David Bowie Rockets Onward

A mercurial superstar tours in triumph

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If there is a contagious sense of release, almost of giddiness, in Bowie's music, that is because he has laid his ghosts well. Lodger, released in 1979, was a purging and a burial. As he had on two previous albums, Bowie worked with the intense Art Rock Composer Brian Eno (Ambient 1: Music for Airports). Boys Keep Swinging mixed Bowie's band with instruments they did not normally play. Guitarist Carlos Alomar, for example, found himself playing drums. Bowie then took the chord changes from Boys Keep Swinging, played them at nearly half speed and came up with a romantic ballad, Fantastic Voyage. Bowie's classic raver for Mott the Hoople, All the Young Dudes, was played backward and turned into Move On.

It was art, but you could not dance to it. Let's Dance gets its licks in with a simplicity that may be deceptively easy to grasp. Its chief architect counsels caution. "Finding my style is real difficult," he says. "It's something real different for me. It's like. . . I don't want to say rebirth. But it's something like that."

There was an intervening album between Lodger and Let's Dance, 1980's Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), on which could be heard the figurative sound of Bowie picking up the pieces. They didn't quite fit yet, although the title track and Ashes to Ashes were two of his best songs. Let's Dance has all the consolidation and much of the restless peace that Bowie has been searching for. Says Japan's Nagisa Oshima, who directed Bowie in his upcoming film, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence: "Let's Dance gives the impression that David really is free." This kind of freedom carries certain risks of its own, such as looking like a bisected square. "It's hard to say, 'Hey, you can be a nice guy without being a wimp,' " Bowie says. "It's hard to make people believe you don't have to be a tooth-gnashing, vampiric drug creature of the night to say something important. That same attitude, that same image, has been coming from one particular area of rock for the last 15 years, but it hasn't done anything except produce casualties."

Bowie ought to know that area the way an old sea hand knows his charts. He navigated it and narrowly missed racking up. Even now, hymning health and positivism, Bowie is doing a delicate balancing act. Spectators who recall his previous incarnations may be pardoned for wondering if this is not another disguise.

No rocker has ever fused stage and private personalities with such dedication and calculation as David Bowie. The painted perversity of Ziggy Stardust spearheaded Glitter Rock and Glam Rock back in the early '70s. But as the centerpiece and major instigator of all this, Bowie was after something more than a shock and a trend. He wanted a confrontation with the innate theatricality of rock. In 1972, when he first hit the stage as Ziggy, decked out in makeup, dye job and psychedelic costume, the rock world was ready. Too much karma, too much good vibes, too much hippy dippy: audiences wanted decadence with a difference. Bowie was there.

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