This is the dream of every reviewer, you ask the artist about his last album, and he sends you a series of words that you can use for your review? What I am talking about?
Rick Moody, a writer for The Rumpus, an online magazine focused on culture and politics, is obviously a big fan of David Bowie – he even admits he has ‘an obsessive-compulsive fixation on Bowie’s work’ – and somehow, he managed to persuade ‘David Bowie to part with a few words on the subject of this album’, meaning ‘The Next Day’. How the hell did he manage this tour de force? Did he email Bowie? Did he tweet him? Facebook him? I don’t know, but this is how Moody described it:
‘I persuaded Bowie, somehow, to give me a sort of a work flow diagram for The Next Day, because I wanted to think about it in light of what he was thinking about it, I wanted to understand the lexicon of The Next Day, and so I simply asked if he would provide this list of words about his album, assuming, like everyone else waving madly trying to get his attention, that there was not a chance in hell that I would get this list, because who the fuck am I, some novelist killing time writing occasionally about music, and yet astonishingly the list appeared, and it appeared without further comment, which is really excellent, and exactly in the spirit of this album, and the list is far better than I could ever have hoped, and it’s exactly like Bowie, at least in my understanding of him, impulsive, intuitive, haunted, astringent, and incredibly ambitious in the matter of the arts; Bowie is a conceptual artist, it seems to me, who just happens to work in the popular song, and he wants to make work that goes somewhere new, and this is amply demonstrated by the list.’
Wow, yeah, who the fuck he is to get Bowie’s attention? (Editors Note: Rick Moody wrote “The Ice Storm”) Here is this list:
‘Effigies
Indulgences
Anarchist
Violence
Chthonic
Intimidation
Vampyric
Pantheon
Succubus
Hostage
Transference
Identity
Mauer
Interface
Flitting
Isolation
Revenge
Osmosis
Crusade
Tyrant
Domination
Indifference
Miasma
Pressgang
Displaced
Flight
Resettlement
Funereal
Glide
Trace
Balkan
Burial
Reverse
Manipulate
Origin
Text
Traitor
Urban
Comeuppance
Tragic
Nerve
Mystification’
Some interesting words, and I can’t imagine Moody’s excitation! He wrote a long paragraph for each word as a theme and ‘The Next Day’ as the subject, and the result is very long as you can imagine. But what else could he have done?
So I had never truly imagine Bowie as an anarchist because he is ‘making songs without choruses, songs without hooks, and without end rhymes’, but vampyric wasn’t a surprise and it sounds even more gothic with a y. There is also a series of cryptic or weird words like Chthonic, Succubus, Mauer, Pressgang, Comeuppance, and Mr. Moody goes into great lengths to cover everything. Overall, this is a very good and helpful start for a review, I guess this is a first, music writers should try this more often, they may get as lucky as he was!
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