I recently watched Brett Morgan’s 2022 David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream and it was a remarkable experience—hallucinogenic, visually dazzling, and narrated by the Zigster himself. But I was also disappointed. One of the things that has always most fascinated me about everybody’s biggest Space Oddity was his Dark Age in the mid-eighties. Todd Haynes did a wonderful job in his 1998 film Velvet Goldmine of depicting Bowie’s coldly calculated transformation from Ziggy Stardust to the reptilian Tommy Stone of his Let’s Dance period, and by so doing captured an essential truth about the artist—namely, that Mr. Ch-ch-ch-changes chameleon-like ability to switch personae wasn’t always a good thing.
Moonage Daydream does a wonderful job of exploring Bowie’s life as spiritual quest. But it glosses over—and I understand why—Bowie’s phases of spiritual emptiness. His lengthy and downright scary descent into cocaine psychosis and creepy occultism during his stay in Los Angeles, for instance. More importantly, it glosses over the years 1983 through 1987, during which Bowie, in pursuit of the superstardom that had eluded him for so long, sold all of his avant garde principles down the river in favor of a slick and very mainstream species of dance rock.
Geniuses are most intriguing for their faults—Mick Jagger is the least interesting rock god there is because he never took a terribly wrong turn. What does it mean when a genius loses his genius? Or, as was the case with Bowie, coldly jettisons it to win a wider audience and fill his pockets with filthy lucre? What does it mean when an artist who was always ahead of the curve thanks to daring, audacity, and the ability to sniff out what was coming next settles into complacency and takes the easy—and profitable—way out? Moonage Daydream doesn’t touch upon these issues, and I think they’re critical when it comes to fully understanding Bowie the artist.
1984’s (appropriate, that) Tonight was the second of the three albums that would make up Bowie’s extended descent into the creative void. On its predecessor, 1983’s Let’s Dance, Bowie won hearts and pocketbooks with lowest-common-denominator fare like the title track and “Modern Love,” both of which still leave me queasy. He’d invented a new character, true, but there was nothing positive to be said about the slick song and dance man he’d made himself into. You’ve heard of plastic soul? Well Bowie had opted for plastic soulless, and become a snake-oil salesman.
On Tonight he did the same but he’d lost his Midas touch—there was nothing half as catchy as “Let’s Dance” on it. And on 1987’s Never Let Me Down he defied all odds and did worse. Bob Dylan at least managed to shock with his 1970 fiasco Self Portrait—there was something almost uncanny about its wrongness. It was as if he wanted to lose his audience. Bowie set out to widen his audience and succeeded, only to choke on the bone of fame he’d sacrificed his genius to gain. Tonight and Never Let Me Down were both sadly predictable and predictably sad—albums by a desperate man trapped in the creative grave he’d dug for himself.
Tonight includes nine songs—three of them covers, and only two of them written solely by the artist himself—in a hopeless mishmash of styles. None of them are brilliant, or even memorable. Co-producer Hugh Pagdham, asked later in an interview why he hadn’t done something to put a stop to the horror, put it best: “Who am I to say to Mr. David Bowie that his songs suck?”
Opener “Loving the Alien” is the strongest track on the album, if only because its title harkens back to Bowie as extraterrestrial; on its own merits it’s merely slightly above average period fare. It has that depressing upbeat eighties beat and breaks no new creative ground. Bowie would later claim the demo was far superior, and he may well have been right—the finished product is produced to within an inch of its life.
Iggy Pop was a prominent figure at the sessions and evidently the two produced material that was superior to what’s on the album, but wasn’t deemed sufficiently commercial. Too bad. Because the songs Iggy had anything to do with are mind-boggling failures. The Iggy Pop/James Williamson composition “Don’t Look Down” is tepid pop reggae, thickened to utter coagulation by over-production. The chorus is crap pap and Steely Dan slick, and the song drowns in horns. I’m rather surprised Bowie didn’t release this one as a single—I suspect Bowie’s target audience would have eaten it up.
His cover of Brian Wilson’s great “God Only Knows” is, no other word for it, a disgrace. His histrionic vocals, coupled with the industrial strength strings and big drums, turn what is one of the most heartfelt and simple songs ever recorded into a big shlock production number. Bowie was never the most sincere of singers, although he certainly had his moments, but on this one he gives you nothing—he’s performing the song, not feeling it, and it has zero emotional power.
The title track is another reggae-flavored number. It’s turgid, a cliche, and co-lead vocalist Tina Turner adds nothing—her fiery tonsils seem to have been removed before she was allowed in the studio. And it too sinks in a quicksand of overly perky horns. The up-tempo “rocker” “Neighborhood Threat” was written by Bowie, Pop, and Ricky Gardiner and falls into the category of Folie à trois. Without the eighties studio trappings and played with even a modicum of ferocity it might have stood and delivered—instead it sinks under the weight of eight hundred coats of glossy studio varnish. The guitar has muscle, but the drumbeat is the sound of the eighties in all their predictability, the backing vocalists weigh the song down, and the only threat I can detect is to my sanity. “Blue Jean” at least features an impassioned Bowie vocal performance, but what it sounds like to me is a desperate attempt to recapture the minor glory of “China Girl”—the only Bowie song I can listen to recorded during the lost years he spent creatively blinded by the stage lights of popular success.
Bowie and Pop also collaborated on “Tumble and Twirl,” a tooth-polish bright production number bloated by a lamentably chipper horn section and rendered sterile by its reliance on every dubious weapon in the eighties’ studio armamentarium. I can think of few things musically sadder than Bowie, who was always ahead of the pack, choosing instead to hide himself in the middle of it, as if terrified that the least hiccup of originality might draw the lethal attention of the vigilant tigers of commercial conformity.
Which brings us to closer “I Keep Forgettin’,” a Lieber-Stoller composition originally sung by Chuck Jackson in 1962. It’s the most interesting thing he does on Tonight, but alas, it sounds exactly like everything else on the album, pressed as it is into the narrow mold of those benighted times. There is no beauty without some strangeness in it’s proportion, to paraphrase Francis Bacon, and the old Bowie would have supplied it, but sonically fits seamlessly into the cookie-cutter production line of songs that come before it. Compare it to his cover of Jacques Brel’s “My Death”—or even to the least of the covers on 1973’s Pin Ups—and you’ll want to weep.
David Bowie was always a spearhead, but come Let’s Dance he gave those of us in awe of his ability to always be at the artistic forefront the shaft. He joined the mainstream in pursuit of megastardom, and it worked. Which in a weird sense was just another proof of his genius—selling out isn’t as easy as it looks. But there’s no ignoring the fact that the Man Who Sold the World had become the Man Who Sold His Soul. And by Tonight he’d even lost the knack for producing quality shlock. Slick, uninspired, vapid, empty—Tonight (and its successor) marked Bowie’s creative nadir. He had truly become the man who fell to earth, and his was a brutal landing.
Moonage Daydream does a brilliant job of illuminating the philosophy of a visionary artist. It’s a celebration, and Bowie warrants one. But Todd Haynes gave us a more nuanced portrait—he didn’t treat Bowie like a sacred cow whose career was one long uninterrupted creative adventure. He told the truth, and the truth honors Bowie the man in a way no panegyric ever will.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
