Glum Glam

I was talking to a friend of mine recently about the fact that the legacies of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean seem to have little do with their movies. For example, if you had never seen a Marilyn Monroe movie you might be inclined to think she was some kind of precursor to Madonna: An oversexed, overrated pin-up who just couldn't help herself. Had you never seen one of the three James Dean movies, you might be inclined to think that he was an aloof, macho playboy with a death wish. They may have been all of those things and more, but not on the evidence of their movies alone.Upon a recent viewing of Rebel Without a Cause I was struck at how innocent and vulnerable Dean appeared. Similarly, Monroe naive so straight in her movies, I'm not entirely convinced she was acting.

These tiny revelations got me thinking about the relationship between similarly legendary pop artists and their classic albums, like David Bowie and Low. Eager for a certain level of respectability, critics and other artists alike routinely name-drop Low to refer to . . . well, I'm not entirely certain. Warm layers of distorted guitars with lots of tremolo? Swirling, somewhat extra-terrestrial-sounding keyboards? Reverberatingly empty snare drum sounds? General ambient haze?

The truth is, not all of these indie rock signatures are found on Low, but I didn't know that until quite recently. I knew the album's avatars so well, I had never even bothered to listen to it.

In a game of word association, the first that had always come to mind regarding Low was always Eno, not even Bowie. Strange, since Brian Eno didn't produce the record. I account my default to Brian Eno to two sources:

1) My awareness of his presence on the album led me to suspect, quite naturally I think, that he acted as producer on the album.

2) Having combined the ingredients of other Eno-produced albums, as well as those reported to be indebted to Low, I readily imagined an uneasy balance of Music for Airports, Loveless, and Ziggy Stardust.

All of this before hearing a single note on the album. In fact, a very adroit Tony Visconti produced the album, inventing new rock vocabulary with the album's unique drum sound. There is little in the way of guitars ala Loveless or Ziggy Stardust, and Eno doesn't really make his presence known until Side B.

My confusion might have been a blessing in disguise, because my mind was, in no uncertain terms, blown when I finally did hear it. It was much, much weirder than I thought it would be. Given its title and reputation, I expected a real slow-burning downer. Instead, I discovered that if one were so inclined, he could dance to "Speed of Life." There's even a disco intermission at around the 1:00 minute. The same cannot be said of anything in, say, Billy Corgan's TheFutureEmbrace, a "low"-ly descedent of Bowie's work. Followed by "Breaking Glass" and "What in the World," Low begins to sound more and more like a deranged party record. And what's more fun than the glam-funk of "Be My Wife?"

Enter Brian Eno.

"Warszawa," stumbling in just past the mid-point, is a six-minute space epic that never returns the album back to earth. Low closes with four instrumental tracks in a row. But it was that sudden transition to Enoland that undercut my expectations most violently and ultimately makes the album a trip . . . in every sense of the word. One minute you're high on a rooftop in West Berlin (Low is the first in Bowie's Berlin Trilogy), the next you're in an arid antechamber of depression, the "low" after the "high," and also the Low that has been cannonized. It turns out, it's an art album after all, adopting a bi-polar aesthetic of brilliant light and sudden dark to reflect Bowie's own existential crisis and fragile emotional state. Some things really are exactly as they seem.

Weird, though; the only parts that seem to have been distilled from it to other, more recent attempts at pop art like Corgan's TheFutureEmbrace and Elefant's The Black Magic Show are the depressing bits (more on the latter album later!). Leave it to the perpertually self-serious to glean only the glum from glam.