David Bowie
Diamond Dogs

THE REVIEW

Sinking into the Ghost Town
or the eternal song of skeleton families

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Death.
Death came to meet me one summer day while I was browsing through the stalls at a market in a remote village in Bergamo, when I still believed glam was just a dandy alien playing with glitter. I did not seek out Death; it found me, just like Tolkien's Ring. In this case, Death popped out from the cover of a record, with dark red hair, lipstick, and eyes ringed in black. Death was thin, naked, and calling me to its ghost town, Hunger City, whispering me a "Future Legend."

"And in death, as the last few corpses lie rotting in the slimy thoroughfare", I too begin to sink with them into this exquisitely sick, perverse, and decadent slimy thoroughfare. Death initially has the deceptively smiling and terrifying appearance of the "Diamond Dogs", then reveals its true face, and behind the smile hides the triad "Sweet Thing-Candidate-Sweet Thing Reprise", a despair as deep as the mud and debris of this ghost town, a delirious solitude surrounded by a thousand faces of puppets and cadaverous circus phenomena. Everything we've wanted is a sweet taste with claws that grabs us and takes us down to the depths of this hallucinatory journey in Death's half-man, half-dog body.
But it’s time to hide the scars with makeup, disguise ourselves as "Rebel Rebel", don a guitar stolen from the Rolling Stones, and once more climb on stage to pretend we are in the prime of "youthful success" dancing to exhaustion one last "Rock And Roll With Me" of tears.

After the last dance, the metamorphosis is complete, now "We Are The Dead", we are the dead and we hide behind the remains of this Apocalypse, behind the ruins of a love torn apart by the Diamond Dogs, secret police, ghost assassins of hope, the last one we have left is to suffocate in peace in this hell of newspapers, leeches, relatives, dancers, financiers, and Bankrupt Children. "For everything we've seen, for everything we've said we are the Dead".
We are the Dead, we are Death, we have sunk, annihilated, integrated, we do not exist in it, and in it, we are already in "1984", and we care not if a "Big Brother" has cracked our skulls with the blows of these last hammering dances of skeleton families because we are part of them forever, as long as Death exists, as long as it continues to annihilate and suffocate us with the dirty sheets of cocaine from these songs...

...I could have written that in 1974 the English singer David Bowie, after dramatically discarding the toy Ziggy Stardust with a stunning suicide, wrote an album halfway between glam and soul, a concept album inspired by George Orwell's book "1984" and seasoned with futuristic sounds, apocalyptic suggestions, saxophones, lacerating guitars, and voices from the beyond... I could have talked about the relationship between the artist, Burroughs' cut-up writing technique, and cocaine... I could have narrated how Bowie invented dark... I could have told you about a former mime who, obsessed with his own characters, fled to Los Angeles in search of new soul and funky inspirations... I could have done all this, but at a mountain market, I met a creature half man and half dog, with long red hair and eyes dyed black, who took me with him to the city of skeletal mannequins and painted ghosts.

from "Sweet Thing Reprise"

"Is it nice in your snow storm, freezing your brain?
Do you think that your face looks the same?
Then let it be, it’s all I ever wanted

It’s a street with a deal, and a taste
It’s got claws, it’s got me, it’s got you"