David Bowie’s 21st studio album Earthling (stylised as EART HL ING) was released on 3 February 1997. The follow up to the 1995 concept album Outside the original plans were for this record to be a conceptual continuation of what came before. Instead, Bowie scrapped that idea and this album was just merely influenced by some of styles and sounds of Outside in particular electronica as well as drum and bass/jungle culture that had been developing throughout the 1990s. This album is an interesting one in that it sounds like Bowie has never been further away from the glam rock style that made him famous. This is straight up drum and bass and on first listen it can be hard to know what to make of it. Is Bowie once again reinventing himself and making a bold new statement on artistic integrity and the drive to delve even deeper into the culture's musical landscape? Or is chasing a sound that had already past its height of cultural relevance, desperately trying to stay relevant as he enters his 50s? The answer to that question I feel probably lies somewhere in the middle.
Bowie was influenced by contemporary acts like Underworld and the Prodigy to explore a more electronic sound, it was his first album since Diamond Dogs that was almost entirely self-produced and he had a strong idea about how he wanted the record to sound, together with guitarist Gabrel Reeves Bowie produced demos for much of the music on Earthling's while on tour. In comparison to Outside once work was properly started on this album everything moved very quickly and the entire record was recorded in two and half weeks. The recording sessions for this record re-purposed some songs that can previously been recorded with Tin Machine and the updated versions of these songs would eventually find their way onto the Is It Any Wonder? EP released in 2020. Originally it’s said that Earthling was envisaged as an EP of new tracks sequenced with remakes and covers in between, but by the time they got to end of the sessions there was actually enough material for a full length record of all new content.
This album is sometimes dismissed as Bowie’s drum and bass record but biographer Marc Spitz argues it’s simply a case of a veteran artist pursuing a sound he has fallen in love with and it is true that this is the type of thing he’s been doing his entire career, when he went full soul star for Young Americans he didn’t get this kind of flak, it was understood that absorbing new styles was part of his musical genetic makeup. However, the rapid-fire breakbeats and incessant percussion can start to grate on a listener as you make your way through this record, I guess it’s an either you love it or hate it kind of thing and I imagine there’s many a classic era Bowie fan who just can’t jive with this sound for almost 50 minutes in a row, while I am sure there are others who can’t get enough of it and occasional you hear it spoken of as one of his most underrated releases.
The album opens strong with "Little Wonder" and right out the gate we are into the drum and bass style and it even utilises the percussion and power chords that were used in the Prodigy’s hit “Firestarter” the year before. Bowie said the lyrics were written through a ridiculous exercise of stream of consciousness where he took the dwarves from Snow White and made a line for each other their names, he laughed and then explained that he ran out of dwarves so there’s a couple extra with names like “Stinky”. As the song builds into the chorus the guitar comes in and it takes a turn into arena rock almost as if he’s not quite ready just yet to commit entirely to this new sound and wants to retreat into more familiar territory and give his audience a chance to adapt. The track is grounded in its simple piano refrain that really ties everything together and I think overall it’s a pretty strong opening number. It was released as a single and was the most successful song from Earthling reaching number 14 in the UK.
“Looking for Satellites” began as drummer Mark Plati’s attempt to create an electronic track in Waltz timing but once Bowie and Gabrels starting working on it then it started to shift and change with Bowie added a number of Brian Eno style restrictions like forcing Gabrels to remain on a low E string until the chord would change and could only continue to move up with each chord progression. This type of restricted method was a holdover from the way Bowie created his previous album Outside with Eno. The track uses the image of the satellite to pit humanities inherent desire for religion against the progresses of technology and communication and was influenced by the then recent scientific discussion around the possibility of life on mars (*pun cough pun). The image of satellites representing something grander than ourselves also harks back to the Bowie produced Lou Reed song “Satellite of Love” from the 1972 Reed record Transformer.
The idea behind “Battle for Britain (The Letter)” was according to Plati to create a jazz-tinged jungle track and is characterised by various loops and distortions as Bowie reckons with uncertainty around his own British identity after living in the USA for so long. A willingness to observe and highlight his own Britishness is something that is apparent on this record as Bowie allows his accent to become more prominent on these tracks that he usually does, even the album cover portrays him wearing a tattered Union Jack coat while looking out at the green plains of England. While Bowie always fetishized America it seems at this point in the 1990s it was never cooler to be English with the rise of Britpop and bands like Oasis and Blur feeding into the cultural zeitgeist. On the jazz side of things we’ve got a manic piano solo from Mike Garson who has been responsible for most of the notable piano work in Bowie’s oeuvre especially his avant-garde work on the title track from Aladdin Sane.
Things are a little less jungley on “Seven Years in Tibet” which was influenced by the Heinrich Harrer autobiography of the same name which reflected the Chinese takeover of Tibet. Bowie first became fascinated by Buddhism when he was around 19 and since then the situation in Tibet can only continued to get worse, he said that after listening to lectures by Dalia Lama, he felt it was important to take a stance on how he felt about the issue and all the Tibetan families who have lived in horror for so long. Bowie then began to play Tibetan house benefits, hang a Tibetan flag in the studio and even sang a version of this song in Mandarin Chinese that would become the last number one single in British controlled Hong Kong. This song is more influenced by grunge, new wave and R&B and is characterised by saxophone riffs, shrieking guitars, various loops and treated vocals and synthesisers.
Bowie described “Dead Man Walking” as a tribute to rock n’ roll, a genre that stays young while everyone else grows old and was also influenced by watching Neil Young perform at a 1996 concert as well a tribute to his old flame the actress Susan Sarandon who he had an affair with while they both starred in the 1983 horror movie The Hunger. Lyrically it’s a little hard to pin down and seems to be about an older man watching a clip of his younger self before getting up and walking away. The track features a whole assortment of sound including frantic bebop piano, programming, Roland VG-8, and even a Moog synthesizer.
“Telling Lies” is a song that originated during the sessions for Outside and was originally released on Bowie’s website and holds the honour of being the first downloadable single by a major artist with over 300,000 people downloading the internet only single. Bowie launched the song in an online chat session where he and two other people pretending to be him answered questions from the audience, with Bowie telling the truth and the others telling lies. This track was the first time Bowie attempted to merge rock music with a drum and bass style and would be the first example of his use of the styles that would characterise this record. By the time he got to the recording session for Earthling Bowie wanted to have another crack at this song and it made the cut, but I would rate it as one of the album’s weaker moments.
Although I would say “The Last Thing You Should Do” is probably the album’s actual weakest moment. A late addition to the record it was one of the last things they had recorded and is essentially a collection of discarded overdubs and techno sounds. An uninteresting and uninspired song that feels like the most dated thing on this entire record, and that’s saying something.
But next up we get what I’m sure most people would rate as this album’s highpoint and the only song from this record that the casual Bowie fan might be aware of. “I’m Afraid of Americans” was co-written by Bowie and Brian Eno during the sessions for Outside and following the release of this album six different remixes were issues on maxi singles which were mostly created by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor who had toured with Bowie during the Outside tour. The music video for this track also featured Reznor with Bowie highlighting the theme of a European frightened in an American city. The song is probably the most successful track on the album as it holds back from the direct drum and bass sound and instead allows the electronic techno nature of the record blend in naturally, as such it can feel a little detached from the rest of the album as musically it is so different.
“Law (Earthlings on Fire)" was described by Bowie biographer Chris O’Leary as a club track and “industrial trash-pop”. The lyrics paraphrase philosopher Bertrand Russell with “I don’t want knowledge, I want certainty” and were supposed to reflect Bowie’s realisation that as he gets older, he realises there is no such thing as certainty and that accepting that realisation can actually be freeing. Unfortunately for being the album’s closing song and I suppose meant to be the culmination of all that came before, even containing elements from the opening song “Little Wonder”, but it just doesn’t come to anything and after going through these nine songs I start to feel a little bit jaded with the type of music he’s making, but I guess I was just never a true junglist no matter how hard I’ve tried.
When this album was released, it received quite positive reviews from critics with many lauding it as his best since Scary Monsters, people commended Bowie for sounding in touch with the era although some felt it lacked innovation and didn’t really contribute anything new to the drum and bass/jungle genre. Overall, even though it was well-received it lacked the cohesiveness of a true classic and there wasn’t much, except possible “I’m Afraid of Americans” that would be remembered going into the future. Retrospectively it all feels a little bit rushed, the album was recorded incredibly quickly and the sounds repeat themselves quite consistently, you could say that’s just the style of the genre but if they were worked on a little longer I think things could have been made a bit more unique. Ultimately Bowie is a little bit behind here with this new sound, drum and bass was already on the way out and the electronic experimentation found on Outside feels a little bit more genuine. I think when you take everything together Earthling is a good record, it’s interesting and it features Bowie like we’ve never heard him before, but it just isn’t good enough to stand him to the more applauded sections of his catalogue.
Earthling (1997) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ [6/10]
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