Bowie 1973 Alladin Sane
Who will love a lad who is insane? It is the most divested condition of all. "If I go crazy then will you still call me Superman?" as Three Doors Down would ask three decades later. The interest of Bowie in madness first appeared on The Man Who Sold the World, in "All the Madmen," where he, or the character he invents to sing the song, satires the treatments of modern psychology and chooses the world of the mad over that of the "sad men roaming free." Pink Floyd, too, would comment on the insanity of the sane world that tries to contain the mad.
The cut up method is evident on this album, and the jazz piano hitting scattered notes is like the thought or speech of the mad, hitting apparently random notes that are actually part of a fractured picture. Gathering clues from Songmeanings.com, two themes are evident in addition to madness, going off to war, to Paris, and something like dating, with sake or champagne, are evident. One reader reports a statement of Bowie that its about "young men partying before being sent off to war." The three dates are before the start of each of the world wars (nagronomai), if the third were to start within "Five Years." The splicing together of the themes is then like Simon and Garfunkel in the song "Parsley, Sage…" splicing together the war and love stories. One sees then that the cut up method does not mean there is no meaning, but rather is a clue to the meaning. The addition of a third theme raises the question of who then is mad, the mad or the sane who cannot get around sending the young to war. Alladin Vein was going to be the title of the album, meaning, among other things, who will love a boy to no purpose, or love in vein. "Millions weep a fountain / Just in case of sunrise." The weeping of mankind like a fountain, "like garden waterpots," says Lear, is set against the possibility that there will be sunrise. This is the character of the whole album.
The title of Jean Genie means to combine Jean as in blue jeans and genie as one in a bottle. Written for the amusement of an actress, the song seems to be about a New York City seducer that is a danger to young pretties. The maracas imitate a rattle snake, and he sits like a man but smiles like a reptile. He'll love you, but just for a short while. Poor little greenie" or innocent, she is. He has a seducing line and may pander beauty and nutrition snake oils as an entrance to the pretties. By contrast, as it seems, he, the poet or lover, is so simple minded he can hardly drive a car, and loves to be loved. This is what the unsympathetic say about the lover.
Time is a surrealistic philosophic reflection on our vulnerability to the passing of time, in a series of strange and beautiful images about how time creeps up on us. "You've left your coat behind" refers back to the very early Bowie, where "buy me a raincoat" is similar to "gimme shelter." Billy Dolls of the New York Dolls had died, demanded by time.
Breaking up is hard
But keeping dark is hateful
I had so many dreams
I had so many breakthroughs
But you my love were kind
Though love has left you dreamless
The door to dreams was closed
Your park was real and greenless……
So the reflection on time was caused by the subjection of love to time.
Drive In Saturday
A clue to this song is given in the history of its conception. As Pegg reports, Bowie was riding sleepless on a train between Seattle and Phoenix in November of 1972, and from the window saw…
…the moon shining on seventeen or eighteen enormous silver domes. I couldn't find out from anyone what they were. But they gave me a vision of America, Britain, and China after a nuclear catastrophe. The radiation has affected people's minds and reproductive organs, and they don't have a sex life. The only way they can learn to make love again is by watching films of how it used to be done…This takes place about the year 2033.
The particular future story is an amplification of the common or universal nostalgia for lost love:
His name was always Buddy
And he'd shrug and ask to stay
And she'd sigh like Twig the wonder kid
And turn her face away
The images are magical, and I'd swear I recall them myself: "Perhaps the strange ones in the dome…" The book is Jung, and it accompanied him in love.
Part II of the song is about Jung, and it is difficult to see how the two parts are related, unless this were the book they would borrow at the dome if they were to try to be in love again. "Like the video films he saw" connects the experience of Jung to the experience of the poet back in the sixties.
"Jung the foreman who prayed at work" refers to our authority Carl Jung, whom Bowie has read at least a bit. Bowie sees he is the foreman of the psychologists. That he prayed at work refers to his combination of science and religion in the scientific study of the images produced by the human mind. It is called "phenomenology," meaning that the scientist can set aside the question of the truth of beliefs and study the fact that people believe or imagine this or that. The images are seen as images, and the important things about man can then be readmitted to scientific study. He prayed that his hands and limbs would not burst in the effort to "keep formation" amid the fallout of modernity. The next lines are intentionally difficult:
Cursing at the astronnets
He stands ensteeled by his cabinet, He's
Crashing out with Sylvian
The Bureau Supply for aging men
With snorting head he gazes to the shore
Which once had raised, the sea that raged no more
Like the video films we saw
And did he lose his love this way? Is this romantic crisis not the crash course for the ravers? But is it not eros and the crash course that allows us to hear the raging sea? Does he refer to Jung's open affair in old age, mentioned in Memories, Dreams and Reflections ? If he is still talking about Jung, the poet presents an image of the aged Jung gazing off in the direction where the sea of the unconscious was once lively and raging, though no longer is so. Bowie will take up the torch when he is "Tall in this room overlooking the ocean, on Station.
Panic in Detroit is one of the greatest rock songs of all time, showing what rock is in a certain way.
It is a story of a sixties radical in Detroit. Pegg writes that Iggy Pop had flown to a Bowie concert at Carnegie Hall, and "spent the night telling David colorful tales of the Detroit revolutionaries he had known during his youth in Michigan." He looked like Che, the romanticized Cuban communist revolutionary, whose efforts helped Castro to institute such a golden age that Florida continues to host the refugees. This Detroiter was an armed hippie, member of a group called the "National People's Gang," with a gun he keeps concealed, showing his humility. He was lonely, and dies by suicide after pulling off a robbery to fund his activities. For some reason, the poet cares about him, and is involved in his circumstance. He may be a fan, if he asked for an autograph.
Putting on some clothes I made my way to school
And found my teacher crouching in his overalls
I screamed and ran to smash my favorite slot machine
And jumped a side of cars that slept at traffic lights.
Is the revolutionary his school teacher? For some reason he runs from school in crazed anguish through the city, as in a dream. So, the revolutionary hears the sirens coming for him after the robbery and shoots himself. He poet finds him slumped across a table, and describes his being dead as "a gun and me alone." He'd left him an autograph. It says: "Let me collect dust / I wished someone would phone" He goes to the window and stares a while in paralyzed contemplation while a couple planes go by.
The song is another Bowie criticism of the extreme left wing conclusion of the sixties revolutionaries, as in Cygnet committee, where one ends up old and bitter. "Let me collect dust" means that the message of this figure as an image is to leave this revolutionary stuff in the "dustbin of history." What he really wanted was not a communist utopia, but someone to phone. The real problem is human emptiness or loneliness, to which he turns for the course of music in the seventies. The profundity of Bowie as a thinker should not be underestimated. It is not that Bowie is not radical enough to be a revolutionary. In "1984," he imagines he'll be looking for the treason that he knew in '65.
No comments:
Post a Comment