#100, July 1, 2006

From Ibeza to the Norfolk Broads

Hunky Dory is alright! Actually, it is more than that. It is one of those ten albums that one would want to have on that very limited-memory Ipod which one would be forced to take onto that desert island where one would be shipwrecked simply so that one could indicate which album one really liked – today. Because, if one was shipwrecked on a different day, the contents of that limited-memory Ipod would look somewhat different. But today, at least, Hunky Dory is Top Ten.

Why? Surely there are better albums around. Surely there are better David Bowie albums also – Ziggy Stardust, for example. And, indeed, one would have to admit that some of the songs on Ziggy Stardust (“Five Years,” “Suffragette City,” “Ziggy Stardust”) are superior to many of the songs on Hunky Dory. Possibly all of the music is of a better quality, more polished, on Ziggy as well. But Ziggy Stardust, in the end, is pulled down by being a concept album; some of the songs’ words (though not those of the aforementioned ones, of course) end up seeming pretty trite and in many instances don’t live up to the quality of the music they are accompanying (“There’s a Starman, waiting in the sky…” etc.). The songs don’t really stand up without the somewhat contrived, and yet inexplicable, concept. [I am willing to be convinced otherwise.]

But it isn’t just the negatives associated with other albums like Ziggy and Aladdin Sane that leaves Hunky Dory on our limited-memory Ipod as we head island-wards. Hunky Dory is phenomenal at the level of the music, but also at the level of ideas. While Ziggy Stardust appears as a modernist piece of escapism – in other words, while it doesn’t conform to the usual dichotomies of social conflict, which means it transcends the Modern also, it merely posits a sci-fi positivism and study of commercialism in its place – Hunky Dory challenges the modernist edifice in its entirety. It is a supreme piece of post-modern, while still pre-modem, scholarship.

Its best known song, in fact the only one that makes it onto the Bowie greatest hits compilations, is “Changes.” The song is perhaps too well known for its own good, and its words don’t get a good airing as a consequence. In the pop music world it is not a bad ditty. Attached to the album, it is an interesting manifesto that helps account for all that follows. It is obviously about change, but it is also about change that doesn’t lead anywhere in particular. You have “the children that you spit on/who try to change their world” who are “immune to your consultation,” so don’t try to co-opt them; but you also have the warning to “look out you rock and rollers” since we all get older.

What Hunky Dory as a whole feels most like is a post-modern version of “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Except, instead of Mussorgsky wandering around his friend’s art exhibit and writing musical impressions of what he sees, one has David Bowie tramping through the cultural landscape of early 1970s Britain and the United States and creating songs that sum up the state of the art. Thus each piece is able to be thought of collectively as part of an album, and separately as a work of art. Thus, there is the free-associating “Eight Line Poem:”

Tactful cactus by your window


Surveys the prairie of your room


Mobile spins to its collision


Clara puts her head between her paws


They've opened shops down west side


Will the cacti find a home


But the key to the city


Is in the sun that pins the branches to the sky

which is sheer brilliance. Then you have the surreal genius of “Quicksand:”

I'm closer to the golden dawn


Immersed in Crowley's uniform


Of imagery


I'm living in a silent film


Portraying Himmler's sacred realm


Of dream reality


I'm frightened by the total goal


Drawing to the ragged hole


And I ain't got the power, anymore


No I ain't got the power anymore



I'm the twisted name on Garbo's eyes


Living proof of Churchill's lies


I'm destiny


I'm torn between the light and dark


Where others see their target’s


Divine symmetry


Should I kiss the viper's fang


Or herald loud the death of man


I'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought


And i ain't got the power anymore


Not surprisingly, the chorus’s demand that we not have faith in ourselves has much traction after such verses!

Two more to conjure with, both very self-conscious and intelligent songs for someone trying to grapple with the impact of modern art and music and their relation to social change: “Andy Warhol” and “Song for Bob Dylan.”

The former with its chorus of

Andy Warhol looks a scream


Hang him on my wall


Andy Warhol, silver screen


Can't tell them apart at all

speaks for itself.

The latter is very interesting also. Here you have someone who has renamed himself – as a result of the popularity of the Monkeys, an American TV show about a band with an English lead singer modeled on the English Beatles (I would say influenced by “Hard Day’s Night” and “Help”) – who chooses a name from American legend (should the name be pronounced Bow-ie as in bending, or Bow-ie as in tying bows? who knows) – and who then comments on another artist who has refashioned himself – giving up a German Jewish [?] name for one taken, I imagine, from the first name of a Welsh poet (though that’s a guess) – of such things is post-World War II transnationalism (Anglo-American style) made. Parse out that sentence, if you will, and pass it on if you must!

The first verse talks about the impact of Bob Dylan’s music and it makes gestures to the 1960s counter-culture:

Ah, hear this Robert Zimmerman


I wrote a song for you


About a strange young man called Dylan


With a voice like sand and glue


Some words of truthful vengeance


They could pin us to the floor


Brought a few more people on


And put the fear in a whole lot more


But somewhere along the way people seem to have lost the plot –

You gave your heart to every bedsit room


At least a picture on the wall


And you sat behind a million pair of eyes


And told them how they saw


Then we lost your train of thought


The paintings are all your own


While troubles are rising


We'd rather be scared


Together than alone

and thus Hunky Dory, released at the end of 1971, becomes another harbinger of the end of social reform and protest, and the arrival of whatever it is that you think the 1970s represented. But the album is one that retains its freshness and intellectual power long after most of the work produced at the same time sounds dated and pseudo-intellectual.

Anyway, who hasn’t become “chameleon, comedian, corinthian and caricature”?