occasional dream, fifteen

Touch the fullness of her breast, feel the love of her caress, she will be your living end… I may be a little down on Aladdin Sane at the moment, but Lady Grinning Soul is one of the finest songs Bowie ever did, one where he really comes into his own as a vocalist.  Part of Bowie’s distinct genius comes from his ability to achieve emotional immediacy within a more generally detached standpoint.  If this seems contradictory, it is.  It’s a funny little trick he pulls off.  He filters everything through performance, adopting the McLuenesque conceit that the medium is the message, and this gives things an element of artifice and fakery, yet he makes each of his incarnations feel like organic outgrowths of who he is, even though a clear concept of who he is elusive. This pretzel logic of personality, if you will, peaks with the Berlin trilogy, where Bowie’s pain and alienation cross a threshold into stunted numbness, only occasionally breaking out into a full venting of human suffering, but always at the precise moment where the acute emotionality will achieve maximum impact, most memorably from the third verse of ‘Heroes’ onwards.  The capacity to be at once distant and intimate is another unifying aspect of Bowie’s best work, and Lady Grinning Soul certainly fits into this category.  The song feels like an elegy to a fallen age, She’ll come, she’ll go.  But the end of the glitter era, the death of Ziggy Stardust, isn’t mournful.  On the contrary, it’s pregnant with new possibilities…