewhere, on Outside's final song, "Law (Earthlings on Fire)," there's a repeated, spoken refrain: "I don't want knowledge, I want certainty." A reasonable conclusion, I'd say. The first time I heard this song, however, I thought he was saying, "I don't want knowledge, I want succotash." I think I like my line better.

Next: Hours (1999)