When LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy sampled “Heroes” in 2010, the ecstasy of hearing David Bowie revamped for the 21st century couldn’t escape a question of nostalgia: Where did he go? It was mostly asked out of resignation; after a decade of nothing and three decades of nothing great, there was no reason to expect anything more from the glam-rock legend. But Bowie has never been one for expectations.
Bowie’s newest album, “The Next Day,” came into public knowledge through the crooning ballad “Where Are We Now.” Mellow and melancholic, with a gracefully-aged vibrato, it’s an appropriately grand reintroduction – even more so because of the sly misdirection inherent in its marketing. With its synth-orchestral hum and its gentle rhythm, plus enough Berlin imagery to make the titular “we” more of an “I,” the song begged for interpretation as to what the new album would sound like: old, measured, self-reflective.
“The Next Day” is sometimes the work of an aging rockstar (especially lyrically), but it’s more of what the first and titular track entails: roars of razor-sharp guitar, percussion stolen from the ’80s and the snarling attitude of a man dissatisfied with fading away.
It’s still Bowie, and he sure talks about life and death a lot, but rejuvenated with grit and power and rock ‘n’ roll. The album adopts the philosophy of its first single but the mantra of its first track – “and the next day / and the next / and another day” – breathlessly plunging into the modern age.
That’s not to say that “The Next Day” is in any way a young man’s album – just look at the subversively ugly album cover, where “Heroes”-era Bowie is indifferently defeated by minimalism. It’s a powerful signifier of this album of conflicts, of battles between youth and age, death and immortality.
The emotional apex of these conflicts is album highlight “The Stars (Are Out Tonight),” an elegiac ode to celebrity whose Springsteen levels of musical-lyrical dissonance create a brilliantly complicated examination of Bowie’s own notoriety. On the one hand, it is absolutely alive with grandeur, its pulsating bass line and soaring melodies evoking a sense of universality. On the other, it also includes lyrical morbidness in lines like “stars are never sleeping / dead ones and the living” and “they are the stars, they’re dying for you / but I hope they live forever.” Sung from the perspective of a not-yet-world-conquering Bowie, these lyrics place him as both detached cultural critic and self-mourning establishment icon.
He also turns out to be self-eulogizing: For a man so famous for his many faces, this is the first time that he’s chosen to wear his own, albeit borrowed from different eras. In “Love is Lost,” he is 22; in “I’d Rather Be High,” he is 17; in “Valentine’s Day,” he is a high school student who adopts the mindset of a lost-youth murderer.
As is evident from that last example, he’s taking liberties with reality to sketch out an interpretation of youth – its anger, its frustration and its inevitable progression. The penultimate “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die” almost seems like a career summation as it declares, “I want to see you clearly before you close the door,” before drifting into its haunting mantra of solitary fade.
But that’s not where the album ends. In the song “Heat,” Bowie gets to the core of his personal and professional burnout. It’s a murky, atonal, Scott Walker-esque abstraction brimming with existential uncertainty. “And I tell myself I don’t know who I am,” he repeats. “I am a seer / but I am a liar,” he confesses.
Yet the line that sticks out is the one he ends on: “My father ran the prison.” Burning through a life’s worth of identities, “The Next Day” gives the world all the youth he has left. This leaves one last mission: to confront this exhausting, caged-in reality. And the next one. And another one.
–Tony Huang
Email Huang at thuang@media.ucla.edu.