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rfmcdonaldThe first David Bowie that I ever owned was his 1997 Earthling, and after the lead single of "Little Wonder" the song that caught my attention most--the song from the album achieved the greatest chart success, too--is "I'm Afraid of Americans". I really like the blend of Eno's spiky music and Bowie's paranoid style.
Bowie explained the song in the official press release for Earthling as a straightforward expression of his dislike of American cultural imperialism.
Bowie did write the song, and it's difficult to interpret lines like "Jonny wants a brain, Jonny wants to/Suck on a coke./Jonny wants a woman, Jonny wants/To think of a joke./Jonny's in America." outside of that framework. Fans certainly agree: One of the commenters at a YouTube page hostings one version of the "I'm Afraid of Americans" music video wrote that it is "[s]triking how relevant this song is 10 years later," another person went so far as to liken it to Michael Moore's An Awful Truth, and one commenter on a blog wondered how the world would have reacted if "I'm Afraid of Americans" was released not in 1997 but in 2004.
All this is fine, but I have another deuterocanonical interpretation. Even before my experience this past January, witnessing a bit of senseless violence on the street and in the Spadina subway station (1, 2, 3), I was struck by the pervasive fear and paranoia of both the song and the video. Yes, Trent Reznor's Jonny can be scary, but Reznor wasn't the only person who scared Bowie on the streets of New York: As Bowie the singer sings about Jonny (who at least sounds very ordinary, by the way, looking up the stars and lusting after women and talking about cars), Bowie the actor runs down the street and sees all kinds of people morphing into gun-murderers as he runs. Is he seeing correctly or is he paranoid, overgeneralizing from one person (or no person) to all persons? That sort of concern with an unpredictable world, as I discovered for myself after that January, can be a difficult thing to break. Some people do break it. Others cannot and continue to overgeneralize, clinging to a flawed transitive logic that here is something like "Jonny's an American and Jonny's violent, therefore Americans are violent, Bowie is in America, therefore everyone around Bowie is violent."
But what if Bowie's video persona is wrong, and the people around him are just as normal and peaceful as people anywhere else? America's just another nation if a large one, and to some extent or another very many non-Americans--certainly almost all of the consumers of Bowie's music--also relate to a heavily American global popular culture that people want. Who, according to this song, wouldn't be complicit and at risk of posing a threat to us? It's not as if Jonny doesn't sound like a normal enough guy. If he's not safe, is anyone around us safe? Are we safe?
As Le Monde's editorialists said in a not too different context, we are all Americans.
Bowie explained the song in the official press release for Earthling as a straightforward expression of his dislike of American cultural imperialism.
"'I'm Afraid of Americans' was written by myself and Eno. It's not as truly hostile about Americans as say 'Born in the USA': it's merely sardonic. I was traveling in Java when the first McDonalds went up: it was like, 'for fuck's sake.' The invasion by any homogenized culture is so depressing, the erection of another Disney World in, say, Umbria, Italy, more so. It strangles the indigenous culture and narrows expression of life."
Bowie did write the song, and it's difficult to interpret lines like "Jonny wants a brain, Jonny wants to/Suck on a coke./Jonny wants a woman, Jonny wants/To think of a joke./Jonny's in America." outside of that framework. Fans certainly agree: One of the commenters at a YouTube page hostings one version of the "I'm Afraid of Americans" music video wrote that it is "[s]triking how relevant this song is 10 years later," another person went so far as to liken it to Michael Moore's An Awful Truth, and one commenter on a blog wondered how the world would have reacted if "I'm Afraid of Americans" was released not in 1997 but in 2004.
All this is fine, but I have another deuterocanonical interpretation. Even before my experience this past January, witnessing a bit of senseless violence on the street and in the Spadina subway station (1, 2, 3), I was struck by the pervasive fear and paranoia of both the song and the video. Yes, Trent Reznor's Jonny can be scary, but Reznor wasn't the only person who scared Bowie on the streets of New York: As Bowie the singer sings about Jonny (who at least sounds very ordinary, by the way, looking up the stars and lusting after women and talking about cars), Bowie the actor runs down the street and sees all kinds of people morphing into gun-murderers as he runs. Is he seeing correctly or is he paranoid, overgeneralizing from one person (or no person) to all persons? That sort of concern with an unpredictable world, as I discovered for myself after that January, can be a difficult thing to break. Some people do break it. Others cannot and continue to overgeneralize, clinging to a flawed transitive logic that here is something like "Jonny's an American and Jonny's violent, therefore Americans are violent, Bowie is in America, therefore everyone around Bowie is violent."
But what if Bowie's video persona is wrong, and the people around him are just as normal and peaceful as people anywhere else? America's just another nation if a large one, and to some extent or another very many non-Americans--certainly almost all of the consumers of Bowie's music--also relate to a heavily American global popular culture that people want. Who, according to this song, wouldn't be complicit and at risk of posing a threat to us? It's not as if Jonny doesn't sound like a normal enough guy. If he's not safe, is anyone around us safe? Are we safe?
I'm afraid of americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I cant help it
I'm afraid I cant
Johnnys in america
God is an american
I'm afraid of americans
I'm afraid of the world
As Le Monde's editorialists said in a not too different context, we are all Americans.
