FEATURE:
Second Spin
David Bowie - Reality
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THERE are a few reasons…
IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie in 2003/PHOTO CREDIT: Robert Maxwell
why I wanted to feature David Bowie’s twenty-fourth album, Reality. This would turn out to be his antepenultimate studio album. Reality was released on 15th September, 2003. As it is almost twenty, it deserves to be highlighted. Also, it would be ten years until Bowie followed this album. Many thought he had retired and would not return. He came back with the remarkable The Next Day in 2013. Sadly, we would only get one further album from him: 2016’s Blackstar was released on his sixty-ninth birthday (two days before he died). Also, I think Reality is an underrated album. A year after Heathen was released, maybe the more mixed response to Reality was a reason why Bowie stepped away from the spotlight. Recorded at Looking Glass in New York City between January and May 2003, it was produced by David Bowie and Tony Visconti. I am going to end with one of the positive reviews for the album. Whilst many journalists did like the album, they compared Reality negatively when placed against his greatest work. I will end of that review. Before further exploration, Wikipedia have compiled sources and quote that highlight the legacy and retrospective acclaim for Reality:
“Reality has attracted generally positive assessments in subsequent years. In his 2005 book Strange Fascination, Buckley argues the album lacks both a "coherent musical identity" and "any thematic trajectory", furthermore observing a general feeling of "laxity" and underwritten songs, with the songs ranging from "good to merely pleasant", and "around a third" seeing Bowie "near top form". On the other hand, Perone considers it a "strong album" and one that does have consistent themes throughout. Author Paul Trynka writes that the record proves that, with the likes of tracks like "Bring Me the Disco King", Bowie "has the potential to conjure up pleasures as yet unknown". Marc Spitz, writing before the release of The Next Day, found it worthy as a swan song to Bowie's long career. Following that album's release, however, O'Leary argues that Reality reestablished itself as "a minor album whose songs were built to be blasted on stage". The covers have also continued to receive praise.
In The Complete David Bowie, Pegg states that one of the album's successes is that it emerges with a "reinvigorated sense of rock attack" following the "delicate, self-consciously artful[ness]" of its predecessor, equating both records to the relationships between Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, or Outside (1995) and Earthling. Further comparing the two albums, he says Reality offers "less complexity and fewer sonic layers" than Heathen in exchange for "a greater abundance of catchy hooks and buoyant pop-rock atmospherics". He also argues that Reality loses none of its predecessor's "artistic sensibility" and "its lasting value lies not just in its infectious melodies and evocative lyrics, but in the exquisitely judged oddness of its sonic textures". In 2016, Bryan Wawzenek of Ultimate Classic Rock placed Reality at number 16 out of 26 in a list ranking Bowie's studio albums from worst to best, praising Bowie's comfortability on the record. Including Bowie's two albums with Tin Machine, Consequence of Sound ranked Reality number 24 out of 28 in a 2018 list, with Pat Levy calling it "a decent record in the pantheon of Bowie, nothing more, nothing less".
I want to bring in a feature from Classic Rock & Culture from 2013. They looked back a decade at one of Bowie’s most underrated and interesting albums. It came out at a crucial moment in his career. So soon after his previous album and before he would step away for nearly a decade, Reality definitely warrants fresh love and focus:
“It took David Bowie a mere 15 months to write and record his 23rd album, 2003's Reality. While no one could have guessed it at the time, it'd take him another 10 years to finish his 24th.
Released on Sept. 16, 2003, Reality found Bowie working once again with frequent collaborator Tony Visconti, who returned to co-produce 2002's Heathen for the first time since 1980's Scary Monsters. The platinum-selling Heathen brought Bowie some of his best reviews in years, but rather than trying to duplicate that album's heavily layered approach, the duo opted for a more direct, aggressive sound.
"There's a part of David Bowie that definitely does not want to repeat himself, so we were committed to avoiding the Heathen formula," Visconti explained to Sound on Sound. "He wanted to change to something that he and his live band could play onstage with great immediacy, without the need for synthesizer patches and backing tracks. He wanted to make this more of a band album."
While Bowie mildly disputed Visconti's version of events ("it really doesn't work like that"), he admitted to Sound on Sound that "I was looking for something that had a slightly more urgent kind of sound than Heathen."
To Bowie's way of thinking, the change in approach was a byproduct of his surroundings during the writing process. "I think the mainstay of the album is that I was writing it and recording here in downtown New York. It's very much inspired by where I live and how I live and the day-to-day life down here. There is a sense of urgency to this town."
Like a number of Bowie records, Reality incorporates a mixture of material, some of it freshly written ("Fall Dog Bombs the Moon," which was reportedly composed in half an hour) and some drawn from Bowie's back pages ("Bring Me the Disco King," which had been kicking around in various incarnations since the '70s). Ironically, given the decade of silence that was soon to follow, Bowie also told Sound on Sound that the quick downtime between Heathen and Reality reflected a change in his own creative tempo.
"These days, it's great to be able to record more frequently and clear the decks of the songs I'm writing," he mused. "For me, this is a far preferable way to go. ... I think I find an album a year very comfortable. It doesn't faze me at all, and it tends to follow the pattern and the rhythm at which I write."
Reality represented yet another evolution in sound for a performer known for his chameleonic shifts in style, but Bowie insisted all of his music was essentially of a piece. "I don't really think it's going to change very much," Bowie said when asked by the New York Times to describe his creative approach.
"As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I've got left?" he added. "When it's taken that nakedly, these are my subjects. And it's like, well, how many times can you do this? And I tell myself, actually, over and over again. The problem would be if I was too self-confident and actually came up with resolutions for these questions. But I think they're such huge unanswerable questions that it's just me posing them, again and again."
If his songwriting approach remained unchanged, Bowie was perfectly willing to admit that he saw major challenges ahead for the recording industry, then still in the early years of the ugly tailspin it entered at the dawn of the Mp3 era.
"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he predicted to the Times. "So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not. It's what's going to happen."
But as the business that earned him his livelihood entered a period of turmoil, Bowie told critic Anthony DeCurtis that he found himself mellowing out – and perhaps signaled his pending decade of semi-retirement.
"I've stabilized my life to an extent now over these past 10 years. I'm very at ease, and I like it," Bowie said. "I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy. I didn't think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that's happening to me. I'm rather surprised at who I am, because I'm actually like my dad!".
A lot of the reviews I can see for Reality are three-star. I have seen a few that are more positive, though most give it a middling assessment. I think that Reality is stronger than that. As it is twenty on 15th September, I am keen for people to explore an under-listened gem in the Bowie cannon. Pitchfork provided their thoughts when Reality was released in 2003:
“There is a reason the present begrudges the past," writes Harlan Ellison; I won't pretend to be wise enough to know what that reason is, but I believe that statement to be true, regardless. The evidence is plain in just about anyone beyond a certain age, the all-consuming, epic oldness where a person can say "when I was your age" without a trace of irony. It hits some people as early as twenty or so, when they suddenly find themselves on the downhill side of life, confronted with a bleak realization that things were a whole lot greener back when they were still climbing (or before they knew any better, at least). Some people, they just never stop climbing; it's rare, but it happens.
A great many of David Bowie's fans, with each successive year, slowly but surely creep into the former category even as Bowie himself manages to still act like a card-carrying member of the latter. "I'm never never gonna get old," he proclaims on the Toys 'R' Us-inspired "Never Get Old", and to his credit, he makes yet another convincing argument. With one exception (the hokey, one-foot-in-the-grave Hours), Bowie-- even in his advanced age (by fresh-faced rock standards), even after almost a trillion records-- has never dwelled unduly on his past. If anything, while people will always hold him up to his past accomplishments, his career has floundered more than once out of his desire for self-conscious avant-gardism and an almost schizophrenic need to reinvent his persona. What last year's Heathen implied, and what Reality seems to prove, is that those days are over; never looking back, and no longer focusing ahead, Bowie has finally joined us all in the present, mind-young as ever but old enough not to make a show of it.
And then, if you'll grant this indulgence, there's me, the one who's supposed to be writing about him: "Plain Ol' 'Dave'" baffles me. Bowie's work is traditionally seen in a terrifically damaging binary-- common law states that if his work isn't brilliant, it's terrible; that's obviously wrong, since there're plenty of gray areas to be found in Bowie's oeuvre, but it's easy as hell to fall into the trap. Not much can stack up to Hunky Dory or Scary Monsters, after all. But then he goes and releases, consecutively, the two most earnest, unpretentious albums he's ever dreamed up, and the Pocket Dichotomy that had been used so frequently to dismiss Outside, Earthling, and others, is now terminally, irrevocably broken. Heathen looked like it might've been a holding pattern on the way to greater heights, but only for rising from the ashes of Hours; Reality shows that instead, Bowie is not aiming for an unattainable Ziggy-caliber alien classic, but is simply going to rock like any other human, in a pleasantly mild, non-conformist manner.
This is as close as Bowie has ever come to simply "pretty good" in his storied career. A zealous few will say that he's just further ahead of the curve than anyone can see, but if that's so, then what lies ahead is MOR rock and roll, with producer Tony Visconti's unobtrusive, light-handed electronic flourishes as gloss; no way-- he's too talented to be overtly influenced or obviously faddish, but that doesn't mean he's breaking ground. That's not an insult. I feel the biggest strength of this album is how relaxed it is, how well this anti-pose suits Bowie. It's freed him to craft some of the finest original material he's done in quite a while; Heathen best expressed his singular vision through the compositions of others, but Reality's original material easily overshadows its covers.
In particular, the George Harrison-penned "Try Some, Buy Some", though a kind tribute to Bowie's recently deceased contemporary, might be the album's only real mistake. Sappy, vacant lyrics and plodding, waltz-timed orchestration give a feel similar to a more fleshed-out version of the Morrissey cover "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday", but without any the self-referential poignancy invested in the latter. The deep-space broadcast of "Pablo Picasso" is a substantial improvement, in terms of covers, with its echoing trills and white-funk syncopation and the intense surrealism of hearing the words "Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole/ Not like you," come from Bowie's mouth, but David promised that Reality would "rock", and he proceeds to do so even more effectively elsewhere.
Hard-edged dynamics are supplied to direct, aggressive rhythms on numerous tracks like the supremely nervous, desperate "Looking for Water" and less obviously on the epic jazz kick "Bring Me the Disco King", but only "New Killer Star" feels like more than an exercise with slightly dusty rock standbys. It opens the album with a bassline etched indelibly within our genetic make-up, instantly recognizable and irresistible, and once the hook is set, a deluge of static-hazed background singers, weird robo-choruses, and a shaky treble riff that easily marks the album's finest moment simply spew forth from the speakers, overwhelming all but the most cynical of Bowie's detractors. At least, that's what I predict.
Also worthy of mention is the stark contrast provided by "The Loneliest Guy". It sounds like the title to a forgotten Dudley Moore flick, and may sound somewhat like disingenuous fame lament coming from Bowie, but the song itself will dispel those thoughts. Nearly a cappella, with bare hints of strings and stray piano chords fading in from other rooms, Bowie instead offers that he's "the luckiest guy/ Not the loneliest guy/ In the world/ Not me," but does so with such mournful uncertainty that no easy reading of the song is possible; it seems surprisingly human, bittersweet, and altogether far more real than its name implies. It's startlingly out of place, sandwiched between "Never Get Old" and "Looking for Water", so much so that it almost implies sarcasm, but that's fitting, as this is as eclectic and puzzling album as Bowie's ever made. He's not always at the top of his game, but Bowie's musical ideas, not filtered through any sort of trend-grab, are unfailingly unique, and that alone should cement his continued role as vibrant, modern artist for years to come”.
To mark a great work from David Bowie that should be explored more, I will end things now and urge people to listen through Reality. It does have a few weaker songs, though tracks like New Killer Star and The Loneliest Guy rank alongside his best late-career material. It is well worth your time. It turns twenty next month, so it is a good moment to (re)acquaint yourself with…
A real diamond.