1. Outside
bears the subtitle "The Diary of Nathan Adler or The Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue. A Non-Linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle." Alright, so it reeks of pretension. One belabors the point because
Bowie
at his best has always been pretentious, risque, creatively (if sometimes contrivedly) over the top.
marks the first in a planned series of collaborations with multi-instrumentalist, producer, and conceptualist
Brian Eno
based on a
short story. In this end-of-millennium setting, "art-crimes" and "concept muggings" merit their own police division funded by the "Arts Protectorate of London." Echoes of the Berlin "outsider"
/
Eno
'70s trilogy of
Low
,
Heroes
, and
Lodger
reverberate throughout, including a return to the "cut-and-paste" lyric-assembly method then employed, only this time fed through a Mac rather than more labor-intensive paper-and-scissors tools. The thusly fragmented "narrative" follows the investigations of Detective Professor Adler into the murder and subsequent dismembered body parts exhibition of 14-year-old runaway Baby Grace Blue. In this cut-up, composite world, each character, including Adler, Baby Grace, mixed-race youth Leon Blank, septuagenarian Algeria Touchshriek, and art-terrorist Ramona A. Stone, reflects a different aspect of
himself and is therefore a component of all the previous personas
has enacted over the years. The music also randomly dices and displays many of the previous album settings such personas have populated. To complete the cube,
then draws on musicians that form a kind of anagram band from his past. The closest "Ziggy" link comes courtesy of pianist
Mike Garson
, whose icy, tinkling jazz runs evoke many a spine-tingly moment from
Aladdin Sane
and
Diamond Dogs
. Besides
Garson
, other names familiar to those who follow the
canon include guitarists
Carlos Alomar
(
Station to Station
through
Scary Monsters
) and
Reeves Grabels
Tin Machine
), and '90s collaborators such as drummer
Sterling Campbell
Black Tie White Noise
) and multi-instrumentalist
Erdal Kizilcay
Buddha
).
, inspired by
George Orwell
's 1984, is another obvious precursor to
's dissection of a post-apocalyptic, technological society in the name of Art.
inflicts "in-character" spoken word segments as between-song segues, several of which evoke the Cockney campiness of such '60s period pieces as "Please Mr. Gravedigger" and "The Laughing Gnome" -- humor (intentional or not) that softens an otherwise bleak landscape. So, should you actually care about this dense, dark, difficult story and its generally unsympathetic characters? The effort required to adequately "process"
pays off in a richly voyeuristic experience where
once again reflects fringe culture onto the mainstream and forces us to consider that the differences are not so great. ~ Roch Parisien