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rfmcdonaldSomething about David Bowie strikes me as ever so slightly wrong. I don't deny that David Bowie is a seminal figure in the popular music of the last portion of the 20th century--"Space Oddity," for one, is a song for the ages. As well-crafted as his songs may be, it seems to me that they are too often marred by a certain insincerity, by a lightness of tone that undermines the effectiveness of his music by calling into question its honesty. Fortunately from my perspective as a fan, there are entire albums where he is sincere. Most recently, my favourite examples of this best category of Bowie can be found in the late 1970s' Berlin trilogy (Low, "Heroes", Lodger). The passionate "Heroes" easily makes it into my top 5 listing of all-time favourite songs.
Things were different when I first began listening to Bowie in the mid- and late-1990s. Back then, my favourite Bowie album was 1997's nine-song Earthling. At the time, Earthling was lauded by music critics as yet another album produced on his recovery from a late 1980s/early 1990s creative nadir marked by the album Never Let Me Down and Bowie's band Tin Machine, with its choppy samples, Reeves Gabrels' guitar work, and insistent synth parts. "Little Wonder," the first single off of the album, was promoted with a surreal music video directed by the brilliant Floria Sigismondi. As much as I like "Little Wonder" (and "Dead Man Walking"), Earthling's track #8, "I'm Afraid of Americans," co-written with Brian Eno, is my favourite song off of Earthling.
There are a few different versions of "I'm Afraid of Americans." There is the album version, which is good. There is the single version produced with Trent Reznor, which is rather more fun. On the CD single, there are another five versions, of which the hip-hop remix featuring Ice Cube is the most interesting. The single version was used for the eye-catching music video, which featured a glowering Trent Reznor chasing a frazzled Bowie through the streets of Greenwich Village. The music is catchy and hook-filled; it's also coiled-spring tense, and so goes along well with the lyrics.
When Bowie's sincere, he's humanistic. The passion of "Heroes" always struck me as rooted not in the comparatively cheap thrills of love, but in the principled support for individualism, in his cheering of two lovers' efforts to assert themselves against a state that denies them the right to choose who they want to love. ("Though nothing will keep us together/we can beat them/for ever and ever./Oh we can be heroes/just for one day.") In "I'm Afraid of Americans," Bowie explores the United States through the American character of Johnny and through his narrative persona's own meditations.
The song opens with a description of Johnny's thoughts. His thoughts do Johnny little credit ("Johnny wants a brain/Johnny wants to suck on a Coke/Johnny wants a woman/Johnny wants to think of a joke"), but as the song progresses the narrator's true concerns ("Nobody needs anyone/They don't even just pretend") become apparent. Johnny, it turns out, is a fairly harmless figure, a sort of millennial everyman. The narrator is rather more terrified of the wider world that Johnny inhabits, of the vast and diverse universe populated by threatening things.
"God," Bowie sings, "is an American," just like Johnny. It's not Americans who are the problem so much as it is the Americans' dark side and the narrator's own dark side working in concert. "I'm Afraid of Americans" isn't a simple America-bashing song. It's a sign of Bowie's prescience that, in the relatively Ameriphilic environment of the 1990s, he managed to anticipate the exceptional ambivalence of the non-American world towards the world's only hyperpower. This song is, rather more interestingly, a song about the simple animal fear, both of the other and of one's self, that too often paralyzes people. We 6.1 billion non-Americans share this world with nearly 300 million Americans; almost any problem that we might have (as individuals, as societies) owes at least as much to ourselves as it does to that heterogeneous quarreling polity of more than a quarter-billion souls, if not rather more. How can we all work through our fears if we don't bother to identify our fears' causes accurately?
Time to embrace the world.
Things were different when I first began listening to Bowie in the mid- and late-1990s. Back then, my favourite Bowie album was 1997's nine-song Earthling. At the time, Earthling was lauded by music critics as yet another album produced on his recovery from a late 1980s/early 1990s creative nadir marked by the album Never Let Me Down and Bowie's band Tin Machine, with its choppy samples, Reeves Gabrels' guitar work, and insistent synth parts. "Little Wonder," the first single off of the album, was promoted with a surreal music video directed by the brilliant Floria Sigismondi. As much as I like "Little Wonder" (and "Dead Man Walking"), Earthling's track #8, "I'm Afraid of Americans," co-written with Brian Eno, is my favourite song off of Earthling.
There are a few different versions of "I'm Afraid of Americans." There is the album version, which is good. There is the single version produced with Trent Reznor, which is rather more fun. On the CD single, there are another five versions, of which the hip-hop remix featuring Ice Cube is the most interesting. The single version was used for the eye-catching music video, which featured a glowering Trent Reznor chasing a frazzled Bowie through the streets of Greenwich Village. The music is catchy and hook-filled; it's also coiled-spring tense, and so goes along well with the lyrics.
When Bowie's sincere, he's humanistic. The passion of "Heroes" always struck me as rooted not in the comparatively cheap thrills of love, but in the principled support for individualism, in his cheering of two lovers' efforts to assert themselves against a state that denies them the right to choose who they want to love. ("Though nothing will keep us together/we can beat them/for ever and ever./Oh we can be heroes/just for one day.") In "I'm Afraid of Americans," Bowie explores the United States through the American character of Johnny and through his narrative persona's own meditations.
The song opens with a description of Johnny's thoughts. His thoughts do Johnny little credit ("Johnny wants a brain/Johnny wants to suck on a Coke/Johnny wants a woman/Johnny wants to think of a joke"), but as the song progresses the narrator's true concerns ("Nobody needs anyone/They don't even just pretend") become apparent. Johnny, it turns out, is a fairly harmless figure, a sort of millennial everyman. The narrator is rather more terrified of the wider world that Johnny inhabits, of the vast and diverse universe populated by threatening things.
I'm afraid of Americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid of Americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid of Americans
"God," Bowie sings, "is an American," just like Johnny. It's not Americans who are the problem so much as it is the Americans' dark side and the narrator's own dark side working in concert. "I'm Afraid of Americans" isn't a simple America-bashing song. It's a sign of Bowie's prescience that, in the relatively Ameriphilic environment of the 1990s, he managed to anticipate the exceptional ambivalence of the non-American world towards the world's only hyperpower. This song is, rather more interestingly, a song about the simple animal fear, both of the other and of one's self, that too often paralyzes people. We 6.1 billion non-Americans share this world with nearly 300 million Americans; almost any problem that we might have (as individuals, as societies) owes at least as much to ourselves as it does to that heterogeneous quarreling polity of more than a quarter-billion souls, if not rather more. How can we all work through our fears if we don't bother to identify our fears' causes accurately?
Time to embrace the world.
