review: david bowie’s the next day¹

If you’re interested in The Next Day — and even if you aren’t — you’ve probably heard it by now. Heard it, been disappointed by it, ceased caring about it. The only really twenty-first-century thing about The Next Day is the way it exemplifies the hype velocity of current communication: artfully timed PR rumours, hints and hyperbole induce anyone within its range to hallucinate a sublime object behind the veil, only for that object to degenerate into quotidian mediocrity the very second we’ve downloaded it.

The willingness to hallucinate is certainly there. Witness the sheer heft of the coverage, and feel the desperation behind it. The prospect of Bowie’s return was guaranteed to tickle the palate of a certain age of listener, but the desires that it triggered were also for something missing from contemporary popular music. These days, Bowie stands for all the lost possibilities going by the idea of art pop — which is to say, not only pop plus art, or pop as art, but a circuit where fashion, visual art and experimental culture connected up and renewed each other in unpredictable ways. His absence was a palate cleanser — his string of forgettable 1980s and Nineties records now forgotten, he could once again be the thin white space onto which fantasies are projected. His absence almost seemed like a ploy invented by Bowie the impresario-strategist. After all, the only way to make a new Bowie record an event was for him to withdraw long enough that it could seem like it might — really, this time — be forever.

The Next Day’s first single “Where Are We Now?”, with its references to West Berlin era Potsdamer Platz and Nurnberger Strasse, sounded like an object carefully designed to pique the interest not only of the Bowie diehards but also those with a more general stake in pop history and mythology. Berlin! Tony Visconti! The track’s lugubrious melancholy prompted the fantasy that The Next Day could be Bowie’s version of Sinatra’s No One Cares — an old crooner, a man lost in time paradoxically regaining currency by giving up on the sad pursuit of a present that had escaped him for good long ago. But it was a red herring. There are all kinds of intimations of mortality in The Next Day’s words — and reviewers seeking to rescue the record have tended to take refuge in the lyric sheet — but the form is rock, and an alarmingly unprepossessing, devoid of funk (as well as electronics) rock at that. The rest of the album makes the distance between now and (Berlin) then of “Where Are We Now?” painfully evident, a pain heightened by Visconti’s failure to convert this collection of session muso workouts into anything memorable. The Next Day sounds as if it were barely produced at all: it has the flatness of a demo. The relatively warm reception The Next Day received tells its own sad tale about the state of pop in 2013.

You can’t just put Visconti and Bowie together in a studio in 2012 and expect the equivalent of Low, “Heroes” or Lodger to result. The sorcerous powers that artists seem to possess as of right are never really theirs. Bowie — who perhaps more than any artist has performed the pop star’s lack of interiority — has always known this, and he and Eno did much to puncture the Romantic conceit that creativity comes from the mysterious inner depths of a musician. Bowie’s serial passage through personae, concepts and collaborators only telegraphed what is always the case: that the artist is synthesizer and curator of forces and ideas. This is all very well when the syntheses and the synergies are working, and there’s a steady supply of new collaborators to feed off and to lionise. It’s harder in this long striplit hours in the studio when the old magic won’t come, when the revels have ended but you still have to go through the motions.

It’s cruelly appropriate that Bowie’s powers deserted him at practically the very moment that the Seventies — the decade with which he will always be synonymous — ended. I came to musical consciousness round about the time of 1980’s Scary Monsters, and took Bowie for granted. Ziggy Stardust already sounded like a hoary old rock ‘n’ roll relic, and even much of Scary Monsters sounded reactionary by comparison with what proteges like Gary Numan, the Associates and Visage were doing. Yet Bowie had helped to create the conditions of his own obsolescence. His successors were following Bowie’s template for what a pop star should be: a conceptualist and a designer, sexuality and gender indeterminate, alien and/or android, all outside and no inside, the changing face of the strange. From this point on, Bowie himself would be bereft of masks and make-up — it would be just him, the music and the Eighties suits. What followed was years of gradually lowering expectations, of spectacular misfires and the occasional lost gem, but mostly there was reliable mediocrity, the familiar declined star pattern where each new record is fanfare as a return to form, only to immediately disappear into irrelevance.

Much of this is compressed onto the cover image, which is by far the most startling thing about The Next Day. It’s startling not for the act of desecration — but for the casual character of the desecration: a white square over the “Heroes” cover — what could be more half-assed? When I first saw the cover image I thought it must be a prank — what would the real cover image be like? Here is cover designer Jonathan Barnbrook’s rationale for the design: “The ‘Heroes’ cover obscured by the white square is about the spirit of great pop or rock music which is ‘of the moment’, forgetting or obliterating the past. However, we all know that this is never quite the case, no matter how much we try, we cannot break free from the past.”

The image becomes more than a comment on Bowie — the man who once traded on his ability to escape the past is now trapped by it. It also functions as a diagnosis of a broader temporal malaise. What is this white space, this void? An optimistic reading would construe it as the openness of a present that is not yet decided. A bleaker take — one in keeping with the hackneyed quality of the music — would see the white space as standing in for the vacancy of the present, with nothing there except a necessarily failed attempt to escape and recover the past. That’s our pop predicament in 2013, a predicament which The Next Day couldn’t seriously have been expected to resolve.