David Bowie's Low by Hugo Wilcken Read Free Book Online

room, until finally he uttered the word ‘record.’” (Of course, this was in the days before sequencers—nowadays you could do all that on a computer in a few minutes.)
    The Idiot
also finds Iggy Pop straining towards other idioms, experimenting with his voice: “To work with [Bowie] as a producer …he was a pain in the ass—megalomaniacal, loco! But he had good ideas. The best example I can give you was when I was working on the lyrics to ‘Funtime’ and he said, ‘Yeah, the words are good. But don’t sing it like a rock guy. Sing it like Mae West.’ Which made it informed of other genres, like cinema. Also, it was a little bit gay. The vocals there became more menacing as a result of that suggestion.”
    Iggy’s catatonic, lugubrious croon—like a drugged-up Frank Sinatra—is one of the signatures of the album. As on
Station to Station
, the crooning comes over as a form of alienatedmale hysteria. The emotionally skewed quality of the album is apparent right from the first track, the superb “Sister Midnight.” A funk bass and riff play against dirty, dissonant guitars, while Iggy Pop’s basso profundo contrasts weirdly with Bowie’s falsetto yelps. The lyrics set the tormented, psychiatric tone of the album, as Iggy recounts a dream in which “Mother was in my bed, and I made love to her/Father he gunned for me, hunted me with his six-gun.”
    There’s a relentlessly disturbing feel to the album that would be too much to take if it weren’t for the camp touches and stabs of dark humour scattered across most of the tracks. The autistic worldview of
Low
is one in which relationships are an impossibility; on
The Idiot
, relationships are not only possible, they’re a mutually destructive addiction. Songs kick off with a vision of happy codependence, only to sink into rupture and depression or violence. “China Girl” (reprised by Bowie six years later as a cheesy pop song, but excellent here) uses the analogy of East and West, as Iggy corrupts his oriental lover with “television, eyes of blue” and “men who want to rule the world.” (The song also alludes to Bowie’s messianic delusions: “I stumble into town, just like a sacred cow, visions of swastikas in my head, plans for everyone.”) Even the jokey, cabaret-style “Tiny Girls” (a risqué title given Iggy Pop’s sexual proclivities of the time) ends with the sour message of a world where even the “girls who have got no tricks” ultimately “sing of greed, like a young banshee.” Relationships are power struggles inwhich lies and deception are the weapons, and the strong crush the weak.
    There’s misogyny, but also plenty of self-hate in there too—in fact it’s pretty much the sort of album you’d expect two junkies running away from deteriorating relationships might make. But the songs are mostly leavened with irony and humorous touches. The exception is the eight and half minutes of the final track—nothing on the rest of the album matches the sheer nihilism of “Mass Production.” (Eno described listening to the album as akin to sticking your head in concrete, which is not true at all, except perhaps for this one track.) Crunching, industrial synth sounds fight distorted guitars over the genocidal imagery of “smokestacks belching, breasts turn brown.” Iggy Pop croons against the backdrop of suicide (“although I try to die, you put me back on the line”), begging the lover who thanklessly saved him to “give me the number of a girl almost like you,” since “I’m almost like him.” The estrangement from the self is now complete, and the song collapses in a morass of detuned synthesisers and grinding noise.
    Bowie’s stylistic
imprimatur
is all over the album. Even the title’s literary allusion is more Bowie than Pop. The cover is a black-and-white shot of Iggy Pop in a karate-style pose inspired by the painting
Roquairol
by the German Expressionist painter Erich Heckel—a Bowie-esque reference. Not only