From All Angles: The Return Of David Bowie

Once again, David Bowie has cultural antennas twitching – this time with the release of his first album in a decade. But the attention lavished on The Next Day (“He’s back!”, “Tilda Swinton!”, “It’s quite good!”) doesn’t end with the music. The music journalist equivalent of an arms race has broken out amongst newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, as commissioning editors wheel out the big guns, summoning the superstar graduates of the now mythical London music press. Whose take on Bowie should you approvingly reference? Allow a music journalism tragic who owns books by all three writers to explain the candidates and their contributions, for our first instalment of From All Angles.

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Name: Paul Morley

Article: How Bowie Changed The Way We Think, The Telegraph (UK)

Background: A nervy Northerner who could (and did) dash off one thousand ambitious words on a 7-inch single, Morley – or ‘Maul Poorly’, as detractors called him – arrived at the New Music Express in 1977, freaked out readers with his labyrinthine prose, featured in the clip to ABC’s ‘The Look Of Love’, helped formulate Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and later wrote a book, Words And Music, that uses a Kylie Minogue android as the starting point for a summation of pop music.

Crux of article: Focusing on both The Next Day and David Bowie Is, a new exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Morley sketches Bowie as a creative catalyst, absent from popular culture’s everyday ebbs but deeply influential. He includes his touchstone term – “futurists” – and in typical Morley style references himself, due to his contribution to the exhibition. He identifies Bowie as a precursor to Google and a successor to celebrity’s tired conformity; you’re never short of ideas in a Paul Morley piece.

$2-a-word sentence: “It’s a riveting blend of the obvious and the cryptic, of rock’s classically comforting emotional power and its stranger, more disturbing qualities.”

Suitable Bowie soundtrack: ‘Always Crashing In The Same Car’

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Name: Simon Reynolds

Article: The Singer Who Fell To Earth, The New York Times

Background: A comparative youngster at just 49-years-old, the baby-faced Reynolds joined one of the world’s first music weeklies, Melody Maker, in the mid-1980s and connected various theorists to oceanic rock and hip-hop before shipping off to Manhattan and immersing himself in electronic music and club culture. Reynolds maintains a widely admired blog and a daunting knowledge of music, which he marshals with scientific zeal; the best of his books is 2005’s Rip It Up And Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-1984.

Crux of article: In an extended dissection of The Next Day, Reynolds contrasts the immortality of fame and the very real allusions to mortality in this late-era work from Mr. Bowie (yes, Mr. Bowie – welcome to the NYT, bitch). These “closely braided themes” are opened into an exploration of Bowie the perpetual reinventor, whose resurgent influence now reaches the likes of Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj. Reynolds, befitting his employer, is concise and detailed – but then, unlike Bowie, flights of fancy have never been his thing.

$2-a-word sentence: “What he was really developing during the ’70s was a new postmodern psychology based around flux and mutability.”

Suitable Bowie soundtrack: ‘Ashes To Ashes’

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Name: Jon Savage

Article: When Bowie Met Burroughs, The Guardian

Background: Author of the magisterial England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols And Punk Rock, Savage is the Cambridge-educated trainee solicitor who embraced punk via a fanzine and then Sounds in 1977. An initial staff member at The Face who occasionally still classes up Mojo, he’s a critic with an historian’s eye who dissects British youth and gay culture and taught a generation of aspiring music journalists that it was perfectly fine to throw around the term “psychogeography”.

Crux of article: Typically precise, Savage focuses on the crucial role played by Bowie’s meeting in November 1973 with then underground icon William S. Burroughs, the Beat Generation author of The Naked Lunch. By the time Rolling Stone published the dialogue the following February, Bowie was already outstripping his imitators and deliberately drawing to a close his first flush of Ziggy Stardust-era pop stardom. Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and Burroughs’ The Wild Boys are punk precursors, intertwined in the movement as Bowie moved through his most restless, productive decade of creativity.

$2-a-word sentence: “This was deliberate: Bowie had become a leader but, as he had written, the leader is always deserted by his followers. The trick was to withdraw before they deserted you.”

Suitable Bowie soundtrack: ‘Rebel Rebel’

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