A Sense of Doubt blog post #3626 - BOWIE MONTH - Thoughts on "Ashes to Ashes" via Adam Steiner's book: Silhouettes and Shadows - The Secret History of David Bowie's Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3626 - BOWIE MONTH - Thoughts on "Ashes to Ashes" via Adam Steiner's book: Silhouettes and Shadows - The Secret History of David Bowie's Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

New feature; BOWIE MONTH for now and for next January.

Also, new feature as I report back and comment on this book I have read: 

Adam Steiner's book: Silhouettes and Shadows - The Secret History of David Bowie's Scary Monsters and Super Creeps.

LINK TO KINDLE

I have plans for several of these segments on Steiner's book plus two other music-centric books: one by Nick Cave and another by Sinéad O'Connor.

As I have written before, when I first put David Bowie's 1980s album Scary Monsters and Super Creeps on my turntable, I was turned off. What was this noise? Why was there screaming? Why screaming in Japanese? It totally was outside of my experience with music, and so I hated it.

We reject the things we fear, right?

I wasn't ready to be a Bowie fan yet.

That was in the summer or early fall of 1980.

A year later, in the Fall of 1981, I was so deep in the Bowie fandom that his music was my main soundtrack, one album after another, though I did not own them all yet.

In 1981, I couldn't just look up his discography on Wikipedia; my sources of information were mainly record stores, a few magazine articles, and word of mouth (other people's collections).

In late Fall quarter 1981, I had been assigned a crucial essay for my American Literature I course on the character of Pip in the novel Moby Dick, and I had no clue what to write.

Clearly, as a mode of procrastination and cry for help to the very cool professor whom I adored, since

I was listening to a lot of David Bowie music, and smoking a ton of pot (and hash), I wrote a killer essay on David Bowie's music, the album Scary Monsters and Super Creeps (by then my favorite), and primarily the song (also my favorite) "Ashes to Ashes." However, instead of naming this essay "Ashes to Ashes" or using some lyric, like "The Shrieking of Nothing is Killing Me" (my favorite line), I called it "Yassassin" because I had just bought the 1979 album Lodger, and I was listening to it non-stop. The liner notes informed me that "Yassassin" meant "long live" in Turkish, and I was trying to be a cosmopolitan, metropolitan, culturally-aware intellectual, so this word, that I fantasized that my professor did not know and so would be impressed with me appealed to me as the best title for the essay.

I wrote about much of this here:

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3263 - SoD Reprint of #1987 - The first time I heard David Bowie - Musical Monday for 2007.27

I am hoping that the essay survives in my filing cabinets in a storage facility in Michigan, awaiting transport and storage out here: I have space in my home. However, I am not sure if I do still have it. This was in the days before computers, composed on a typewriter... though don't get me started on how I threw away a bunch of diskettes that I thought were all backed up!!!

So, in 2023, when I once again validated that subscribing to far too many newsletters often pays off when POST PONK MONK told me about a book analyzing David Bowie's 1980 album Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, as I had tried to do in five or six pages in 1981, I had to own it and eventually I started reading it.

I described the start of that journey here during last year's BOWIE MONTH:

Saturday, January 20, 2024

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3259 - Silhouettes and Shadows - new book on Bowie's Scary Monsters album

And so when I chose to start the book in earnest, instead of cherry picking little nuggets, in the determination to finish it, on a trip  to Iceland and England, I started not at the beginning, but at the chapter on "Ashes to Ashes."

I was inspired and strongly influenced by Steiner's lush, lyrical, illustrative language as he describes and analyzes my favorite David Bowie song and what I believe to be among his ten best.

Steiner focuses very effectively on the MUSIC.

When I wrote about Bowie and this song, I almost ignored the music and instead explicated the lyrics as a warning against drug addiction that may bring on hallucinations ("The shrieking of nothing"), frightening and irreversible health effects ("ain't got no hair), and a sense of utter futility ("Want an axe to break the ice, want to come down right now").

Steiner describes the sound with language so rich in imagery and invention that it's almost poetry.

Why didn't I do that in 1981?

I wasn't ready yet.

The sluice of water imagery and sound descriptions evoke many associations before we even get into the lyrics. I love the "breath of tides," which may be the phrase that prompted me to get out my notebook and start writing down some of these images to use in poems (and I did take that one and work into a poem that will be the topic of a future post).

I am not sure that I agree that the song pushes the listener away due to "deliberate obfuscating." I never felt this way about it. I felt that the song drew me in as whispered confession in the box with the priest on the other side of the screen.

It does have an otherworldly quality that manifests through sounds as the song wheezes into being in those opening seconds.

To my ear, the guitars are whirring not grinding and the whole thing has a toy music box quality as if it had been over-wound far too many times and will never unwind in quite the right away ever again.

But the introduction of Bowie's voice as both far away and close-whispered in the ear is exactly what I hear as well. And just because I disagree with Steiner's imagery does not make him wrong or the book a piece of trash. I love his book and his writing; I just hear it all a little differently.

I don't hear the neon, but I feel the gloom. The neon infuses the video, though, which may be the root of Steiner's image. Instead I hear that old organ grind far in the distance, the wind-up musical engine tinking and chirping like a xylophone made for a toddler. I am not sure I hear the scything down the fretboard as much as I do hear the stabbing of bass, but Steiner's language overwhelms my senses and makes me want to read it all over and over again.

I do like Steiner's description of Bowie's voice, though I am not sure I hear a call for salvation so much as a lament for someone's "fall to earth."

The lines: "I've loved all I've needed, love/ Sordid details following" that appear early in the song were among my favorites to sing along. I felt that they were the cry of defeat from someone who had given away his heart only to have it trampled upon, crushed, mangled, and mutilated. Throughout my life, as I loved and lost, these lines were a strong mantra. Is this the last time? I have loved and lost yet again, is that the last one? Have I loved all that I have needed? In years of listening, I did not "hear" the comma. I hear it as "I've loved all I've needed love," which is quite different than "I've loved all I've needed, love" as if Bowie (or Major Tom here) is addressing someone as "love" (common Brit slang) rather than putting an end to loving it's more, in that case, of an end for now.

I do hear the guitar chord strike through the haze before the first lyric.

I never heard a Bowie voice stripped of its humanity. I heard Bowie as himself and Major Tom as despondent, tired, struggling to kick his drug habits, dealing with his own pain and trauma.

But I do like Steiner's analysis in the above footnote (see where it derives in the previous passage), even if Bowie is just transmitting to the listener from far away, he's distant and unreachable at the very least, a radio broadcast tuned in on the dial where no station should be, a ghostly sound in the night with nightmarish echoes of other worlds and other monstrosities howling in and out of the garbled broadcast.

I see a lot of what Steiner writes in the passage above about radio broadcasts, ghostly nostalgia, and even childhood concerns now after reading his entire chapter on "Ashes to Ashes." For instance, I did not know what or who "Action Man" was. I assumed Bowie had made it up.

Didn't know about Action Man.

Even though I disagree on some interpretations, my adoration of my favorite song -- "Ashes to Ashes" -- is impassioned and enflamed by Steiner's chapter and book.

More Bowie posts on parts of the book and other things forthcoming.

Thanks for tuning in.

Ashes to Ashes | David Bowie + Lyrics

THESE POSTS AGAIN BECAUSE, WELL, JUST BECAUSE...

Last Year's Bowie mix

Take Back This Fear - David Bowie Mix for 2402.12

in 

Monday, February 12, 2024

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3282 - "Take Back This Fear" - a new mix of David Bowie music for Music Monday 2402.12

Also, a post about my favorite Bowie album.

Thursday, June 3, 2021

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2298 - Scary Monsters at 40

My entry for the book series (I would have submitted had I known) "First Time I Heard..."

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3263 - SoD Reprint of #1987 - The first time I heard David Bowie - Musical Monday for 2007.27

Thursday, January 18, 2024

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3257 - All the Bowie Albums and my TOP TEN

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2501.22 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3490 days ago & DAD = 146 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.