I <3 '80s Bowie, part 2

On "Loving the Alien" and "This Is Not America"

After Bowie’s passing in 2016, we convened to memorialize him at the Singles Jukebox by doing what we do best: blurbing individual songs. I contributed these two (under my old name), which are two of my very favorites from his vast catalog.

“Loving the Alien” (1984)
Don’t talk to me about the single version; I hate its mix, and it’s far too short. This song requires its full 7+ minutes to breathe, to get its point across. Now, yes, I’m known to be a perverse defender of the Tonight album, an album I find fascinating for where it comes in Bowie’s catalog, for its slapdash kitchen-sink approach; and for the fact that no album of Bowie’s has so much Iggy Pop on it (he co-wrote five of the album’s nine songs). But “Alien” has nothing to do with Pop — and barely has anything to do with pop, either. Its predominant instrument is the marimba, for god’s sake, which right there makes it sound like precious little else (except, of course, like a Bowie record, because few artists have ever so thoroughly done anything they wanted, artistically speaking). Derek Bramble coaxes unease out of his synths, chords that initially sound relaxing but have a menace lurking, like a fluffy cloud of poison gas. Bowie’s longtime guitarist Carlos Alomar rips some gorgeous little guitar riffs, especially on the song’s coda. Omar Hakim keeps everyone in time. But ultimately, this is all down to Bowie: his vocal is one of my favorite of his career. It’s an art-damaged croon, one that’s just a little off: listen to the way he leans into the word “prayers” in the chorus, ripping it — and you, as you listen — apart just a little bit. It’s twistedly gorgeous, turning a dark song just an iota towards the light.

“This Is Not America” (David Bowie with the Pat Metheny Group (1985)
It somehow made perfect sense that, on the heels of Tonight, Bowie should collaborate with jazz-fusion superstars the Pat Metheny Group on a single from their soundtrack to the US-USSR espionage film The Falcon and the Snowman. Befitting John Schlesinger’s claustrophobic film (starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn), Metheny’s soundtrack is tight and constrained, and Bowie wrote a set of icy lyrics to match: “A little piece of you/The little peace in me/Will die,” the song opens. There’s an edginess here, an appropriate level of anxiety. But at the same time — and this may sound counterintuitive — with this song, an awful lot of people were, in essence, introduced to smooth jazz. In the mid-’80s, the Pat Metheny Group was chiefly trafficking in smoothed-out textures with Metheny’s own tricky little guitar patterns on top of them. So when this made the charts — top 3 across Scandinavia, top 20 in the UK, #32 in the US — Bowie fans (and pop music fans in general) everywhere were likely being introduced to Metheny and his band. As someone who’s a big smooth jazz fan now, and a major fan of Metheny, I will forever be grateful to Bowie for introducing me to him. And also that Bowie made this superb collaboration, one of the most unsung singles in his catalog.