The POLL's Filthy Lesson: David Bowie "Outside"

I'm in two minds about this album. On one hand there's the horribly pretentious Art Crime/DB learns to use 'emboss' in Photoshop gubbins. OTOH there are some of Bowie's best 90's songs here.

Funny how we all agree on the good ones: "Thru These Architects' Eyes," "Hallo Spaceboy," "Strangers When We Meet," "I'm Deranged."

Let me put in a good word for "The Motel," which (finally!) sunk its claws in me when I watched Bowie's performance on the 2004 live DVD.

It was his best album since Scary Monsters at the time

My favourite Bowie album. It's "I'm Deranged" for me.

This record features several of Bowie's best collaborators so perfectly and prominently-- Zach's tiny, metal drumming, a scurrilous version of motorik that functions at 160 bpm, recorded on this album perfectly before Bowie decided to evolve the style into a drum-n-bass experiment; Mike Garson's finest piano solos, fulfilling and surpassing the possibilities hinted at on "Aladdin Sane"; Reeves Gabrels' guitar work throughout; and the man himself with his finest ever vocal performance.

The segues, even if they're there to "advance the shitty plot"-- I given't a shit about the plot-- they place these songs so effectively in a lively, closed world. It's "Blade Runner".

And also "yes totally" the Photoshop is the lame-o but Bowie did the cover too and the cover is rad

Mike Garson's finest piano solos, fulfilling and surpassing the possibilities hinted at on "Aladdin Sane"

You know what? I agree! Like on "The Voyeur..."

My favourite Bowie album.

Owen,

"A Small Plot of Land"

It's got the most stuff to listen to.

probably the last good thing eno was involved in as well. HFL for me

This is also Bowie's favourite Bowie album so Owen, all you want

<3

Funny how we all agree on the good ones: "Thru These Architects' Eyes," "Hallo Spaceboy," "Strangers When We Meet," "I'm Deranged."

Gotta put in a vote for "We Prick You" as well, more formal than some performances on the one hand but I love that quick, slippery arrangement. Also would definitely have to agree on the return of Garson just somehow working way better than I might have guessed initially.

Who here saw the tour with NIN? He was in his "I won't do the old hits, I said I wouldn't!" mode so he was doing things like radically reworked "Andy Warhol" and "The Man Who Sold the World" versions (presumably the latter in particular to escape the Nirvana unplugged take). About the only thing he did anything like the old stuff was a duet on "Under Pressure" with Gail Ann Dorsey as a show-closer. Meanwhile that left a lot of space for the new songs and I remember the overall performance being pretty sharp.

I didn't mention "No Control" -- a magnificent vocal, rightly praised by Eno.

lol I was sampling this on iTunes and the song is "We P**** You" on there

@ Ned that was my second ever "big show"

I've always dug "A Small Plot of Land."

Anyway, this may be one of Bowie's most inspired records, unfortunately marred by the fact that so many of its inspirations are kind of shit.

@ Ned that was my second ever "big show"

Nice. Mine was Hall and Oates in 1984.

@ Josh, what are its inspirations? I'm curious! One of the main reasons I stan for this records above all others is that I can't think of any other record that sounds quite like it, or even somewhat like it. I can hear Scott Walker and some retroactive David Sylvian in the vocal delivery, and Eno's definitely doing things he's done in other places, but I don't know of any other records that attempt the same style of music, this uhhh industrial lite, this same sense of gentle dread. It's somewhere between Killing Joke and Julee Cruise. (When I was a romantic teenager I chalked this uniqueness up to the success of Eno's oblique strategies).

Musically, I hear a lot of then de rigueur nods to industrial music, hard club music and other electronic stuff. To me, it dates it in an awkward sort of way (unlike, say, "The Downward Spiral," which I think has aged better, or "The Fragile," which has a lot in common with "Outside" but again is vastly superior, imo). Vocally, there's a lot to glom onto - I always hear Walker and Sylvian in Bowie, even though one was influence and the other influenced - but musically, I just don't think the music is up to the level of the musicianship. As far as improvised Eno-assisted records of this era, I greatly prefer "Wah Wah" by James.

Honestly, just about every song on this is great. Went "Thru' These Architects' Eyes" because it's simple and glorious -- tho it just as easily could've been "I'm Deranged" (Eno Dn'B) "I Have Not Been To Oxford Town" (catchy), "Heart's Filthy Lesson" (Lodger-esque in its melodic maximalism), "Small Plot of Land" (one of Eno's best edited improvs of the period), "No Control" (agreed, the operatic vocal is amazing), "The Motel" (languid, bleak romanticism). The list goes on and on.

Blade Runner is dead, dead on. As I'm wont to do in every thread that mentions Outside, I must confess my unreserved enjoyment of the "shitty plot." All of it--the cheap pitch harmonized spoken word, the 'shopped sleeve, the whole "goth hypercycle" subtitle--has always seemed to me to be entirely in keeping with his aesthetic and image to that point -- over the top, pansexual, tongue in cheek. Had Outside come immediately after Ziggy or his cross-dressing videos of the late-70s, would anyone so much have batted a false eyelash?

Is every song on this album meant to be part of the story? Some of them - "Thru' These Architects' Eyes" - seem to stand alone.

imho it's best if you don't think of the story too deeply. I don't think the shitty plot is shitty b/c of the conceptualization but the execution. Ziggy worked because it required no preamble, it was just a couple of photos and the songs.

"Outside", however, had a cast, non-chronological diary entries, the ghastly photos, the lyrics obscured by 'artwork'. It's too much for me to process. Even when I did try and puzzle it out I ended up with something that resembled "Twin Peaks"' solution too closely for me to feel good about it.

@ Josh, I don't personally find there to be too many similarities between NIN and Bowie, despite their tour together. "Wah Wah" is a cool record, for sure, but I literally cannot even begin to think about comparing Bowie's songs to Tim Booth's schnitz, like I can't even.

Do you really wanna go on like this?
Do you really wanna go on like this?
Do you really wanna go on like this?
Get to the bottom of the well

LOL

Whatever happened to the purported Contamination project, anyway?

Anyway, inspired by this thread and some of the comments here I just fired up the album in iTunes and did an on the fly playlist that ran like this:

"A Small Plot of Land"
"The Motel"
"No Control"
"The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)"
"We Prick You"
"I'm Deranged"
"Thru' These Architects Eyes"

By stripping out both the various segues as well as the singles and 'big' tracks, more or less, this reduction becomes a really enjoyable seven song experiment, with an ending that's as appropriate for this variation as "Strangers When We Meet" is for the album as a whole.

This was the first Boie album I ever heard; in my first year of sixth form I got talking with my English tutor about music after I wrote my first essay about The Beatles, or something, and we lent each other records a few times. I remember I lent him Screamadelica and The Stone Roses, and he lent my Nick Drake and Bowie; specifically this. I quite enjoyed it at the time, as I recall, and about.... 10, 11, 12 years later I bought myself a copy. I've not listened to it properly since I bought my own copy, though. I'll try and do so now.

Boie = Bowie, obv.

@ Ned. I don't think anybody knows!

The Outside sessions generated a tonne of material. Rough mixes exist and have been quietly passed around the Bowie fan community... "quietly" b/c I assume they were illicitly obtained. I've heard them and they are slow going.

I think the band went back to try out some new material and got too excited about "Earthling"s sound to keep the "Contamination" idea alive. Also, iirc, Bowie was talking a lot about "Contamination" but Eno made no mention of it?

The Basquiat soundtrack boasted a spare version of "A Small Plot of Land" -- Bowie and a synth pad -- that might be what Eno had in mind about having the guts to attempt minimalism.

xp I like the track that starts with DB saying "Andy, can I get a coffee? And another drummer."

A lot of the material that's circulated is from the big improvisation session they held before they went into the studio proper. Eno and Bowie have spoken somewhat grandiosely about that session -- but IIRC, all that made it onto the album was "I Am With Name" and some of the noodly background music used on the segues, as well as some lyrical ideas ("we'll creep together, you and I").

Re. minimalism, one of the things about Eno's diary from '95 (A Year With Swollen Appendices) that struck me was how limited Eno's time was in the mid- to later-stages of the recording. Like, a few days here and there but that's all. As a result, it sounds like Bowie just kept adding stuff and the mix became considerably busier than it would've been had it been Eno's to finish alone.

I'll check this out for the first time since it came out because of Owen's hard-stanning for it but I have to say when it came out I was, what, fourteen years into my listening relationship with Bowie, and Outside. felt like it was trying way too hard. I hate it when people accuse people of "trying too hard" -- what are people supposed to do? not try? -- but there was something about Outside.'s palpable desire to stay current that sort of felt forced to me. That said, I thought "Little Wonder" a couple years later was a fantastic song, and that one was even more transparently check-me-out-I'm-still-listening-to-what's-new, so...I should just listen again I guess. But I do wonder, of this album's champions here, how many had already been through a "fuck, I love David Bowie" phase earlier in their lives?

ty for "given't"!

I unreservedly love this record. Picking one is going to be tough, though my gut says "Thru These Architects' Eyes" should get the nod. I think the record as a whole is Bowie's last (some might say first) great set of vocal performances.

Mike Garson's finest piano solos, fulfilling and surpassing the possibilities hinted at on "Aladdin Sane"

This is a key observation by Ówen. For an "industrial" record this cleanly recorded piano is doing a lot of heavy lifting amidst the machines.

Note: I feel I ought to dock Outside some points for agreeing to the "I Have Not Been To Outer Space" abomination in Starship Troopers.

But I do wonder, of this album's champions here, how many had already been through a "fuck, I love David Bowie" phase earlier in their lives?]

Me! The Rykodisc reissues reinforced the love. Even bearing in mind that I overrated Outside as is our wont when a favorite artist releases a new album, it sounded pretty good if ponderous; and, yes, I agree Bowie Tried Too Hard in the late nineties. He'll admit it too (on hours he didn't try hard enough). Which is why I love Reality the most unreservedly: he was relaxed enough to weave the experiments of the nineties and the verities of age.

Ryko reissues cemented my fandom as well.

Another Ryko kid here.

I proudly was given Tonight for my 12th birthday. ;-)

Re. the Blade Runner analogy, my admiration for the spoken interludes notwithstanding, I also wonder if a reissue of this record without them (along the lines of Ridley Scott's Director's Cut) would improve the standing of this record's music. As noted many times upthread, it holds its own with the very best in Bowie's catalog.

Ryko fanatic here as well.
Personally I thought that 'Earthling' was far more of an attempt by DB to prove that he was still relevant. Maybe the industrial stuff on 'Outside' is sort of the same thing, but there's enough weirdness to deflect attention away from most charges of bandwagon jumping.

Owen, I wasn't comparing this to NIN or James's "Wah Wah" directly. Just that they're going for similar things: expansive industrial/electronic music and Eno jam session edits, respectively. In the case of Reznor, his sprawling epics don't sound like they're trying to squeeze themselves into a scene, but to my ears Bowie's does, which may be why an erstwhile concept album like "TheFragile" coheres to me, but "Outside" (an explicit concept album) does not. I'll always have time for Bowie, but I still think "Outside" sounds like a vision in search of an album. Industrial, cyberpunk ... this things don't necessarily suit to guy. Per Alfred, I think "Reality" and the other one (the last one?) did a much better job of sounding contemporary without sounding too on the nose.

I should note, as an aside, that I've begun to suspect Eno's method of working does not always work to the artist's advantage, especially major artists like U2 and Bowie. These guys are part of such huge machines that eventually the record must be done. Eno encourages free exploration, but he's not really on a schedule. The band, footing the bill to boot, is. As Eno has pointed out, there's not a single U2 record he's worked on that has not gone down to the wire, and sometimes the band is on a creative upswing when they finish, sometimes not. I wouldn't be surprised if Eno encouraged Bowie to pursue all these different ideas but then sort of left him hanging, as the auteur in chief, to bring them to completion. Which, obviously, he didn't do.

u2 have never been on a 'creative upswing', ever

to me the thing that happened with Bowie after Scary Monsters is he stopped making albums - every album afterwards has a song or two to remind you that he kicks ass, but every album afterwards also has the sort of filler that's absent from (at minimum) the Hunky Dory through Scary Monsters run. I don't really like the instrumental stuff on Low and Heroes, but it serves the records; it contributes. After Scary Monsters, the stuff that isn't "Little Wonder" or "Thursday's Child" (which hasn't aged well, but which is a good song in my opinion) isn't just stuff I don't like as much: it's stuff I'd rather not hear.

also thomp otm the problem w/U2 is that they are horrible, not that their schedules are too tight in the studio

Here's where we part company. There's plenty of filler in his classic seventies run!

To my ears I can still judge an album "excellent" or "worth a listen" even if half of it is...problematic (Scary Monsters) or flawed from conception (Diamond Dogs).

"Changes" – 3:37
"Oh! You Pretty Things" – 3:12
"Eight Line Poem" – 2:55
"Life on Mars?" – 3:53
"Kooks" – 2:53
"Quicksand" – 5:08
Side two
"Fill Your Heart" (Biff Rose, Paul Williams) – 3:07
"Andy Warhol" – 3:56
"Song for Bob Dylan" – 4:12
"Queen Bitch" – 3:18
"The Bewlay Brothers" – 5:22

^^^ the only song that's not REALLY GOOD here is "Song for Bob Dylan"!

ixnay to "Eight Line Poem" and "Fill Your Heart."

Diamond Dogs doesn't hold together as a concept but lookee here:

"Future Legend" – 1:05
"Diamond Dogs" – 5:56
"Sweet Thing" – 3:39
"Candidate" – 2:40
"Sweet Thing (reprise)" – 2:31
"Rebel Rebel" – 4:30
Side two
"Rock 'n' Roll with Me" (lyrics: Bowie, music: Bowie, Warren Peace) – 4:00
"We Are the Dead" – 4:58
"1984" – 3:27
"Big Brother" – 3:21
"Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family" – 2:00

these are all good, the only one I skip is "Rebel Rebel" because it's been played to death!

xp how, how can a person hate on "Fill Your Heart," it is lovely. I bet that no matter how long it's been since you listened to it, you can sing it from memory.

also the "Fill Your Heart" strings arrangement is TERRIFIC!

I dislike more than half of DD, sorry. I know consensus now regards it as a meisterwerk.

he had a rough entry to the 21st Century.

strangers when we meet

prob my favorite bowie song

The kind of malignant disinterest borne of too much money:

http://allmusic.galeon.com/caratulas/d/david_bowie_-_hours-back.jpg

I like how neatly his albums are divided by 1980, if I'm counting correctly, 12 before, 12 after? Including Tin Machine and Buddha?

Josh: interesting points, thanks for elaborating! I agree that cyberpunk doesn't necessarily "suit the guy" but that's part of why I love "Outside" (and "Nite Flights", and "Blemish") so much

I don't think of 70s Bowie as being filler-free, but I would say to Bowie's immense credit that "Hunky Dory", "Ziggy Stardust" and "Station to station" are marred only by the songs that aren't Bowie.

I prefer the Outside version of "Strangers..."

The kind of malignant disinterest borne of too much money

That's right, he'd already done the Bowie Bonds thing by that point, hadn't he? (Talk about cashing in at JUST the right time.)

And indeed:

Bowie Bonds are asset-backed securities of current and future revenues of the 25 albums (287 songs) that David Bowie recorded before 1990.

Issued in 1997, the bonds were bought for US$55 million by the Prudential Insurance Company. The bonds paid an interest rate of 7.9% and had an average life of ten years, a higher rate of return than a 10-year Treasury note (at the time, 6.37%). Royalties from the 25 albums generated the cash flow that secured the bonds' interest payments. Prudential also received guarantees from Bowie's label, EMI Records, which had recently signed a $30m deal with Bowie.

By forfeiting ten years worth of royalties, David Bowie was able to receive a payment of US$55 million up front. Bowie used this income to buy songs owned by his former manager. Bowie's combined catalog of albums covered by this agreement sold more than 1 million copies annually at the time of the agreement.

The Bowie Bond issuance was perhaps the first instance of intellectual property rights securitization. The securitization of the collections of other artists, such as James Brown, Ashford & Simpson and the Isley Brothers, later followed. These Bonds are named Pullman Bonds after David Pullman, the banker who pushed the original Bowie deal.

In March 2004, Moody's Investors Service lowered the bonds from an A3 rating (the seventh highest rating) to Baa3, one notch above junk status. This downgrade was prompted by lower-than-expected revenue "due to weakness in sales for recorded music." A downgrade to an unnamed company that guarantees the issue was also cited as a reason for the downgrade.

The success of Apple's iTunes and other legal online music retailers has led to a renewed interest in Bowie and Pullman Bonds.

He got what he wanted: $55 million for his daughter and his back catalog.

Can't blame him, really.

This webpage'll take you back:

http://www.pullmanco.com/dbb.htm

Is there any other comparable artist still alive (or band still active) with such complete control of their back catalog and who started in the sixties? The Rolling Stones didn't get their label going until the early seventies, and the only things Bowie is missing are the self-titled debut from 1967 and the earliest singles, though maybe he finally snagged those as well.

Zappa?

though he's obviously passed.

But the family trust keeps mining for gold (and finding lots so far).

so, nobody.

the Stones do own their catalog, no?

Fripp has control of the King Crimson catalog, though the band isn't active now and probably won't be again.

the Stones do own their catalog, no?

when has anyone been able to pry anything out of Allen Klein's hands...?

the Stones do own their catalog, no?

As muttered, only from early 70s forward.

this album is great

mike garson is just thundering down all over this shit

the segues are horrifying / man why couldn't they just leave them alone and let them be interstitial jams

read that as intestinal jams

baby grace definitely resembles an intestinal jam

BABY GRACE IS A COLON

the only bad thing about this album are the spoken bits which are dumb now

WHY DOES EVERYONE KEEP SAYING THIS? THEY ARE FUNNY. FOR GOD'S SAKE, IT'S BOWIE PLAYING AN OLD MAN, A LITTLE GIRL, A NOIR-ISH DETECTIVE (named after a German kabbalist!), AND A HOMICIDAL DOMINATRIX!! HOW IS THAT NOT AWESOME?!?

"The Heart's Filthy Lesson" was the last genuinely great thing the man did.

Has everyone heard the Something Really Fishy boot? About 50 minutes of outtakes and jams from the Outside sessions (I believe they may predate formal recording for what became the album; net seems to think they were edited out of the initial 3 1/2 hour jam session). Interestingly weird.

Not often I'll praise Bowie lyrics but in "Strangers When We Meet" he uses the cut-up thing to devastating effect. I love the "I'm in clover/heel head over" outro.

"The Heart's Filthy Lesson" was the last genuinely great thing the man did.

Another song that often gets overlooked on this record is the title track. Great sense of drama and an incredible crescendo to the climax.

I prefer "Outside" to THFL but think that both songs are fantastic sounds looking for tunes, if that makes sense; they're too wedded to Bowie's addled concept.

"Hallo Spaceboy". Although the PSB version is better.

I've never seen this, has anyone else?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spb8bhuKDdQ

Wow, that edgy interview style has aged about as well as this album.

That was a fun set of videos! I'd never seen them before. Thanks.

Funny, I'm almost getting the sense that Josh has some unpleasant feelings about this album.

Ha, it's not that bad! Tbh, I haven't listened to it in years. Most of all, I felt really disappointed that a long in the waiting re-team with Eno - and a full collab at that - proved so hit or miss. There's always been stuff about this album that I liked. But then, there's stuff I like about Tin Machine, too, which Bowie addresses in that clip.

For what it's worth, it's also at this point (coincidence or no) that Eno's production began to pay far fewer dividends.

thought this awesome at 15 and kind of lame at 20 and it might have worked its way back around to awesome now, i wonder if i still have a copy

does "i'm in clover / head heel over" really strike anyone as a cutup? what

not a great example, only because it was too early/late to quote lyrics (the correct lyric btw is "heel head over"). Here's a better example:

Blank screen TV
Preening ourselves in the snow
Forget my name
But I'm over you
Blended sunrise
And it's a dying world
Humming Rheingold
We scavenge up our clothes

obv when forced into coherence by the title concept Bowie's vocal rhythms and key changes (those unexpected melismas beside Sinatra-esque talk-singing) it doesn't look so cut-up.

*title concept AND

maybe he just didn't cut the bits of paper small enough

1995 the last time people used scissors iirc

lol apparently he had a custom mac application called "Verbasiser"

The quality of this is for shit, but also kind of interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nadP79bR6Ig

"The Heart's Filthy Lesson" was the last genuinely great thing the man did.

Madness.
This is fantastic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtNAXxwn-I

^^^ love that one. I'll poll Heathen next.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv6mEv_rDdE

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Think I may change my vote to "I'm Deranged" -- while "Architects" is probably my favorite song, "Deranged" feels more uniquely Outside with its Eno-fied jungle production.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I'm in clover