How would you rate "Outside" (1995) by David Bowie?

I think he struggled through the Eighties trying to replicate the success of Let's Dance. That's where all the Tina Turner duets and Glass Spider nonsense came from. Becoming a global superstar is a helluva drug and he who rides a tiger.... But in the end, he need not have feared dismounting as the tiger took it upon itself to give him the heave-ho. And for this we are grateful as it led to an artistic rejuvenation..

D.D.

 

That's what was a shock with Let's Dance - before that he was flawless - but LD turned off so many. I mentioned upthread that LD was seen as a sequel to Young Americans - but strangely that had turned off a lot of the Glam Rock Bowie fans in 75. But I think LD had not the sophistication or class of YA, for me anyway it was nowhere near.
When Bowie died so did my feeling of attachment to my 1970s childhood, but we all have to move on don't we! I really think he became as good as he ever was with Outside and Earthling, but I expect a lot of traditionalists to disagree with that.

 

The actual quote from Eno was that Bowie hadn't "the nerve to be simple" but hey ho.

Having said that, Wishful Beginnings IS sparse and musically way more Eno than Bowie. So of course, when the label ended to remove a track for some international editions of the album (to make room for the Pet Shop Boys mix of Spaceboy) Bowie nominated Wishful Beginnings.

Outside was set for release in the April of 95 had Virgin not insisted on some more accessible material going on it (cf Strangers etc).

 

I didn't know that. Maybe that's why they were talking about him.

 

I've always felt Outside had a strong connection to The Who's Quadrophenia. Whereas Jimmy in Quadrophenia was schizophrenic, or quadrophrenic, split into 4 personalities, on Outside Bowie is split into many personalities.

Outside, like Quadrophenia, has a libretto in the form of a diary. There is a beginning song, Leon Takes Us Outside, very similar to Quadro's I Am The Sea.

Outside is about Bowie as a patient in the Gugging Psychiatric Hospital, creating his own outsider art, trying to forget and deny that it was he himself who killed Baby Grace.

 

In case anyone who hasn't seen it has a spare 90 minutes (!) here's the Outside tour press conference. It's worth watching if you're a Bowie maniac.

 

Actually it only lasts 45 mins because it's repeated from a different camera angle - but it's worth watching. i don't know what happened to PJ Harvey.

 

What do you mean?

 

He was supposed to perform TMWSTW on the MTV awards with PJ, but he did it on his own. In the above press conference at one point he says he worked with PJ IIRC.

 

Oh, okay - I thought you meant something different. My mistake!

 

Outside is a great collaboration between David Bowie and Brian Eno.

It's probably, though, one of those album that is borderline...as far as me keeping it.

But keep it I do.

Even as it leans toward the deranged, disjointed, disturbed, haunted, and "I'm losing my mind and morals" side of things.

But doesn't go so far in this realm that I say, "no, this is too messed up".

The White album is a bit like this...in places... But still within the "I'm keeping it" side.

The sound on Outside is wonderful.

And matches the lyrics, theme, and intent of the "songs".

Outside is a place to visit...infrequently.

I wouldn't want to live there.

Yet, I keep it.

 

Per How David Bowie, Brian Eno Created Sci-Fi Experiment '1. Outside'

"When David Bowie began work on 1. Outside, it had been a decade since he'd had a mainstream hit, and he was well beyond caring. "He said to me that he didn't like the commercial things he did in the 1980s when he was pressured by his record company," says keyboardist Mike Garson. "He said, 'For this next album, I'm going to pick all my favorite musicians who inspire me. We're going to improvise on two big 48-track machines and just play and play. ... Brian will cut it all up and make songs.'"




Bowie meant Brian Eno, whom he hadn't worked with since 1979's Lodger. They reconnected at Bowie's wedding and began work two years later with Tin Machine guitarist Reeves Gabrels, guitarist Carlos Alomar and Garson, back in play after defecting from the Church of Scientology. "The chemistry between us is just tremendous," Bowie said of working with Eno. "He will take things from low art and elevate them to high-art status. I tend to do exactly the opposite.

They convened at Montreux's Mountain Studios – where Bowie and Eno worked on Lodger – and made up everything on the spot. Bowie created the trippy lyrics by typing articles on outsider art into a computer program that rearranged them into random phrases. Eno took a similar approach by handing band members flashcards that gave them roles to play. "They'd say something like, 'Today you're going to think of yourself as a 21st-century pilot in a planet that's light-years away and you're the commander of the ship,'" Garson recalls. "'Play from that viewpoint.'"

The result was Bowie's most experimental album since his Berlin period. It attempts to tell the story, complete with dialogue, of a police officer four years in the future investigating a series of murders. Listeners were baffled. Nine Inch Nails fans walked out of amphitheaters in droves when Bowie filled his co-headlining set with Outside songs. But he believed in the music and continued playing highlights like "Hallo Spaceboy" and "The Motel" up through his final shows in 2004."

 

I sort of agree with that, but you could also see it as that he was trying to rediscover himself after losing himself on LD, but the commerciality was holding him back. If what you say is correct, why would he be so interested in trying to force so many obscure Iggy Pop covers onto the general public? The Glass Spider theatrics seemed to be an attempt to recreate the Diamond Dogs Tour which he knew had been critically acclaimed. I think that in his mind he was trying to be his old self but failing because the global success of IMO such an uncreative record as LD and the family-friendly Smash Hits Cover Star nature of the Serious Moonlight tour had been so powerful that he lost his artistic Mojo.

 

Because he wasn't able to write enough half-decent new material (even LD only had five new songs) b) he was doing his old mate a favour (who'd squandered that money he'd gained from the RCA albums with DB) and c) he knew it would sell anyway, coming on the back of the biggest album of his life.

 

But he also incorporated other less populist more avant-garde artful elements to get away from the commerciality of LD.
In Loving The Alien he steals from Laurie Anderson's O Superman which he went on to cover on the Outside/Earthling Tour (uh-uh-uh-uh) and even the promo video had him with a lightbulb in his mouth.



And then there's the Gilbert and George pastiche sleeve art - both are signs of his attempted return to outsider art.

Also the extreme make up for the Blue Jean promo was right on the leading edge for the time - I notice Boy George was still peddling out the same idea of make-up shadows over a decade later.



On NLMD's Day In, Day Out promo Bowie was deliberately anti-commercial.
An accompanying music video for "Day-In Day-Out" was shot in Los Angeles in early 1987, with Bowie claiming it was "not going to sell the song at all", and was designed to explore the music video as a storytelling format over promoting the track itself.... it was banned by some TV stations, even after edits removed the female protagonist's heavily implied rape, swapped in an alternate version of a scene where the couple's child spells out "Mom", "Food" and "F$*k" in building blocks (words which represented the child's cycle of dependency; the alternate version had the child spell out the meaningless words "Mom", "Look" and "Luck"), and removed a closing scene of a young man urinating on Ronald Reagan's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Not exactly family viewing.


Day-In Day-Out - Wikipedia

Cleaned Up Bowie`s New Video Is A Hit

 

i get what you're saying but that's not the definition of outsider art, which is specifically the work of untrained artists, including the mentally ill. by comparison, anderson and G&G are positively mainstream.

bowie was caught between two worlds with NLMD. the serious themes of his lyrics were undermined by the mullet hair and continued willing association with the commercial pop arena, of which he was justifiably content to reap the rewards after decades of first failure and then managerial exploitation. and who knows, if NLMD and Glass Spider hadn't been so critically panned (for the most part), then he might have given us another version of the Tin Machine album wherein the sociopolitical was served up on a bed of synths and flavor of the month guest guitarists.

exactly this confluence of circumstances.

 

Come on karmaman!


Gilbert & George Major Exhibition: Room guide, room 13 | Tate

 

I saw the flaws showing just before that with that Side 2 of Scary Monsters which was his dullest side of music up to that point in my opinion.
Let's Dance was perfect for the times with its bouncy freshness but its novelty factor soon got tiring and the following two albums dragged it down with them. Thank God he met Reeves Gabrels!

 

come on, nothing (so to speak). by definition they're not outsider art. that they're deliberately provocative is hardly unusual within their chosen sphere where they are much better known than most.

 

Maybe - but I'd still rather listen to side 2 than side 1. It's still a 4.5 out of 5 LP though.

 

Alright - maybe 'Outsider Art' as a term is not what I am talking about, but what I'm saying is that there are signs immediately after Let's Dance that he was trying to reconnect with being an Artist rather than a #1 singles maker and worldwide star.
I still can't see that Gilbert and George painting being a mass market product which your parents would buy a print of to hang on their wall. They would have a copy of Let's Dance though or Bowie's 20 Golden Greats.

 

Couldn't disagree more, that side is one of his most brilliant. Teenage Wildlife alone is so full of glorious turns, passion and genius songwriting.

 

i think that's a stretch. he wanted Let's Dance to be a commercial success but he couldn't have predicted how much of one. Tonight was an artistic capitulation if anything, and Never Let Me Down was a half-hearted attempt to get his creative juices pumping again (it contains more original material than the previous two) but it was still dressed in commercial garb.

they only ever had the Space Oddity single, but you're right they wouldn't display Gilbert and George any more than Bowie did with the Tonight album cover which is a wholly sanitised version of the style closer in tone to a stained glass window.

 

I always found "Teenage Wildlife" to be quite a dirge and it sounded like he was trying to recycle "Heroes?". Just too long also (6:56) and followed by:
"Scream Like A Baby" - a pretty weak song
"Kingdome Come" a pretty weak cover
"Because You're Young" - sounds just like everything that came before on this side. Dull.
"It's No Game (N°2)" - I even felt that this was David's own admission of how dreary Side 2 is. This sounds like he's given up.

But that's just me folks!