David Bowie: "Low Funeral in Berlin" Article (1977)

David Bowie’s "Low Funeral in Berlin", a two-page article in Melody Maker, January 29, 1977.

DAVID BOWIE'S last image, as a kind of wasp-waisted performer in a Weimar cabaret, would hardly prepare one for reports of the figure he's currently cutting in Berlin, where he now lives.

It seems that the famous red hair, now returned to its original mousy color, has been scalped to a crew cut, that he's grown the curving mustache of a prosperous bürgermeister, and, having put on some weight, and wearing a cap pulled down low, he spends his time frequenting both the cultural establishments and working-men's haunts of that city.

More Günter Grass than Joel Grey, he obviously continues in his fascination with all things German that reached notorious proportions early last summer in his well-publicized speech about fascism.

None of this will much surprise keen Bowie-watchers, who have observed his bewildering metamorphoses from an acoustic performer and mime artist to an ambiguous commentator upon rock stardom with "Ziggy," a doom-monger with "Diamond Dogs," a moon-age soul singer with "Young Americans" and "Station To Station," and the star of Nicolas Roeg's futuristic art-film, The Man Who Fell To Earth.

It's not difficult to see why Bowie is the most interpreted, and the most reviled, rock star of this generation.

He's consistent only in the diversity of his actions. He doesn't respond in the way expected of rock stars when each tour he presents a different public face, and no two albums are truly alike.

Eclectic to a fault, unlike all other major rock performers he has willfully neglected to define his own oeuvre, beyond reflecting a certain preoccupation as a lyricist with a technological future and as a musician with mutations of mainstream styles.

While undeniably a stylist, as is borne out by the attractive pastiches of "Pin-Ups," he has too much artistic substance to justify that as a condemnation.

"Diamond Dogs," for example, despite its musical roughness, seems increasingly to me a classic projection of a lost and rabid society, even though I was indifferent to it when it was released.

Similarly, although I still don't much like a lot of "Young Americans" and find it rather empty, I can nevertheless appreciate the different perspective he brought to white soul, which at first seemed merely parodic.

Brian Eno and Visconti Watts are part of David's controversial album,

Perhaps, therefore, much critical distrust of him may have two origins: in his refusal to stand still and be explained, and in the coldness and isolation, the cerebration evident at the heart of his work, which puts off critics and record-buyers who have become accustomed to the warmth and responsiveness of the rock 'n' roll tradition, a tradition that he has gone out of his way to usurp.

Of all his records, the new album, "Low," is the most controversial, and right in the target line of this critical bias. It's radically different from "Station To Station," because it appears to have been conceived as a "mood" album.

Its creation revolves around the synthesizer: the vocals on the first side are brief, and on the second, which consists of four electronic instrumentals, they are used only as textural aids. Furthermore, this "mood," even as far as it's expressed in whatever lyrics there are, is utterly bleak and depressed, as the album's title would suggest.

Yet for several reasons "Low" strikes me as a remarkable record, and certainly the most interesting Bowie has made.

It's so thoroughly contemporary, less in its pessimism, perhaps, though that's deeply relevant to these times, than in its musical concept: the logic of bringing together mainstream pop in the album's disco bass-and-drums and conventional lyric and experimental music perfectly indicates what could be the popular art of the advanced

society we are moving into, in a way that the Rolling Stones, say, or even the Sex Pistols, whose music relies totally upon its black-derived rhythms, could not hope to express.

The devices of experimental music are scattered throughout the album, for instance, in his employment of...