David Bowie – Black Tie White Noise

this is definitely the turning point leading into bowie's highly under-rated 90s output. he seems to have correctly intuited that a shift in culture was occurring, but he managed to simultaneously move directly towards (forwards) where it was moving and directly away from (backwards) where it was at the same time. in a certain respect, the disc manages to come off as something he would have done in 1997 pasted directly on top of something he would have done in 1983, which makes it stick out like a sore thumb in 1993. most of the reviews i've read try to rationalize why the disc didn't sell. who cares, really? however, if you want a reason, it probably has nothing to do with the artist or the quality of the disc and everything to do with the fact that everybody was listening to backwards guitar solos in 1993, except perhaps the guys playing the backwards guitar solos themselves. this strange retro-futuristic disc, and i mean in contemporary to 1993 as the disc comes off today as being characteristic of the poppier side of "electronica", was just not on people's radar...

i'd bet a sack of apples that clint mansell was listening to pallas athena when he wrote the requiem for a dream theme, but only on the condition that an independent witness can be verified (like bowie cares or needs the money).

lyrically, the disc explores themes that are typical to bowie so i'm not going to really get into that; enough has been written about that and while you won't find much on this disc that he hadn't said previously, he says it here as well as he says it anywhere else. the title track commits a bit of a faux pas in connecting african music to a statement about racism and while it comes off as good intentioned it also comes off as very cheesy, which is something that can perhaps be extrapolated to the rest of the disc.

whatever can be said of the disc, which is not highly regarded, the fact that it succeeds cannot be taken away from it. what that means is that whether or not one likes the production or songwriting decisions, one cannot deny that they converged into a very well polished product, which is something one expects from bowie but is not something that one always receives; this disc ranks near the top of the list insofar as measuring how much effort was put into constructing it. every track is heavily multitracked and meticulously mixed, including a fairly diverse level of instrumentation (even if a lot of it is synthesizer based). so, it's hard to complain. what else can you ask of the guy besides an honest effort?

my dissent simply comes from my lack of interest in the genres of funk, disco and soul, although i do not deny the high points of the disc, particularly the tenth track. there are some points where he almost sways me, and that's something in itself, but i can only recommend this wholeheartedly to the 80s fan base and cautiously to the 90s fan base.