occasional dream, one

On my just completed trip back to New York City for the Thanksgiving holiday, I had occasion, once again, to contemplate the magnificence of David Bowie, from his early days as Davy Jones, a maker of somewhat canned sounding Mod pop, up through songs and albums released within the past ten years. I wrote somewhat extensively (and turgidly, truth be told) about Bowie on my previous blog, which I discontinued in the midst of my 19th nervous breakdown. I was focused back then on albums, but in the time since then I’ve become much more interested in thinking about specific songs apart from the albums on which they appear, so I think I might occasionally post a few thoughts on Bowie songs that continue to capture my imagination, even after all these years of hearing them again and again and again. …Bowie is one of the few artists for whom I will make exceptions to my growing intolerance for explicitly conceptual music, progressive rock, and songs that are hard, heavy, and/or stretched out and windy. …Nowadays when people meet me and ask me what kind of music I like, I tell them that I like guitar-driven pop, and David Bowie. And in a strange twist of taste, it’s precisely when Bowie is at his poppiest that his music is least compelling to me. I’m thinking here of what I regard to be his roughly decade-long ‘lost period,’ spanning from Let’s Dance up to but not including Black Tie, White Noise. I would also include his Tin Machine albums with the lost period. I don’t know why he ever thought it would be a good idea to go grunge. …I had an opportunity to speak with my sister at some length about Bowie while I was staying with her in the Big Apple, and one of the things we both marveled at is that, in spite of the dizzying diversity of musical styles that Bowie has either adopted and made his own or, in some cases, pioneered, there’s an overarching unity to the body of work as a whole. I’m talking here about a David Bowie sound, as it were, a distinct musical thrust that glues together everything from his earliest Swinging London recordings onward. I gave a lot of thought on the flight home Monday to how to articulate the nature of this sound more precisely. More than anything else, I think it comes down to common melodic structures. I looked up a bunch of Bowie guitar tabs on the internet the other night and, sure enough, there are certain things he’s done repeatedly from the very beginning to his most recent recordings. I’m not a musician, so I can’t really describe what he’s doing technically except to say that he’s quite fond of Major 7th chords, and he often likes to substitute a minor chord for a major chord even though the latter would be more conventionally appropriate. I think these compositional tendencies are what give the music its distinct feel, one that’s at once forlorn and ethereal. His songs generally have very unusual progressions with plenty of weird chords or little surprises that take things off the beaten path, much in the same way that you tend to get with the Beatles. And it’s the strangeness of the music, it’s flair for the unexpected, that makes it so enduring. It occurred to me yesterday that the David Bowie sound is generally dissonant, but perhaps part of his genius lies in his capacity to make dissonance sound catchy and infectiously tuneful. …Much of this is, of course, merely mental masturbation on my part, but what else would you expect? I am and always will be Bowie’s biggest fan, not least because his music is so rich and meaningful and thought provoking both in form and content. I just wanna know everything there is to know about how the songs are conceived and executed, what the approach is, who the players are, what the vibe is like in the studio, and how it all reflects some larger social, cultural and/or historical context. I’ll see if I can get at some of this in a weekly feature, an occasional dream, at least for as long as I have the energy.

Originally, I wanted to start out with a few Davy Jones recordings, but I couldn’t find any on Youtube, nor could I find any from Bowie’s 1967 debut as Bowie, so the first one comes from Space Oddity, which is actually a very interesting collection of songs. The music is undeniably based in folk, and there are quite strong hints of the direction he’ll go in for The Man Who Sold the World. The recurrent melodic tendencies I alluded to just now are already in place. The song is the work of an exceedingly English, somewhat posh space hippy, searching for a stable identity and perhaps coming to the realization that stability is far too ordinary for someone with his talent and predisposition…