The Bowie Project #29 – Reality (2003)
Reality is the 24th studio album by David Bowie. It was released in Europe on September 15 2003 and a day later in the United States. Like his previous record Heathen it was produced by the once estranged and now reunited longtime Bowie producer Tony Visconti showing that their previous effort was not just a one-off reunion or a sentimentally fueled exercise in nostalgia. Bowie had been re-energised from the Heathen tour the previous year and was excited to produce a set of songs that could be played live with his touring band. As such this record has a more straightforward rock sound than his previous release, it’s got a direct and edgier sound and sees Bowie feeling quite comfortable in his style for once, he’s not really reaching for anything grander than to make an enjoyable album, he’s giving it his all but in a way that feels confident and secure in a way much of his work through the later part of the 1990s didn’t.
At this point in his career Bowie didn’t owe anything to anybody, his only reason to work was because he wanted to, he had secured a new deal with Columbia Records that gave him the freedom to record as slow or as quickly as he chose and despite this he was eager to get back into the studio asap. He was excited to be working with Tony Visconti again, their work on Heathen was such a success and it proved to themselves and the world the power of their creative partnership had not been sullied by the passage of time. Bowie described Heathen as like their debut reunion album stating: “The circumstances, the environment, everything about it was just perfect for us to find out if we still had a chemistry that was really effective. And it worked out. It was perfect, not a step out of place, as though we had just come from the previous album into this one. It was quite stunningly comfortable to work with each other again.”
The songwriting process for this album was varied, some tracks were written quickly in 30 minutes and others have decades long history begun laboured over and reworked time and time again by Bowie. He prepared a handful of demos before coming into the studio but for the most part all the work for this album was done in-house, Bowie had recently welcomed the birth of his daughter Alexandria and said he didn’t want his house to be taken over by the recording process. It seems finally at this stage in his career he was able to see the benefit of a work life balance, this is a far cry away from the Station to Station era Bowie who became so entrenched with the character he was playing in the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth that he essentially worked himself into a mental breakdown in the late 1970s.
For me one of the most off putting things about this record was always the album artwork. Designed by Jonathan Barnbrook it features a cartoon anime inspired by Bowie with an aggregated hairstyle and oversized eyes, it’s a pretty blatantly awful album cover that brings to mind Hello Kitty or Bratz dolls much more than it does iconic rock n’ roll star entering an elder statesman era. The title leaves much to be desired as well its simple but as Bowie outlines his reasoning there is a bit more to it. ‘Reality’ as representing the fractured broken world we live in now he said “the absolutes have gone” and we are left with “bits and pieces of what our culture was” which feels like an appropriate approximation for a post 9/11 world. I don’t want to be too hard on the cover or concept Bowie himself said the whole subtext is he is taking the piss, I think he was well aware of how aesthetically unhinged the cover is, that’s part of the fun.
Bowie promoting Reality with Kate Moss in 2004, reminiscent of Pin Ups with Twiggy
The album opens with a track that seems to indirectly reference living life in a post-9/11 New York city. “New Killer Star” was the first single issue for the album and Bowie described it as impressionistic piece that attempts to see the positives of the future and that while he is no political commentator that what’s happening politically does tend to find a way into his music, with this being a nod to all the wrongs that were happening and continue to happen with the Middle East. The opening lines “see the great white star, over Battery Park” implies the dust cloud of destruction over the World Trade Centre and the ghost of tragedy is reflected in the song. The title “New Killer Star” a play on the word nuclear which in the wake of the War on Terror was being to feel like a real possibility as the world entered a new era of fear, surveillance, and uncertainty.
The first of two covers on this record is “Pablo Picasso” which is a song originally written by Jonathan Richman for his proto-punk band the Modern Lovers back in 1972. That track was produced by John Cale of the Velvet Underground at the same time Bowie was acting as producer for Lou Reed’s iconic record Transformer. This song presents one of the most dominant artists of the 20th century Pablo Picasso as a short statured charismatic womaniser that the girls just can’t resist. Bowie said that he had always wanted to cover the track and called it one of the “all time great cruising songs”. Bowie described the Modern Lovers as like the Velvet Underground but more whimsy and said that Richman was just extremely funny. Bowie’s cover has a faster pace than the original and the musicality is really bursting with energy. I was always a huge fan of the Modern Lovers and have listened to their debut album to death, I know every note of it so well which made it hard to get into this version initially, but after sticking with this album for a while I started to really like this cover, Bowie’s having fun with it too, you can tell.
At 56 years old at the time of recording “Never Get Old” in fact highlights that ageing is definitely something at the forefront of Bowie’s mind. Around the time of this album’s release Bowie spoke about how the birth of his daughter in the year 2000 made him question how much time he truly had left. He said: “ I just want to be there for Alexandria. She’s so exciting and so lovely so I want to be around when she grows up. I think, ‘When am I gonna let go of her? When she’s 20?’ Nah I wanna see her get married. When she’s 30? Nah I wanna see what she’s like as a mother. I don’t want to let her go. If I didn’t have my little three-year-old running around, I wouldn’t be writing songs quite this way. Seeing in her eyes all the hope and joy and optimism of the future, I have to reflect that in what I’m doing.” As I am sure most people listening know that Bowie did not get to live to see his daughter turn 20, or 30, or become a mother and died in 2016 while she was still just a teenager. “Never Get Old” is a phrase that appears in many Bowie songs like “Fantastic Voyage” or “The Buddha of Suburbia” and ageing is something he was dealt with across his career. Another interest titbit about this song is that is was featured in Bowie’s Vittel water commercial from June 2003 where he reprised for the first time in decades his personas of Ziggy Stardust, Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke, and even the humanoid dog from Diamond Dogs for a campaign with the tagline “every day a new life”. Bowie said he only agreed to appear in the advert if they would use one of the new songs to promote the album.
A slow-paced minimalist piece “The Loneliest Guy” features a character who lives in denial that he is not the loneliest but in fact the luckiest guy in the world because he only has himself to look after. The song seems to imply an inherent loneliness in Bowie and the isolated existence of this character brings to mind the Low era in Berlin when he was coming out of drug addiction and psychosis and often lived in these detached insular places mentally. Now happy in marriage and parenthood he was outside of that but it’s still there and when you’ve got that type of temperament it can be difficult to truly accept that you are no longer alone, that you can rely on something other than yourself.
Written as a protest song, “Looking for Water” speaks out against post 9/11 American imperialism shifting his focus from Manhattan to the Middle East and follows a man wandering the desert looking for water only to be greeted with oil rigs. The theme of this song also harks back to his old character, the alien Thomas Jerome Newton, who came to Earth in search of water for his depleted planet. The strong rock n’ roll edge of its tracks like this you can see that were written to be toured and performed live.
A narrative-based song “She’ll Drive a Big Car Now” it was described by Bowie as "a tragic little story about a lady and her family. And she lives in the wrong part of town, but she wants to live in an even badder, wronger part of town – but her would-be affair, her boyfriend, doesn't turn up." When he’s a no-show she ponders driving into the Hudson River to end her life. The track’s yearning for freedom away from the humdrum mundanities of domestic life have recurred in many Bowie numbers, most notably “Life on Mars”. It was rare for Bowie to provide a clear narrative in his songs and this is a real expectation for him with one of his most straightforward pieces of storytelling. Bowie played many of the instruments on this track including synth, guitar, Stylophone, saxophone and for the first time since the 80s the harmonica.
A homage to the Kinks track “Days” is Bowie’s own take on the oh-so-Ray-Davies theme of nostalgia, heartbreak, and sentimentality. In Bowie’s days he has taken his muse for granted and the emotional debts he owes that he can never repay. There is something really beautiful and genuine in this song and before performing it live at show in Melbourne Bowie introduced it by saying “I sometimes feel I wrote this song for so many people” it could be old relationships, his long-time assistant Coco Schwab, or a desperate atoning to God he doesn’t believe in, there’s real emotion here and it’s sense of not being able to give back all that was taken in this life and the struggle to retain ownership of all that has been taken from him is something we find again on “I Can’t Give Everything Away” from his final album Blackstar.
The second song that outrightly concerns the US-led war in Iraq is “Fall Dog Bombs the Moon” which was inspired by an article Bowie read about contracts being awarded to the US company Kellogg Brown & Root to rebuild the post-war bombed Iraqi cities with the tracks antagonist based on US Vice President Dick Cheney. Bowie wrote the song quickly and was said to have finished it in about a half an hour. Musically the song is really infectious and I love the way that it plods along, it’s good to see Bowie getting outrightly political like this, taking a stand and demonstrating just how tuned in he truly is and has always been, even if that manifested itself in some weird ways in past years, but those days are long gone now.
The second cover song was written by George Harrison and considering his death two years before it works as a tribute to the former Beatle. Bowie’s favourite Beatle was always his close friend and collaborator John Lennon but as the year’s went on his work would become more aligned with Harrison’s incessant search for spirituality, and although Bowie could never quite convince himself to become a true believer in faith the search for meaning has always been present in his songwriting. “Try Some, Buy Some” was recorded originally on Harrison’s debut solo album All Things Must Pass but was left off the final release and producer Phil Spector swiped it for his wife Ronnie to be released as a single in 1971. The track was not a hit for her as it’s themes around the sudden perception of God amid the temptations of a material world were not exactly suitable for the more pop oriented stylings of Ronnie Spector. It was later released by Harrison on his 1973 album Living in a Material World and Bowie called it one of his all time favourites and that it had been totally neglected. Originally slated for a follow up covers album to Pin Ups that never materialised Bowie eventually got to do his own version for this record and correlated his “daunting spiritual search” with Harrison’s belief in “some sort of system”. Bowie said of the track: “my connection to the song is about leaving a way of life behind me and finding something new. It’s overstated about most rock artists leaving drugs, it’s such a bore to read about it. But when I first heard the song in ’74 I was yet to go through my heavy drug period. And now it’s about the consolation of having kicked all that and turning your life around” It’s a good cover and I believe for Bowie it was very important to him.
The hard rock title track “Reality” is probably the loudest moment on the whole record, and it concerns how the quest for meaning in life is always doomed to fail, that real life has no narrative, or that throughout his own life he hid behind personas to block out reality as evident by the lines “I built a wall of sound to separate us, and hid among the junk of wretched highs”. Bowie is dissatisfied with the falsity of the world and vapid disguises that we all live under, ironic considering he was one of the pioneers of personas, reinvention, the constantly developing never pin downable self.
“Bring Me the Disco King” is a track which Bowie stated “crawled alone the years with me” and was first recorded in the early 1990s during the Black Tie White Noise sessions which is still unreleased and said to include an eccentric piano solo by Mike Garson. Bowie called it “a depressing song summing up the sad late 1970s with Philip Glass refrain running through it” He felt it didn’t fit in with the vibe of the album and decided not to include, producer Nile Rodgers agreed calling it funny but too trite. The song rears its head once again during the Earthling sessions in 1997 with a “pulsating, Kraftwerk style synth groove” this version too remains unreleased as Bowie said it still sounded like a heavy handed parody as opposed to the track he wanted. Then for Reality he decided to try it once again, this time stripping it back to its core elements and led by pianist Mike Garson on a Yamaha S90, Bowie loved the slower simpler sound and stated after the album’s release that “this poor little orphan Annie thing seems to have a home now”. With lyrics summing up the excesses of the era, the coke binges, the self-imposed exile in Berlin, killing time in the seventies wasting one's lives to an upbeat disco backbeat. With the extended hiatus Bowie took after the release of this album for a longtime it looked like this could be his last studio outing with “Bring Me the Disco King” serving as the epilogue to his entire career, with the references in this song seeming to suggest looking back on a lifetime of wasted moments, it’s beautiful and melancholic, in line with this album’s focus on the concept of ageing it seems to bring the themes of this record together and works well as anything he had done up to this point as a sign off, a culmination, a statement.
When Reality was released it reached number three in the UK album charts and was his highest charting album since Black Tie White Noise 10 years before, although sales quickly dropped off after the first few weeks. It received positive reviews from critics with many stating it might have even surpassed Heathen in quality, it seemed after years of calls that Bowie had reinvigorated himself creatively, it was now actually true, these last two albums weren’t experimental and devise like so much of his other recent output they were just quality records. Eric Carr of Pitchfork said the album showcased that “Bowie had finally joined us in the present, mind-young as ever but old enough not to make a show of it” and said it cemented his status as a modern artist. That’s the feeling you get listening to these last two records, that Bowie had in a sense rediscovered himself and regained something that had been lost probably as far back as Let’s Dance.
The songwriting is strong, the vocals are powerful, he is in tune with himself and the era. Still pushing boundaries but in a much more subtle way in a sense searching for his fulfilment and not for shock or outrage which was something he may have courted back during the Ziggy Stardust phase. This feels like it could have been the beginning of an incredibly productive era for Bowie, he was excited to be written and performing, he wanted to be out on stage singing his new songs that’s what makes what happened next all the more tragic. Long sets throughout the tour for this album were taking their toll on Bowie and in 2003 he had to cancel on of his concerts due to laryngitis, then in December 2004 a bout of influenza led to the postponement of five dates, in May a lighting technician fell to their death during a support acts set, and then on June 25th he performed at the Hurricane music festival in Germany and suffered a heart attack on stage. He later underwent emergency surgery and the remainder of the tour was cancelled.
A Reality Tour would be his last
Following this Bowie disappears from the public eye making occasional visits at concerts with bands like Franz Ferdinand, Arcade Fire, and David Gilmour before making his last live public performance of his own music at the Hammerstein Ballroom Black Ball Fundraiser with a rendition of “Changes” a track which could be seen to represent the entire ethos of his career. For a long time it seemed like Bowie had retired and this would be last of new music we would ever see from him, it was as if his journey was done and he didn’t have anything else to say, that was until 10 years later when he emerges once again from the shadows, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet.
Reality ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ [7/10]
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