David Bowie’s album EARTHLING might be called a little strange, but then again coming from David Bowie that wouldn’t surprise anyone. There are surprises galore in this experimental album that was conceived and recorded, according to Bowie sources, in less than four months.
In September 1996, merely four days off his World Tour, the band: David Bowie (vocals,guitars,alto sax,samples, and keyboards), Reeves Gabrels (guitars,vocals, and synthesizers), Zachory Alford (drums and electronic percussion), Mike Garson (piano and keyboards), and Gail Ann Dorsey (bass and vocals) entered the Looking Glass studios in New York City as the scaled down version of the eight-piece band from the “Outside tour” to record the nine tracks that would become EARTHLING.
Each of the tracks, according to Bowie, reflect “an attempt to fuse adventurous rock with modern rhythms, while never losing sight of the songs themselves.” Jungle, or Drum n’ Bass, as it is known in Britain, had been washing up on the American shores to wide acclaim in the form of The Prodigy’s THE FAT OF THE LAND, but Bowie being ahead of the times first heard Drum n’ Bass back in 1993 when a London “clubbing” friend of his dropped a stack of vinyls into his lap of the earliest Jungle music. Ultimately it these records that are Bowie’s biggest influence on EARTHLING. “I was just so impressed.” he says. “It just sounded like the whole dichotomy of the music was a parallel of how society exists. There was the hard throbbing pulse underneath- regular and very directed – and there was this incredible chaotic freneticism on top with the sped up snare drum that seemed to break beats continuously and didn’t seem to follow any regular pattern. It really felt like a real social manifesto laid out in music, and I was totally seduced by it.”
EARTHLING is the sort of album for those who are on deadline and have failed to begin the intended project until the night before. Just slip EARTHLING into your CD player, kick back the Java, and fly through your work. Unfortunately it is not a complex work, not in the manner of Bowie’s previous release OUTSIDE. Outside was a concept album (or part one of a hypercycle as referred to on the insert) that revolved around the solving of an art-crime, the murder of a 14 year-old Baby Grace Blue for artistic purposes. EARTHLING is nothing more than a loose collection of songs, with no grand theme tying them together beyond the jungle inspired sound of the compositions themselves. Again, this not a surprise. In fact Bowie admits as much, “(EARTHLING is) all very direct, hard-hitting, to the point” songs.
For those who were hoping for the promised sequel to the “Outside” trilogy, this is sadly not it. “Typically me,” Bowie admits. “My attention wandered. This album was waiting to be made at the end of the last festival tour we did… The next in the trilogy is called ‘Contamination’, and hopefully it will surface… It’ll be quite startling, I think. I guess it won’t be accessible, really, although I might keep it shorter. I think maybe 76 minutes (the album length of OUTSIDE) was an awful long time, today’s attention spans being what they are and all that.”
To get that real jungle feel, Bowie enlisted Mark Plati (known for mixing tracks by Big Audio Dynamite, New Order, Babylon Zoo, and Soul Coughing) to co-produce in addition to Reeves Gabrels and himself.
Brian Eno, an excellent producer of Bowie’s previous albums OUTSIDE, HEROES, LOW, and LODGER, among others provides direction on only one of the songs, co-writing with Bowie, “I’m Afraid of Americans”. This song coincidentally enough also the most engaging on the album with its very tight combination of drums, guitar, and keyboards that seems to draw on inspiration of work by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Again this could have been expected as Bowie did tour the United States with Nine Inch Nails and fellow Nothing Records act Prick in the Fall of 1995 for the first leg of the OUTSIDE tour.
I’m Afraid of Americans”, explains Bowie, “is not truly hostile about Americans, as say Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ It’s merely sardonic. I was traveling in Java when the first McDonald’s went up and it was like: ‘for fuck’s sake!’ The invasion of any homogenized culture is so depressing, the erection of another Disney World in, say, Umbria, Italy, more so. It strangles the indigenous culture and narrows the expression of life.”
While EARTHLING may not be the musical breakthrough many might have expected from Bowie, he had clearly made some advancements in the interaction between artist and fan, as exhibited by his website davidbowie.com which began the artist/fan dialogue long before it became en vogue by releasing a special net version of “Telling Lies” three months in advance of the EARTHLING. This was something that an artist of David Bowie’s stature did not do in 1996. Give EARTHLING a spin, it may not seem so alien after all. It might even seem quite… human.
