David Bowie
Reality

THE REVIEW

Fourteen hours.
Fourteen hours straight of listening to the new shining gem gifted to me by the Regal White Duke. Monday this week is a little less gloomy, the Duke's sound will accompany me along my weekly journey and will sweeten my daily struggles.

Time seems to have different speeds when embraced by perfect sonic creations that rhythmically mark the beats. Not the sound, but time is forced to conform to the dynamics that emerge from the speakers.
The ideal of elegance and perfection that has always accompanied the Divine David, never interrupted in his attention not to be swallowed by the jaws of the "Goliath-Sound" as the only reference, but determined in aiming at the architecture of the song as a desire to exalt his artistic ability, elegance - as was said - is alive and present and inlaid in the structure of the songs, it shines, it magnifies them.
The light of the stars is still visible in his words, in the tension his voice generates.

The acoustically perfect and commercially targeted "New Killer Star," the first single extracted from the album, is a perfect cross-section of the entire, yet another, astonishing work by Bowie: the poetry of the lyrics deliciously marries the notes recited by his band.
The creative and self-celebratory "Never Get Old" continues the discourse, amiably suspended by the homage to Pablo Picasso performed with a cover of a piece by Jonathan Richman. If for a moment one pauses to read the introspective lyrics of "Never Get Old" (which means something like "I will NEVER get old"), one can grasp a new characteristic of my Idol: the fact of accepting and respectfully mocking his own fears. We read indeed: "The sky splits open to a dull, red skull And my head hangs low 'cause it's all over now there's never gonna be enough money there's never gonna be enough drugs I'm never, ever gonna get old There's never gonna be enough bullets There's never gonna be enough sex And I'm never, ever gonna get old The moon flows on to the end of the world because of you". Do you realize? Romanticism and Realism at the highest reachable value. "I will never grow old even if there would not be enough drugs, sufficient money, incessant sex sessions, endless echoes of bullets fired in the distance".
Compared to the verse (taken from "Looking For Water") reciting: "But I lost God in a New York minute I don't know about you, but my heart's not in it I can't breathe the air, can't raise the fight 'Cause all we've got left is a beat in the night, and I'm Looking for water" we can appreciate the artistic and spiritual maturity achieved by Our Master.

Do not think it's a "simply" decadent album: liveliness, perspectives, the desire for revenge and the arrogance dictated by the will to improve the world are nevertheless present: the malice echoing from the title track "Reality" is an altar of celebration. In this track, after reviewing the roaring behavior held in his life, the Duke ends up telling us approximately: "I've been right and I've been wrong - Now I'm back at the starting point - I've never held reality in high regard" with a brazenly goliardic tone that well lets us understand what he has in his sights with those words.

I finish by remembering that with "Try Some, Buy Some," Bowie's heart full of scars wanted to remember the Beatles' guitarist George Harrison, tragically deceased, due to an incurable illness, last year.

A great album, no doubt about it. And may God forgive me if I have not been able to give it the luster it deserves. I wrote that Bowie is not a musician but a "state of mind". Now I am here to shout it even louder.