Michael Draine's Twisted Vista
Book review
Low
Hugo Wilcken
(Continuum, 33 1/3  Series)
$9.95, 138 pp., 2006.
Each volume in Continuum’s 33 1/3 Series
presents an essay on a classic rock album by
a writer outside the field of music journalism.
Novelist Hugo Wilcken opens his analysis of
David Bowie’s enigmatic, influential 1977 LP
Low by establishing a context via comparison
with Bowie’s preceding album, Station to
Station, and Iggy Pop’s Bowie-produced
solo debut, The Idiot. The first chapter
alternates insight and error, with the word
“mellotron” substituted for “melodica” (p.6),
the lyrics from “Station to Station” misquoted
(p.13), and the incorrect producer attributed
to “Space Oddity” (p.16).
While the author cogently notes that Bowie’s
attraction to Berlin derived from a romantic		Music Reviews
picture of the city gleaned from Christopher
Isherwood’s fiction, Wilcken doesn’t seem to
realize the extent to which this vision of glamour
and decadence has been promulgated by		Twisted Cinema
the characterization of Bowie’s collaborations
with Brian Eno as “the Berlin triptych.” For
example, when Siouxsie and the Banshees
arrived at “the legendary” Hansa by the
Wall studio (where Low was completed)
in 1985 to record Tinderbox, the group
was appalled by the drab environment of
the studio and its surroundings.
The best music criticism uncovers elements
that the listener never heard before, but
from that moment on, always will. Wilcken
occasionally achieves such epiphanies,
pointing out how interleaving two distinct
melodic threads evokes a sense of
simultaneous arrival and departure on “A New
Career In A New Town.” Revelations of this
caliber are few, but noteworthy: Wilcken
tags the unlikely friendship between Bowie
and the down-at-the-heels Iggy Pop with a
quote from Marc Bolan: “David always had a
weakness for tough guys,” and identifies
“What in the World” as a holdover from The
Idiot (recorded at Laurent Thibault’s studio,
Château d’Hérouville). Wilcken assiduously
sifts through the conflicting reports about
Bowie’s aborted soundtrack for The Man
Who Fell to Earth, though how direct a
relationship those sessions hold to
Low remains a mystery.
Low’s expansive second side receives only
about 10 percent of the page count. Wilcken
questions the common assumption that
Brian Eno deserves credit for composing
“Warszawa,” asserting “the careful
structuring of this track and its harmonies
actually show something of a Bowie influence
on Eno, whose ambient pieces tend to be less
compositional, less interested in harmony
(p.117).” The dark, troubled tenor of Low
distinguishes the album from the Eno canon,
particularly Eno’s adjacent solo LPs,
Another Green World and Before and After
Science. Wilcken notes that Bowie’s work on
Iggy’s dense, electronic The Idiot signifi-
cantly charts the trajectory of Low, and
questions the practicality of Eno’s Oblique
Strategy cards, stating “They were probably
more important symbolically than practically.
A cerebral theoretician like Eno had more
need of a mental circuit-breaker than some-
like Bowie, who was a natural improviser,
collagiste, artistic gadfly (p.67).”
No primary research was conducted for this
book, leaving it rife with recycled quotations
from David Buckley’s Strange Fascination
and Nicholas Pegg’s The Complete David
Bowie. Too many questions remain unasked,
too many stones unturned. For example, the
possibility that uncredited engineer and
former Magma bassist Laurent Thibault may
have inspired Bowie’s glossolaliac vocals on
“Warsawa” and “Subterraneans” escapes
the author’s notice.
Wilcken repeatedly cites Bowie’s mid-70’s
cocaine psychosis as an integral aspect of
Low’s “autistic” affect, but psychological
interpretation casts little light on an artist
who revels in appropriation and protean,
ever-changing artistic personae.
Three decades after its release, David
Bowie’s Low remains a provocative, cryptic,
challenging work of art, far beyond the
ambitions of this slender paperback.
Michael Draine
www.33third.blogspot.com