David Bowie
Earthling

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DAVID BOWLING.

Just after Outside (which wasn't bad at all), and after the wretched '80s and that half-baked project called Tin Machine (but why, I ask you... why?!), instead of continuing with the anticipated second chapter of Nathan Adler, David Bowie in 1997 decides to release this "Earthling," which, in the Duke's intentions, was supposed to open the doors for him to the world of the Young People, who were passionate about jungle, techno, and drum'n'bass rhythms (ehh yes, it seems like centuries have passed!), which had been all the rage for a couple of years in clubs around the world, and which we obviously find identical in this album.
A bizarre work brimming with elderly pretensions of youthfulness as much as possible, played by a group of musicians of quite good artistic level (Reeves Gabrels, Mike Garson, Gail Ann Dorsey, Zachary Alford, and Mark Plati, etc.) and produced, hear ye, hear ye, for the first time since the times of Diamons Dogs, by none other than DB himself!!
Bowie thus, feeling Younger than ever, churns out an album that, despite being at the antipodes of its predecessor and destabilizing its audience for the umpteenth time, gives us back a record dedicated to the Eternal Quest for Lost Modernity, and if we want, given the meager results, I dare say an end in itself.
If Outside was deep and complex, Earthling is light and fast.
If Outside was coherent storytelling, Earthling is pure musical and linguistic diversion.

If Outside was beautiful, Earthling is not.

That's it.

In short, even today one wonders: what the heck did Mr. Bowie want to tell us with this half-baked mishmash neither flesh nor fish? That the world "goes fast"? that now "everything is disconnected"?! that we need to "run like mad shards"?!
Wow, such a burst of originality, one might ask!!

The tracks strike the listener with the excruciating advance of guitars, the speed, and the compactness of a disorienting drum and bass rhythmic section with an overflowing use of the latest technology available (as if begging for an "ohhhh" of wonder from the young ones hearing "this" Bowie for the first time).
All well.
All commendable.
But it's fair to ask:

... WHO CARES?!

What did Bowie want to tell us with this overwhelming "sonic orgy" that leaves us with barely a taste of unfinished "irresolution" at the end of the listening? Was that the point? The usual die-hard fans will say "of course it is"... all the others, I suppose, will ask themselves the same questions as I do.

We go from the crossover of jungle'n'roll in "Little Wonder" (the only one still remembered), to the techno pulses of "Dead Man Walking" and "Law". From the pure drum'n'bass beginning of Seven Years in "Tibet" to the mad rock gallops of "I'm Afraid of American" and "Looking for Satellites" to the mixture of genres and sonic layers of "Battle For Britain" and "Telling Lies" in a sampler of styles and techniques that are rather "cold and unsettling" as, I imagine, were the intentions of the White Duke.
The use of voice and text then, is nothing short of versatile and changeable (not to say disconnected and incoherent throughout) with experiments of cut-up à la W. Burroughs mixed with free visionary and post-psychedelic nonsense.

In short, a transitional and disruptive album, as the diaphanous singer has often accustomed us to, now grown daft on his little island, and which for many (myself included) has marked an irreparable breach between the old Bowian production and this new course (see the other clunker "Reality"), which now gives us scraps of a foggy and floundering Bowie on all fronts, incapable of resurfacing (musically speaking), lost behind a gilded "pre-retirement" in his "Neverland" with the lovely Iman delighting him far and wide, from morning till night... shall we forgive him for this?!

Of course, we shall.