David Bowie's LOW: a Forty-One Year High

David Bowie’s LOW: A Forty-One Year High January 1977’s LOW was the new soul of a refreshed career and the end of a drug- ravaged David Bowie. Coming off the schizophrenically bombastic/crooning STATION TO STATION, a flirt with the silver screen in The Man Who Fell To Earth, and a hungover 1976, the recording sessions were unimaginable. Primarily Americans made up the band, bringing driving live drums and a soul influence like on STATION and YOUNG AMERICANS. Brian Eno acts as a muse by introducing electronic elements. Bowie himself battled lawyers in Paris and constant back-and-forth summons aside a crumbling marriage. All company were packed into an allegedly haunted chateau in southern France and finished it off in Hansa Studios, adjacent to the Wall in Berlin. The album comes as two courses. Side B is the largest rebuke to STATION, treating Communist Europe as almost a referent object: a bulwark against the coke- fueled, fascist-tinged excess through minimalism and order. The expected character studies of previous records give way to atmospheric worldbuilding for an artist in need of a new habitat, not a new skin to hide in, and it contains by far the most hope for something new. Side A is a refraction of that status quo, made up of glass shards of writer’s block constantly changing stride against audience expectations and even themselves. Gone are those characters of his self-titled, ZIGGY, and already great oeuvre, so too are the twinkling stars of his younger eyes — what remains is a shattered pastiche. Together, the whole of LOW is a reconsideration of what art Bowie has made and will be able to make, handling sin and success the same with observant detachment. In doing so, Bowie creates the best album of the 20th century and a monument to the ability of self-aware change and restoration. Each song of the first half is an appeal, be it for the “gift of sound and vision” or for a touch of the “girl with grey eyes.” Bowie is rebuilding, abstractly. It is a powwow effect of sitting around an electric blue fire pit listening to a man attempt to piece together a new stained- glass image of himself. Initially, through direct and brutish stubbornness. Bowie may be pleading with himself and even his audience, but he ends up focused. His building confidence throughout this record uplifts his renewal and lets songs fit together despite purposeful splits and starts. The “Speed of Life” is a monochromatic overture that breathes life into the ideas presented in this first half. Glaring yet glittery synth lines back neatly chopped bars of simple riffs, introducing the conflict between the new and the old, respectively. Both remain as juvenile versions of themselves for now, but that simplicity of LOW’s fundamentals are what make it work as a ground-up reflection. “Speed” bookends the album in a way as an instrumental, letting the vocals be more welcome when they come on “Breaking Glass.” There, Bowie annunciates his lyrics with austerity and inconsistency against repetitious bass lines and chord changes, before even they are disrupted by asynchronous synths from Eno. The lack of reliability between singer and backing band contributes to the abstractions and chunked rhythms that are Side A. “What In The World” has a synth act like rowdy popcorn against glassier guitar riffs and reverbing drums, obscuring most of their rhythm. The vocals here and on “Glass” are just as internally detached as the instrumentation. Bowie goes from admitting perceived wrongs, past and present, through childlike imagery in “Glass,” from crayons on carpet to baseball-smashed windows, before shifting into slipshod back-and-forths about love, fear, and anxiety mid- sentence on the verses in “World.” There, the topic changes line after line, even syllable after syllable, as LOW hits its peak of manic. Reaching out to the gray-eyed girl locked away and the untouched “you” are attempts at unlocking and reconnecting creative circuits fried out by drugs, isolation, and overindulgence. Bowie can only manage methods brought on by frustration and raw, instinctive fundamentals, like a square synth in a round, full guitar line. The outro presupposes a “real me,” but there lacks a complete me to begin with, only a fragmented, floundering man thrashing for purpose. The simplified, split-up segments and sketchy vocals give way to sense and reason in “Sound and Vision.” It’s the most joyful song on the depressive album. The previously, purposefully conflicting band members work toward a unified song; the building blocks fit together. The largest signifiers of this change are Eno’s synths and effects, acting as sugary sounds on top of the forward-looking guitar or processing on the classic, now pliable sax lines instead of their previous roles as disruptors and smokescreens. The harmony of the band builds over time, introducing new pieces incrementally. It is over a whole minute into the construction process that the architect enters, now sober and self-aware. A put-together Bowie progresses from task to task, monotonically reflecting and reconstructing between lyrical tilts. He knows the “gift” that has pervaded his output for the past decade can come back in spite of his cracked imperfections. He is willing to practice order and care to fix up the room and lay the sheets for its return. He is the one who should take care of himself the most, whistling while he works. The retrospection and relaxed realizations of “Sound” lapse into “Always Crashing In The Same Car.” The song is unlike any other on the album, falling into repetition rather than the previous broken diction, mania, or contrasting focus. It is a static karmic cycle of the vocals— hesitant to the change of “Sound and Vision,” threatening a return to the inarticulate seclusion of “Glass”—standing still against a progressing instrumental background. Paired with “Sound,” “Crashing” runs up against the single-minded, strengthening meditation with delay, tentativeness, and fear, all expressed solely through Bowie. The band goes on, nonplussed. The song has clearly defined instrumental arcs and swells despite its designer’s wariness, and, unlike anything else on LOW’s first half, comes to a logical conclusion rather than fading out. There can be an end to a low of your life, even if it feels motionless. Side A arguably concludes with the blues-rock “Be My Wife.” The song gives free reign to the electric guitars and introduces a singular piano that further divorce the vocals from the instrumentation. Bowie reverts to near monotone, half-heartedly wishing to connect with passion in a suffocated vocal range. The tepid attempt at seducing a true hunger and lust for life permeates the song. The willfully ignorant and deeply apathetic cycle of repeating the same lines and methods for new wives, new records, new concepts meant to bring bliss causes it. The self-destructive refusal to evolve enables it. The existing audience image of a preoccupied singer wanting more but feeling less justifies it. It takes effort to achieve the “gift of sound and vision,” more so than a pessimistic Bowie is putting in. The pity in the heart song comes from the truth of the loneliness and meaninglessness below the nostalgic electrics and keys—it is more a warning and reminder to himself of the black hole awaiting him if he doesn’t smash what he has become. The actual final song on Side A is “A New Career In A New Town,” the most literal title. Originally intended to have vocals, the lyrical drive is produced by a harmonica. It is an incredibly simple, modest lead that guides the listener through a new backdrop: a fused band and synth line. New rails are laid, made from the previous conflict of the two, with Bowie’s harmonica as the conductor. The album uses the flipping of the record as a whiplash from the American rhythm and blues to a scope of new, distinctly European creation. Springboarding from the success of piecing together synths, classic instruments, and himself, Bowie begins to affirm that his coke-fueled, Hollywood Hills past life can be useful in forging ahead, evident in his return, or escape, to Europe to record this album as well. “Warszawa” is the best representation of the gloomy and uncertain yet copiously different Side B. An imagined community of a prototypical Europe, itself recently rebuilt from World War II, forms, taking bits and pieces from collective strife and hope. Unlike Side A, all the second half was overdubbed and finished in Hansa Studios. The Berlin Wall, weeping, looms higher here, yet to be matched by the tense anxiety of “HEROES”. It keeps Bowie wary of the fact that their respective post- war, post-cocaine reconstructions are complicated and internally divisive. The “Art Decade” of ’67 – ‘77 is over, and hesitant confidence on into the 1980s is a heavy ideal to bear. Nevertheless, the now unified atmosphere of the remaining tracks set the scene for the rest of a career. “Warszawa” and it’s made up, phonetically-sound chants give way to stomach-dropping churns in “Art Decade” that lead to scurrying vibrations on “Weeping Wall.” Each song is invested in separating the record’s sides, contrasting the first’s lack of solid track progression with a dark dive ending in a final memento from Bowie’s past. The harrowing saxophone solo in “Subterraneans” is unlike anything else in his discography. As a symbol of the past, it vigilantly lights the way into whatever unknown comes after. The trade off between it and the obtuse, hintingly romantic chanted lyrics bring the duet home; as Bowie said in an interview, the song is an elegy for those who were trapped in East Berlin during the separation.

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