I think that confluence of pressures and influences helps make Scary Monsters feel like Bowie’s most modern, internet-y record of his classic era.ĭavid Roth: The Berlin records were important to me in the way that things were important to me in my late-high school/early-college development into an obnoxious person. He could have become a full-time actor, pop musician, art musician, behind-the-scenes presence, or cautionary tale. 1980 is a year where Bowie could have gone in so many directions-he was an established icon for his time but hadn’t yet made several of the songs that would really cement him as a continuing pop culture presence today. It’s especially wild to me that, the year Scary Monsters came out, he also starred on Broadway in The Elephant Man. Lauren: I love that you bring up all of those other threads (Seu Jorge!), because it gets at Bowie as cultural omnivore, in a time where it wasn’t quite so easy to know about everything. In that sense, really sitting down with Scary Monsters for the first time, it strikes me as a synthesis of so many of the threads of early Bowie, a sort of omnibus of everything that happened in the '70s, which is maybe a weird thing to say about what is a fairly straightforward record. I was into the Berlin records and the classico-style '70s stuff in college, but because this was all happening like 35 years after the fact, I couldn’t really temporally contextualize any of his records. Patrick Redford: I have basically always been a passive David Bowie fan, learning about him by Nirvana’s “Man Who Sold The World” cover, also going Life Aquatic mode, deciding that I should listen to his music after seeing him in Zoolander (though this would take a while because the only Bowie song my parents liked was “Young Americans”), and-here is the most embarrassing sentence in the blog-finding out about “Space Oddity” from Mr. I remember spending a lot of time with Blackstar when he died, but it’s been years since I listened to a record of his in a deliberate fashion. Over the next few years I picked through Bowie’s big singles and albums in a less systematic way. Space Oddity was the first record I heard all the way through, having probably found it in our school IT guy’s magnificent shared iTunes library-remember those?-and I loved it. And then I realized I’d absorbed a lot of his music in the unconscious way that people absorb the music of hugely influential artists. Then I remembered that I’d watched Labyrinth on VHS one day when we had a substitute teacher. Giri Nathan: Here’s one ass-backwards way into Bowie: I watched The Life Aquatic in middle school and really liked the Seu Jorge covers and that got me interested in hearing more. I love the idea of him making a commercial record just to show his most successful imitators how much better he was than all of them. Low has always been a favorite of mine, and Scary Monsters was a blindspot, so I appreciated having the chance to sit with it and get into it and read about it in context of when it came out. But I don’t know enough to pretend I have a real relationship to the music beyond admiration. I was a full-time music writer at one point, so it was damn near a legal requirement. I am familiar with his discography and history. Israel Daramola: Bowie is a complicated one for me. With all that said, where does Scary Monsters stand amid your relationship to Bowie’s work? I couldn’t exactly picture the time and place of him making it, like I could so clearly with so much of his best work, but there are ways in which that ambiguity can be a strength. But on the second listen, prepared for that feeling of dislocation, I could appreciate Scary Monsters as something approaching a classic-a paranoid, alienated record by a celebrity still figuring out his place in the music landscape, and one stuffed with ideas that call upon both his past and future. I love my Bowie when he has a distinct costume of sorts-the young folkie, Ziggy, that constructed soul singer persona, the Thin White Duke, the Berlin artist, the pop-radio savant-and this felt very much like a transitional album between that German intellectual phase and the stadium rock of Let’s Dance. On the first listen, though, I felt good but also a little lost. I was hopeful that I’d have a "Eureka!" moment and discover an all-time favorite. Lauren Theisen: I picked this album because I think it’s the most acclaimed Bowie record that I hadn’t specifically listened to all the way through. This month, Israel Daramola, Giri Nathan, Patrick Redford, David Roth, and Lauren Theisen get together to discuss Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), which sits in the middle of David Bowie's transition from Berlin artist to radio juggernaut.ĭefector Listens To An Album: David Bowie - Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) Welcome to Defector Music Club, where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album and share our favorite new music.
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