The Not so often Formerly Daily Bowie - #76 - "Zeroes"

The Not so often Formerly Daily Bowie - #76 - "Zeroes"

Hi there, welcome the former Daily Bowie that is now the very intermittent and can I even do two in a row Bowie, especially since I originally set this one up for Monday 1608.22 and now it's Thursday 1608.25.

I am going to try to post more often.

We miss you, David.

It seems fitting to come back after almost a month between Bowie posts with a song called "Zeroes" that features the line "It doesn't matter, what you try to do" repeated over and over.

DAVID BOWIE

NEVER LET ME DOWN

The entry in PUSHING AHEAD OF THE DAME - "ZEROES" is great and does a good job of refuting Bowie's own claim describing "'Zeroes' as stripping away all the meanness of rock and coming back to the spirit with which one entered the thing. It’s the ultimate happy-go-lucky rock tune, based in the nonsensical period of psychedelia. So it’s a naivete song about rock, using a lot of cliches.”

The article is worth a read, here's what follows that quote and serves as a good taste for what can be found via the link:

 It’s always a mug’s game to accept a composer’s description of his/her work as gospel, and this quote is such a misreading that it seems like a deliberate feint, much as how Bowie regularly knocked “The Bewlay Brothers” for being gibberish. Because there’s little that’s “happy-go-lucky” in the song, which opens with demonic, distorted screams in lieu of actual audience noises, and whose first verse and chorus is a sharp self-assessment of Bowie’s battered aesthetic condition and where he stood in regard to “The Sixties.”

The latter, by 1986-1987, had been cast into a hollow, brightly-colored tomb, a ceremonial contrast to the political and cultural mood of the era. “The Sixties” was an opposition party happily exiled to the past. And while a number of underground bands were exploring the legacy of “nonsensical psychedelia” and appropriating pieces of it for their own ends, the official “Sixties” narrative was used to shame the allegedly frivolous and/or derivative pop music of the Eighties. There was a sense, pushed by the “classic rock” radio stations and the major rock magazines (blessedly not Spin, the oasis of the era), of Sixties music as being a perfected strain of rock & roll, the High Canon, to which no music afterward could be compared. All that was left for younger musicians was to pay homage, and for Sixties survivors to occasionally reunite and demonstrate “real” music to kids.

In “Zeroes” Bowie tries to position himself, shiftily as usual, as someone who had been both part of the era and yet always outside of it, and one who was trying to escape the decade’s long shadow while simultaneously exploiting it.


"Zeroes" - NEVER LET ME DOWN - 1987



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Rest in peace, David. We miss you.

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1608.25 -  9:14

NOTE ON WHY THE DAILY BOWIE IS NO LONGER DAILY: For 53 days, I completed daily Bowie posts. My schedule is too demanding to make a post every day, so this will now be a feature that is called The Daily Bowie, but it will not be daily. I will post as I can. I will post often. But if I miss a day, I will skip it. Otherwise, I get in the position of making five Bowie posts all in one day, and that's a lot of Bowie for people to swallow all at once... (yeah, leaving that badly phrased, innuendo packed statement. I bet Bowie would have laughed at it).