The Buddha of Suburbia (1993)

  The Bowie Project #23 – The Buddha of Suburbia (1993)

In 1993, the same year as the release of David Bowie’s post-Tin Machine solo comeback album Black Tie White Noise, the Thin White Duke also saw himself working on a lesser known but potentially much more interesting project. The Buddha of Suburbia is a soundtrack album that was not used as a soundtrack. Following an interview between Bowie and British novelist Hanif Kureishi he agreed to compose the soundtrack for an upcoming TV adaptation of Kureishi’s 1990 novel the Buddha of the Suburbia. This autobiographical novel tells the story of Karim, a mixed-race British/Indian teenager who is desperate to escape his suburban life in South London and experience the new cultural experiences in the big city during the 1970s. The book is essentially a series of episodic adventures culminating in Karim’s Indian father being hailed as a mystic along with Karim’s introduction into the world of theatre, punk rock, and free love. A coming-of-age story that mixes realism with political commentary, 1970s pop culture references, and themes of race, identity, and social conflict. Kureishi asked Bowie if he could use some of his music in the soundtrack, and Bowie being a fan of the book said I will make you the soundtrack.

Bowie worked quickly to complete this project, primarily collaborating with Turkish musician Erdal Kızılçay, with pianist Mike Garson contributing overdubs, two musicians he had worked with previously. According to Bowie it only took six days to write and record and in the end only the title track would be used in the miniseries. The music is experimental and contains notes of pop, rock, ambient and jazz throughout. With non-linear lyrics and lots of instrumentals it was not a commercially viable release and despite good reviews it received little promotion from Bowie or his label. First released on November 8th 1993, this album remained out of print until a CD reissue in 2007 and still remains one of Bowie’s least known works. However, there is a lot going on here and Bowie himself named it his favourite album of his in 2003, possibly a tongue-in-cheek answer as this was the one record that people were unable to track down at that time.

The music presented here consists of short motifs with combinations of guitar, synthesiser, trumpet, percussion, and sitar. Bowie said he drew inspirations from all over the place for the project including the Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds, Roxy Music, T. Rex, Neu!, Kraftwerk and Brian Eno with many reviewers comparing it to this 1970s work on the Berlin trilogy. Describing his process for making the album Bowie stated:

“I took each theme or motif from the play and initially stretched or lengthened it to a five or six-minute duration. Then, having noted which musical key I was in and having counted the number of bars, I would often pull down the faders leaving just the percussive element with no harmonic information to refer to. Working in layers I would then build up reinforcements in the key of the composition, totally blind so to speak. When all faders were pushed up again a number of clashes would make themselves evident. The more dangerous or attractive ones would then be isolated and repeated.”

The album feels like a culmination of a lot of Bowie’s work and could be seen as the missing link between the sounds found on his last album Black Tie White Noise and his following record the grand and conception Outside. This record has not been made for mass audience and fans of Bowie glam output in the early 70s or pop megahits in the 80s are probably going to be pretty turned off by it, he’s making this album for himself, he’s having fun experimenting and he’s gotten himself excited once again about his ability to grow and develop as an artist.

The opening track “Buddha of Suburbia” acted as the theme song to the television miniseries, the show was set in the 1970s this song is attempting to recapture something of the sounds of that time while also remaining modern. The sentimental questioning of the lyrics also relate directly to the themes of the novel and could be read as coming directly from the series main character Karim who is desperately trying to find his place in the world and understand the purpose of life, feeling stuck down on himself and down on his knees in suburbia. This single was a minor success reaching number 35 in the charts but was controversial on the radio in both the UK and US for the use of the word bullshit in the lyrics. As a call back to the sounds of the 70s the song features call-backs to some of Bowie’s earlier works incorporating the guitar break from “Space Oddity” and the line “Zane, zane, zane” from his 1970 song “All the Madmen”.

The next song “Sex and the Church” for me is reminiscent of the work of Laurie Anderson in particular “O Superman”. With an electronic backing, drum machines, sequencer, and saxophone solos. It lines up well with the novel and miniseries with spirituality and sexuality being huge themes in both. Bowie uses a vocoder to distort his voice and the ending of this track has a sequencing very similar to his 1972 track “The Jean Genie”, he’s having fun playing with his legacy and bringing together all that come before into a more modern electronic jazz style.

“South Horizon” is an instrumental piece of avant-garde jazz. Bowie explained that "all elements, from lead instrumentation to texture, were played both forwards and backwards. The resulting extracts were then intercut arbitrarily". Bowie called this his favourite song on the album and for me this is all about Mike Garson’s piano work who was previously known for his intense avant-garde piano solo on “Aladdin Sane” so many decades before. It’s just good, weird jazz, I think you either go for it you don’t.

The longest track on the album is “The Mysteries” and this where things are the most evocative of instrumental work Bowie did during the Berlin era. An ambient piece with different electronic sounds and synthesiser loops this is about creating a feeling. Presenting a stark and simple ambient landscape evoking the yearning and constrictions of suburban life. It wouldn’t sound out of place on the second half of his “Heroes” album.

On “Bleed Like a Craze, Dad” Bowie worked with a trio of musicians called 3D Echo who just happened to be recording an EP at the same studio as Bowie. This gives us a harder rock centred sound than anything that came before with Bowie getting close to rapping his lyrics in a way many have compared to work done on the Lodger album in 1979. It’s got an edgy guitar-based sound and I can imagine there’s lots of people who would really get on board with this song but it’s not my style at all.

“Strangers When We Meet” is a track that Bowie would re-record as the closing track for his next studio album, Outside, 1995, and is probably the most conventional song on the record musically and lyrically being about the beginnings of a relationship. Critics have said that this song, while a great Bowie track, feels out of place on both albums but for me it’s nice respite from the avant-garde jazz heavy nature of much of the rest of the record. It’s interesting to hear this song and watch how it developed over the next two years before it was re-recorded, this version feels a little rawer and more melodic, and if you listen closely you’ll see the bassline has been lifted from the Spencer Davis Group track “Gimme Some Lovin”.

“Dead Against It” sees us getting out of suburbia and into the bright lights of the city, a track inspired by new wave New York bands of the 1970s, it’s fast and fun and more playful than a lot of the record. Bowie himself seems to be having some fun with the internal rhyming structure of much of the lyrics with lines like “I couldn't cope or'd hope eloped a dope she roped”. It’s a great track and is up there as one of my favourite moments on this album, it sounds different to anything else he’d done before this.

“Untitled No. 1” is a swirling mix of synthy groovy sounds, with saxophone, piano, and keyboard, a quasi-Indian dance inline with the ethnicity of the series main character. It’s layered and a little entrancing, you just got to enjoy it and go with it, if you haven’t warmed up to styles and feeling of the record by now Bowie has no interest in trying to get you onboard, he had nothing to lose while making this album and is truly doing it for himself.

This then leads us into our final instrumental, the static and slow “Ian Fish UK Heir” that title being an anagram for Buddha of Suburbia author Hanif Kureishi. The song could be Bowie’s most devoted attempt to make ambient music, usually he can’t help but bring the traditional melody into it in more overt ways, but here he has taken a page out of Brian Eno’s book more than ever before. With music slowly fading in and out, static white noise with cracks buzzing, the light pluck of guitar, strings and harp background, it’s not for everyone, but those who it for really love this kind of thing.

We come full circle on the final track, an alternative version of the title track “Buddha of Suburbia” that features Lenny Kravitz on guitar. With slightly more abrasive instrumentation if you ask me it’s not different enough from the opening version to justify being an entirely new track on the record, I would have just picked one and given a shorter reprisal at the end if thematically Bowie wanted to come back to it for that reason.

When The Buddha of Suburbia was released it came and went without many people noticing it and as such could be described as a flop. The original album cover featured a still from a BBC production of the Jungle Book overlayed on a map of Beckenham, it didn’t have Bowie’s face anywhere on it and his name was written so small 99% of people would skip right past it in a record store without realising it was a new David Bowie studio album placed in the soundtrack section. It was further overshadowed by EMI’s release of The Singles Collection of Bowie’s work the week after this was released, that compilation was a success and reached the UK top 10.

The Buddha of Suburbia remains an obscure release to this day, some swear by it as some of the most interesting and underrated music Bowie ever produced, while others see it as maybe a little bit too self-indulgent and overly pretentious, and like most things in this world I imagine the answer lies somewhere in the middle. It’s definitely one to hear for the die-hard Bowie fans and the more I listen to it the more it takes me in.

The Buddha of Suburbia ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ [6/10]