David Bowie
1.Outside

It's been a while since I wanted to write something about this album. Recently – to properly celebrate the departure of the Thin White Duke - I've listened to it again thoroughly and was comforted to find that my initial judgment hasn't changed. It's still a beautiful album, a dark and murky hyperThriller signed Bowie-Eno, schizophrenic and experimental.
Designed to be the first of a series of albums aimed at capturing the end-of-millennium anxiety within an urban undergrowth devoted to new pagan cults, the concept revolves around a story of intrigue and murder titled "The Diary of Nathan Adler or the Ritual-Artistic Murder of Baby Grace Blue," included in the album's booklet.
From this alone, it's clear that the album is far from easy listening, presenting a series of challenges for the listener, especially because the deliberately non-linear nature of the work forces the assembly, like a puzzle, of a mass of disconnected impressions and then putting it all together, trying to make sense of it. Bowie indeed resumes William Burroughs' non-linear writing technique (the infamous cut up), which he had previously used, but this time moving from scribbled notes to a more modern software, the “verbasizer,” which allows him to assemble words freely at his command.
These seemingly undecipherable texts, the fragmented diary of Detective Nathan Alder, and the distorted and electronically manipulated photographs in the booklet are the only clues we have to reconstruct Baby Grace's "case," so better not waste time and start investigating…
The entire cycle begins with Leon Takes us outside, an atmospheric track (in which Bowie reads the dates of the diary) that perfectly conveys the mysterious atmosphere of a Middle Eastern bazaar – somewhat Blade Runner-like – in which the story unfolds.
The piece comes directly from the initial Montreux '94 sessions (with Reeves Gabrels, Erdal Kizilcay, Mike Garson, drummer Sterling Campbell, and the great Brian Eno) inspired by Eno's "oblique strategies" and Leo Navratil's experiments, a psychiatrist who, in those same years in Vienna, encouraged his patients to paint and engage in other artistic activities for therapeutic purposes.
Leon also becomes the name of the first character evoked by Bowie, a twenty-two-year-old mixed-race individual with a short string of petty criminal records, who, besides being a suspect, is the connection exploited by detective Nathan Adler (another reference to psychoanalyst Alfred Adler?), who works in his "artistic crimes" division of the fictional city of Oxford Town, to investigate the crime. But it's still "outside" that one needs to go.
The album's opening is followed, fading into the title track (Outside), an epic overture created in the early months of '95 based on a previous Tin Machine song (Now), whose lyrics were never completed. An exceptional opening, clearly marked by ENO (think of, for example, the beginning of U2's “Zooropa”): A slow ascending chord progression that gives way to a disturbing bass line and the first words of the album, sung with masterful detachment by Bowie:
Now. Not tomorrow
Yesterday
Not tomorrow
It happens today
The crazed in the hot-zone
The mental and diva’s hands
The fisting of life
To the music outside
The music is outside
It’s happening outside
In The Hearts Filthy Lesson, Nathan Adler stands before the dismembered, dissected body of fourteen-year-old Baby Grace, displayed in the "Modern Parts" Museum of Oxford Town and wonders if what he sees can truly be defined as a work of art (here, the inspiration from Damien Hirst’s repulsive artworks - also cited in the booklet - that began gaining notoriety in those years is clear). At some point, he addresses the key character of Ramona A. Stone.
“Caucasian female” around 45 years old, who sustains herself as a drug dealer and “Tyrannous Futurist,” with no convictions in her record so far, Adler first met her in Berlin's Turkish neighborhood on June 15, 1977 – incidentally, Bowie was hanging around there with Iggy Pop too – when she was a punk with studs, priestess of the Caucasian Suicide Temple, and “vomiting her death-as-an-eternal-party doctrine into the empty vessels of Berlin youth.”
Adler's monologue concludes by confiding to his colleague Paddy his confusion and fatigue, but also his unconscious fascination with that death scenario (the filthy lesson of the heart, but which, due to the phonetic similarity between “heart” and “art,” also sounds like the filthy lesson of art):
Paddy oh Paddy,
I think I’ve lost my way
[…] I’m already five years older I’m already in my grave
[…] Paddy, what a fantastic death abyss
When he sings "I’ve Think I’ve lost my way," leaving a moment of suspension, all the sadness and nostalgia for the past is evident, but then from the persistent final spoken inserts one savors that unhealthy excitement that attracts the detective.
Still from the Montreux sessions, A small plot of land is drawn, certainly the most avant-garde piece. While Campbell's bass drum maintains a regular beat, the snare drum's syncopated pattern and Garson's improvisations destabilize quite a bit, while Gabrels' acidic sustain (halfway between Fripp and Belew) rumbles in the background and Erdal Kizilcay's bass seems to abandon the song after a few bars. Bowie intervenes with a sort of funeral litany, repeating “poor soul,” “prayer can’t,” “poor dunce,” “brains talk” always in the same way, holding the first note and letting the second, lower-pitched one quickly expire.
Follows the first of the brief vocal fragments borrowed from various characters, all interpreted by Bowie's voice, appropriately filtered by Eno. As if the convoluted structure of the concept weren't enough, these blessed "segue" are another element that makes Outside challenging. However, even though it's true that without the disc it would gain compactness, these shards are nevertheless essential for the “plot” and then the musical bases in the background, always diverse, are not bad at all. In Baby Grace (a horrid cassette), for example, there's already a first revelation: from a found cassette with Baby Grace's voice, Ramona's involvement in her abduction is discovered.
Test, testing, testing
This, hmmm, Grace is my name
And and I was...um...
It was that phot... a fading photograph of a patch..., a patchwork quilt.
And they've put me on these...<