The Duality of David Bowie’s Low

Low

David Bowie

1977

It’s 1977 and I drop the needle on David Bowie’s Low after a short bike ride home from the local Woolworth’s.  It begins suddenly with a wordless, instrumental song fragment from the future called “Speed of Life.”  The song is built with layers of otherworldly synthesizer  hooks and guitar lines and it instantly shatters any expectations I might have brought to this highly experimental follow-up to Station to Station.

“Speed of Life” feels incomplete, because while there are no vocals,  it is not written or produced like an instrumental track.  That is, the melody isn’t carried by instruments instead of vocals, it’s simply not there at all.  It sounds like a song that Bowie intended to sing at some point.  At first, you expect him to make his vocal entrance, but as the song progresses the missing melody starts to materialize in your mind, only this is your melody…not Bowie’s.  The song tricks your mind into filling in the blanks in this new form of interactive pop.  I don’t understand what I just bought, but I’m enjoying it and like all of the songs on side one, “Speed of Life” ends too soon.

Low had such a profound impact on the pop, punk and new wave music that followed its release, that it’s hard to appreciate just how risky and groundbreaking it was at the time.    Using the two-sided vinyl format to full advantage Bowie essentially released two different records on the same platter, delivering seven short slices of future pop on side one and four lengthy ambient soundscapes on side two.  Collaborating for the first time with Roxy Music’s former synthesizer wiz, Brian Eno,  the side one song suite sounded like little else in popular music at the time.

While the arrangements featured traditional rock and roll instruments, many of the parts are “treated” with unique applications of time and pitch shifting effects.  To be fair, phasers, flangers and delays had been used extensively in rock and roll before Low, but not like this.  These peculiar sounding guitar, keyboard and drum parts are not the icing, they’re the cake and the sound of each instrument is just as important, if not more important than the performances.  The drums, in particular have a jarring, electronic sound that would become commonplace in the eighties.

Masterminded by Bowie and longtime producer, Tony Visconti, this approach subtly dehumanizes the players and their contributions.  As Bowie enters the picture on “Breaking Glass” it does not sound like he’s performing with a band; it sounds as though he is fronting a collective of well-programmed, interchangeable cyborgs.  The songs on side one are uncomfortably short and dense, packed with some of the tightest, catchiest and most instantly pleasurable songs in Bowie’s extensive catalog.  At just 3:29,  “Always Crashing in the Same Car” is the longest and perhaps most traditional song of the batch.  The song seems to address the self-inflicted commercial impact of Bowie’s numerous artistic detours, when he sings:

Every chance, every chance that I take
I take it on the road
Those  kilometers and the red lights
I was always looking left and right
Oh, but  I’m always crashing in the same car

If the unexpected future pop on side one shocked some of Bowie’s fans, nothing could have prepared them for what was waiting on the second side.  In fact, it would be hard to even categorize the compositions on the second side of Low as songs.   Dominated by simple, atmospheric synthesizer arrangements, the ambient music on side two was not designed for active listening.  This is background music, intended to be played quietly while you do other things.  Similar to the effect of white noise, this is music that helps minimize the impact of distractions, theoretically enhancing the listener’s ability to focus more clearly on other activities, such as reading, writing, talking and sleeping.

Though it is at times quite beautiful and melancholy, given its modest intentions, ambient music is hard to evaluate critically.  I neither actively enjoy nor dislike the second side of Low, but I do find it to be useful for moments of quiet reflection and daydreaming.  Sometimes I enjoy falling asleep while this music plays.  “Warszawa”, built on a simple piano loop played by Visconti’s four-year old son, is the most recognizable composition, but there is very little in any of this music that draws or rewards close listening.

Prior to release, Low’s working title was New Music Night and Day, which sums up the recording’s intended structure perfectly.  The long, ambient compositions on side two serve as a logical compliment and counterbalance to the bright, upbeat tracks on side one.  It highlights the duality of our existence through the musical equivalent of a day/night cycle and points to the absurdity of embracing life while saddled with the inescapable knowledge that death surely waits at the end.  A heady concept to be sure, but Bowie never was a frivolous artist.

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