SCREAM LIKE A BABY – DAVID BOWIE’S CLASH WITH TYRANNY

In the age of ICE abductions, very public assassinations and far-right marches in the UK, Scream Like A Baby returns with a vengeance as Bowie’s anthem against totalitarianism in all its forms. The song seems to tell a story of persecution and confinement but the details are shadowy, born of uncertainty like glimpses of light from within a doom-ridden cell. Scream Like A Baby is the voice of resistance, crying out in anger, pain and fear, which has already been broken.

It all started out as a bit of fun—artistic outlaws, freaking out the norms, a cultural revolution televised on prime time. In 1979, David Bowie appeared on Saturday Night Live’s end-of-year show to perform three songs from across his ten-year catalog, a greatest-hits set in miniature. But far from being a nostalgia act, he deployed extreme aesthetics with an avant-garde show of force that transcended mere glamour to project real-time culture shock all across America.

This post is an extract from my book Silhouettes And Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)

Bowie was delivered to the stage in a giant, boxy, black-tie suit of molded plastic, the mechanized chic of a static mannequin inspired by the Cubist outfits of Tristan Tzara’s play The Gas Heart.Bowie opened with a stately performance of “The Man Who Sold the World,”dredging up the spirit of Ozymandias’s king of kings thwarted by his hubris, flanked on his right by singer Klaus Nomi and drag artist Joey Arias dressed as red and black avenging furies delivering falsetto backing vocals and striking eerie attitudes; this is opera as horror show.

This is my absolute favourite rendition of The Man Who Sold The World.

I expected Bowie’s sides to be cracked open, like a giant Easter egg, harking back to the Yamamoto costume stagecraft of the Ziggy era, but at the song’s end, he is merely lifted back to the rear of the stage, like a sculpture set among his disciples at the Last Supper.Compare this to Bowie’s equally slick but super-straight performance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, dressed as James Dean from Rebel Without a Cause—relative wholesomeness of Dean as double martyr, who lived long on-screen and died young in a real-life car accident, without the acknowledgment of his uncertain homosexuality, forced underground and covered up by public friendships with Elizabeth Taylor and attending his screenings paired with young female costars.

The performance starts weird and only gets weirder with “TVC15” as Bowie (and singers) throws his all into the “transmission” phrase, standing alongside a pink poodle on wheels with a flashing TV inserted into mouth that shows a live reel of the show; the song’s narrative becomes the medium that must eat itself. Nomi and Arias cast proto-robot dance shapes with Bowie wriggling and jiving in his royal blue Chinese worker jacket and air hostess tube skirt. By the time of “Boys Keep Swinging,” the scene has gone pure gonzo; through early computer graphics, Bowie’s human head sits atop a stick puppet following Bowie’s own movement, its flailing limbs threatening to take out someone’s eye with the camp abandon of the seasoned stage dancer high on life and lost in song. Despite all of this, there is a last-minute gesture of censorship when Bowie’s vocal is cut out for the line “other boys check you out”; a nod to homosexuality is silenced, robbing the song of its power, while Nomi and Arias strut from the hip and flex their arms in demi-masculine hyperbole.

Despite being introduced by a straight-America movie legend, Martin Sheen, Bowie and his crew upended the status quo of the format, flexing a weird and queer edge into the stay-at-home-night-out U.S. TV mainstay. An internationally recognized performer playing popular “almost hits” and bring- ing underground performers into an overground platform, Bowie flipped the format. Through songs such as “TVC15,” he swallowed up the uncertain and perhaps unwilling audience and spat them back out—leaving them dazed and confused at what they had just been watching.

Leah Kardos noted the debt to Tzara’s Cabaret Voltaire skits and John Heartfield’s photomontages, again echoing Weimar-era Germany, the dismantling of art that carried its own protest. Saturday Night Live (1979) was Bowie’s own Dadaist intervention, like the Situationist International’s derive and detournement,meant to derail the normal counterculture as a verb. Bowie’s new beginnings of 1980 are intimated across the performance: “Here we can witness Bowie in the very act of synthesizing his influences and mythology with his new surroundings, distancing and reconfiguring elements of his past to express his thoughts and feelings in the present” (Kardos 2016). Being seen in the mixed company of artistic subcultures on national television was its own kind of coup—the urgent challenge that Bowie threw down was how his songs could be presented sexually, politically, and musi- cally to confront normality head-on—and how much could he get away with. Bowie would bring the same subversive energy to “Scream Like a Baby.” Between the crash of cymbals and the ominous, chugging guitars, the song edges toward the aftermath of social deviance once the reactive clampdown arrives.

I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way.
—Tristan Zara, Dada Manifesto, 1918

“Scream Like a Baby” was another Frankenstein’s monster of a song, recycled from other tracks. First written in a rougher form as “I Am a Laser” for Bowie’s short-lived soul group the Astronettes, which centered around then girlfriend and backing singer Ava Cherry and was backed up by his longtime friend Geoff McCormack, “I Am a Laser” was a piece of “theatrical soul” that barely served the concept of the group and no doubt led to their demise. Bowie’s lyrics are basically a list of the “Gouster” look, though Tony Visconti praises the strength of the original song’s chord changes, much of which remains intact. Bowie carried over the edgy verse of funk slashes and chorus melody into “Scream”; the strength of the hook laid sunk in his mind for several years. The scream of the song’s title is only implied; with Bowie’s vocals veering between elation and muted disquiet, he offers the faintest resistance knowing that he has already lost—this is the angry dissenting voice of silenced people.

“Scream Like A Baby” is well-known for Bowie’s nightmarish varispeed bridge; a witness or accomplice (nonetheless a survivor) recounts the fate of “Sam,” no longer around to tell his own story. Bowie seems to step on his own voice, forcing the pitch high as the oxygen is squeezed out of the lines. Increasingly desperate, he reels off a series of banned social activities, muttering under his breath until his rage becomes a streak of survivor’s guilt, echoed back at him. While he thinks he is only telling Sam’s story, he is also talking about himself.

The continued goal of Scary Monsters was to push the boundaries of the best studio technology available at the time before the floodgates of the “1980’s sound” were fully unleashed and for Bowie drive his own spirit to meet the character of a song. Exploiting the division between left and right speakers, Visconti manually slowed down the vocal track on one side and continually sped it up on the other, twisting reality as Bowie was recording.“David’s voice goes up and down in pitch contrarily, on opposite sides” (Visconti 2007). This purposeful disorientation throws the listener off with increasingly aggressive voices jumping backward and forward in menacing tones, advancing from the speakers left, then right, like a flurry of punches coming from nowhere. These altered voices connect the novelty of “The Laughing Gnome” to the schizoid breakdown of “The Bewlay Brothers” and to “Scream” with its layered ranting of chewed-up words held in gnashing teeth.

Across Scary Monsters, Bowie takes the songs into hysterical and unhinged places. Pushing his voice with angular intonation to subvert the listener’s expectations, he chases notes across his wide range, as in his performance of The Elephant Man, where Angus MacKinnon noted his “odd, high, fluted voice out of the side of his mouth, which in turn he has to violently contort,” tensing his face to hit new forms of speech and diction, expressing a deeper kind of mutation.

The idea of being forced to live by extremes at the fringes of society was not alien to Bowie. His own sexual identity, which has long been debated, served him well in periods of hyper-fluidity between flirting and enticing collabora- tors, playing to a gay crowd, and queering gender norms for the blurring of fixed sexual behaviors into the twenty-first century, something that he later lamented as touristic metrosexuality. But on “Scream Like a Baby,” he isolates difference itself as the issue, inferred as homosexuality on the song but equally applicable to race, gender, and even the dividing lines of politics, all tipping points toward persecution. The song is the sound of the clampdown, the dangerous fallout from mass authoritarianism against societal difference, squeez- ing out minorities like a splinter. In this sense, “Scream” offers the flip side to “Fashion,” which at least in its tunefulness can work like a macabre celebration of crowd group-think working against deviance. “Scream” is a shadowy picture of the unseen and disappeared victims from this thwarted equation that fails to balance private pleasure, choice, and identity with principle.

Bowie’s earliest influences provoked an interest in the sexualized power of music performance and its associated fashions. Bowie claimed the proto- glamour and sensuality of Elvis, feeding off Little Richard’s hypersexualized gospel singer energy, from the hip-thrusting beginnings to the Vegas jumpsuit of rhinestone self-eclipse, as being closer to the feminized glitter and makeup of glam rock than many would allow, causing Bowie to comment, “If his image wasn’t bisexual then I don’t know what is.”Bowie long flirted with bisexuality as a lifestyle choice and homosexuality as a business decision, trying anything and everything more out of curiosity than outright desire. He offered himself as a metrosexual figurehead for the early 1970s as a hangover from the previous decade.

In his early sexual tourism and interest to walk on the wild side, Bowie was influenced by John Rechy’s autobiographical novel City of Night (1963), which he referred to as “one of the greatest pieces of gay literature ever written.”Bowie’s Books author John O’Connell pointed out that what the City of Night referred to is really a state of mind; as the number of people Rechy slept with multiplied, his story stretched out into one long nocturnal day showing the gay subculture living in the shadows. Along with his many “johns,” the narrator (Rechy) kids himself that he is only in it for the money; though tak- ing pleasure in his work, he is sucked into the self-denying homosexual world of the mid-twentieth century. Elsewhere, Rechy becomes more romantic, and in the aftermath of sex, there is a brief shining moment of peace, content- ment, and connection before the lovers become strangers again—brought down to earth by the realization that same-sex intercourse was an illegal act. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, it was love by another name; it could not be spoken aloud, only whispered into a lover’s ear.

Bowie himself could play within the sphere of homosexuality with some immunity and hide behind the mask of his characters. Camp was already present in the glam era of glitter and makeup, which Bowie would later claim was great for “pulling the birds,” as if it made him (even) less intimidatingly masculine. As a teenager taking the train into central London, Bowie would see the first of the early mods wearing makeup, thinking they looked fantastic—their look was not just laddishness but genuine modishness—rooted in a latent sexuality. He would later take this aesthetic to the limit of masculine beauty with the male dress and the long, wavy hair of 1970, a nod toward transvestitism, which Bowie felt presented a “pre-Raphaelite look.”

The rock guitars of glam were acceptable for people who used beer, denim, and (uh) beards as a straight shield to hide behind; Jon Savage called out Slade and the Sweet as “brickies dressed up as rent-boys.” In this regard, Bowie had the very straight-talking former-council-gardener-from-Hull- turned-rock-guitar-god Mick Ronson, who, along with the other Spiders, was coaxed further and further into the golden and dizzy heights of vague androgyny with platform shoes and shiny jumpsuits. Bowie, of course, brought the inner normality of his very heterosexual foil crashing down when he gripped Ronson’s buttocks, fellating strings with teeth and tongue, the implicit well-hung masculinity of the Les Paul guitar standing in for Ronson’s member, bringing the already ecstatic performance to a head as many young fans looked on wishing it was their body in Bowie’s hands (and mouth) instead; flesh made fantasy.

Aside from this, Bowie literally came out in 1972, proclaiming he was gay to Peter Watts in Melody Maker—“and I always have been, even when I was David Jones”—but continued to edge in and out of the closet as another theatrical pose when and where it suited him.This ambiguity was his greatest strength, turning gender difference on and off like a hot/cold tap, leaving his audience holding their breath for the next affirmation or denial. Peter Doggett points out that when Bowie visited the United States in 1971 wearing a dress, he still declared himself more or less heterosexual, but in that 1972 interview, he presented “sly jollity” along with carefully placed gay men’s magazines on the table, lending an increased effeminacy to his manner. Bowie appeared to play into the hands of his interviewer’s preconceptions, as they were subsumed into his, a knowing game on both sides, happily bandy- ing it about that he was by turns gay and bisexual before declaring outright bisexuality in 1976 to Playboy magazine, further muddying the waters. In a 1978 interview, again with Watts, Bowie declared that his original admission had been a polemicist tactic: “It was something to throw in people’s faces.” Simon Reynolds (2017) found this vagueness to be part of Bowie’s great deflective strength: “Over the years Bowie oscillated wildly sustaining a miasma of sexual undecidability that enabled him to be all things to all people.”

Bowie would continue to make allusive lyrical nods, not just physical ones, to an alignment with gay culture, jumping in and out from behind a glittering, stage-y curtain. From the veiled motions of “John I’m Only Dancing” to “Moonage Daydream” and its “church of man, love,” he rolled along with phallic imagery and the “mama/papa” gender-bending dynamic.

Through the Ziggy Stardust era, Peter Doggett sees Bowie divining a cultural wet-dream moving in parallel with the skyward thrust of the moon landings: everything sexy and potentially queered just enough to throw off the straight listener but with enough pop dynamism to bring them along into the wide and wild realm of open fantasy.

Bowie made a definite rejection of his past, as if trying to conform to the new normal that was expected from the performer of Let’s Dance. In his 1980 article “Gender Bender,” Jon Savage noted Bowie’s adoption of a long- submerged showbiz trope, but even though his pose was affected, Bowie still broke new ground: “Homosexuality, if not bisexuality, had always been part of pop, both in the process (managers picking up potential singers) and the appeal. Film stars like Montgomery Clift had killed themselves in a previous age trying to deny it, but this was the first time, five years after legalization, that any star came right out and said it.”

But it was later in the 1980s, at the peak of his fame with Let’s Dance that Bowie declared: “Bisexual? Absolutely not.” Bowie later claimed that coming out was one of his great mistakes, tying him to other people’s expectations for him as a figurehead for gay rights and identity politics. In a 1995 interview with Details magazine, he explained his position: “I refused to be a banner waver for anything or anybody, and I did not want everything I was doing to be purely coloured by my sexuality. I was dealing in a very primitive way with a very new area of public perception. I made as many mistakes as I made positive moves.”

There remained conflict between the traditions of the more militant homosexual protest movements and those who preferred to enjoy the subculture of illicit encounters. For born outsiders like Francis Bacon, who straddled the pre- and postwar sexual revolution, the illegality of gay sex enjoyed in the blacked-out London of World War II became a mark of quiet resistance, a badge of pride. In 1988, the Conservative government introduced Section (or Clause) 28, a supposed gag order on local authorities, similar to the 1993 “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for the U.S. armed forces, which aimed to pre- vent the “promotion” of homosexuality. It was not to be discussed in schools, and the very existence of gay people was denied or obfuscated in provincial council meetings with the threat of prosecution; nondisclosure became denial as self-erasure.

The 1980s is considered the era in which liberal attitudes toward race and sexuality grew in openness and confidence toward a more outwardly tolerant and equally representative society. But rarely did this arrive from older generations, who remained entrenched in feelings of stigma, exclusion, and separation, with homosexuality targeted as a threat to the cultural norm of the straight family unit. The AIDS crisis and growing conservative attitudes toward sexual promiscuity (for women) and reproductive rights, fueled by the self- appointed “moral majority,” would aim to see civil liberties, such as the right to abortion, contested in 1981, rolled back as the decade progressed.

In 1973, Bowie complained, “I think being bisexual is a facet of my life, but not necessarily the most important. In the States, it gets to horrendous proportions and it’s ‘faggot this’ and ‘faggot that’ and all the papers call me a ‘faggot.’ But I don’t see why it should stop me being an all-round entertainer.” Elsewhere, other, more mainstream artists, such as Liberace(!), skirted around the issue where homosexuality was merely implied or simply a verboten subject; it remained about the surface of subtext—no one asked, and everyone was happy. Despite his complaint, “faggot” was a term that Bowie threw out on frequent occasions in early interviews and was, like many of his golden lines, repeated, recycled, and absorbed into songs.

On “Scream Like a Baby,” Bowie throws in the slur just to make his point—the word hits hard not only as an insult but also as a marker rooted in the persecution of difference. He himself had been insulted in the same way by many of his musical heroes, often to his face, sometimes in behind- the-scenes hearsay, from Sinatra to Elvis to Jacques Brel, who in the Ziggy era brushed Bowie off for his showy and outlandish exhibitions of androgyny. Where they had secured their own strongly uniform heterosexual identity built on the traditions of masculinity, Bowie was up and coming with broader contemporary appeal. Bowie might have become inured to the alarmism of the term by the time of Scary Monsters, referring to himself as “the red-haired faggot” to both Edward Bell and Angus MacKinnon. Even by 1980, for many fans, casual listeners, and media outlets, he remained bisexual Ziggy. Because of this, Bowie felt he was given short shrift when it came to interviews that didn’t bother to apply any critical insight to his work.

Queer, gay, bisexual—these were easy tags for Bowie to use without the sincere right of ownership and without consequence. By osmosis and design, he routinely absorbed other people’s street vernacular: “Gouster” slang and bastardized polari, underground language that allowed British gay people to communicate in public without being eavesdropped on. Reappropriated into Bowie’s earliest songs, this marked a shift from the perception in the United Kingdom of glam rock as “glitter rock” and in the United States as “fag rock” or “drag rock,” perhaps as a slur but perhaps also as a more accurate descrip- tion of what true glam rock expressed: a sense of decadent glamour that wrestled with its own mask of androgyny.Bowie would throw out some casual phrases in 2016’s “Girl Loves Me,” a throwback to his earlier mixture of fake eyelashes, jumpsuits, and NADSAT, the invented gang language of the Droogs in Antony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Bowie’s self-identification as the “red-haired . . . gay/faggot/bisexual” line was altered, depending on whom he was speaking to, but in weaponizing sexual deviance, Bowie was able to disarm its detractors. “Scream” shouted out a warning against censor- ship of alternative modes of life.He offered a confrontation to the wider public struggle to accept nonstandard sexual modes, where the world of sexuality was dominated by “normality” and where women were objects to be seen, something like a muse and to write pop songs about, and men were there to freely gaze at and enjoy them, dictating the course of visual arts for hundreds of years and subsequently for rock music.

On “Repetition” and “Boys Keep Swinging,” Bowie addressed the more toxic aspects of hetero-stereotypes, particularly the chauvinism of masculine privilege: the regression into the major-dominant role of the male causes the reactionary gag reflex and the crackdown against alternative models of living. With the decline of the nuclear family and the falling birth rates in Western democracies, new systems of family and relationship status would be ushered in to make a more open and civilized society—a very gradual shift in the law but one that the wider population would only grudgingly accept.

Democracy is a good thing, but is violence and war the only way we can establish its goodness?
—Thomas Anthony Harris, I’m OK, You’re OK

Sam’s rising terror is the fire lit under “Scream Like a Baby,” never know- ing how or when the hammer will fall—until it hits him. On the original version of the song “I Am a Laser,” Bowie sang of a force “burning through your eyes,” a deeper self-surveillance becoming the knives that lacerate your brain, stripped of denial, the citizen finally seeing themself cowed under fear of the unknown; it is already too late. Bowie himself would admit, “I lapse into this future nostalgia thing . . . taking a past look that something that hasn’t actually happened yet,” a latent sense of dread Bowie described as “that Orwellian thing,” which, since Diamond Dogs, was a major touchstone in his music (MacKinnon 1980).

Bowie used a broad range of influences from his reading list for the song, the specter of his time spent in Berlin as city-state reveal themselves across the divide of the democratic West and the state-controlled Communist East.Bowie’s time in Berlin brought home the history of World War II just the Cold War remained red hot. Heading into the post-punk years of 1978, Berlin inherited a blank generation, populated by the very old and the very young, with the population of middle-aged citizens decimated by World War II. Bowie met people his own age whose fathers had been active mem- bers of the Schutzstaffel (SS) or Wehrmacht soldiers, the inheritors of those responsible for torture and ethnic cleansing as well as ordinary people caught up in Germany’s nationalist extremism. Elsewhere, he witnessed the Turkish immigrants of “New Cologne” beaten up by neo-Nazi thugs, memorialized in the song “Neuköln.”Bowie was singing about the great wall in his eyeline as a harbinger of the city, constantly overlooked by armed guards and watchtowers, and suspicious citizens, spied on and spying on one another. A psychological barrier as much as a physical one, the Berlin Wall did not cast its shade over Bowie; he left his shadow on the wall. The spirit of paranoia in the German capital of the 1970s echoed the city of the 1930s, suggesting a cyclical state of history caught between resurrection and total collapse, perpetual revolution, and reactionary backlash; it must have been hard for Bowie to ignore the patterns forming before him, with great art produced under conservative pressures and in opposition to wider conformity.

Jon Savage (2016) draws a ley line between William S. Burroughs and Christopher Isherwood. “Both are more or less specifically homosexual authors, both deal with smut and totalitarian control.” The authoritarian powers could only live in denial of the undesirable elements of sexual desire, the crooked, degenerate element they intended to make straight or else silence, knowing their plan for total eradication could never entirely be fulfilled. Under the political turbulence of the collapsing Weimar Republic witnessed by Isherwood in the 1930s and resurrected in the movie Cabaret, if “Scream” speaks to writing on the wall or blood on the streets, Sam and his friends have already chosen to look away. Everyone knows that Sam is beat; not only is he “down” in hipster beatnik slang of subterranean cool, he is also thwarted from the start, and his burning secret seals his doom.

On “It’s No Game (No. 2),” Bowie alludes to the glory years of post- revolutionary regime change. The song echoes the Nazis’ brute logic of forging a better world in the image of their own nation, borrowing from the imperial pomp of the Roman model of war and conquest in the name of empire and eugenicist proto-accelerationism: “big heads and drums/full speed and pagan.” The brutality of fact meets the power of force, where the march of progress demanded that others be crushed under its weight. The self-righteousness of torture and tyranny is a sham, with straitened chaos and instability always bubbling under the surface of any authoritarian system masquerading as calm and order.

A paranoid song of persecution, then, but who are the real victims? The crackdown on the individual citizen is crystallized in Arthur Koestler’s 1946 novel Darkness at Noon, where he features a quote from Dietrich Von Nieheim, Bishop of Verden (1411), to skewer the problem:

With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death. For all order it for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed to the common good.

It is coldly ironic that Koestler refers to the enforcement of religious orthodoxy to elucidate the totalitarian horrors of (atheistic) communism under the regime of Stalin. The heroes who helped bring about revolution in Russia now became its enemies, “confessing” to being traitors in a series of show trials. Published in 1940, nine years before Orwell’s 1984, Darkness at Noon suggests a warning from history that bears repeating.

Bowie would often write apocalyptically, and in the so-called society of “Scream Like a Baby,” he confronts a more subtle form of terror. After his journey on the Trans-Siberian Express in 1973, a seemingly shell-shocked Bowie said to Angie, “I’ve never been so damn scared in my life,” such that he wouldn’t write about it in his music, fearing he might be disappeared.Bowie’s track foreshadowed the race riots of 1981 and the homophobic backlash against victims of HIV and AIDS, only just becoming widely known toward the mid-1980s as it began to shift into an epidemic crisis. Cruelly labeled the “gay plague,” AIDS was used as a pushback against the sexual revolution; but, more importantly, patients suffered from a lack of healthcare support for lifesaving drugs and a reluctance from the government to act preventively by raising more public awareness. Ghettoization and extermination were bywords for ideas of progress in the 1980s; the rule of divide and conquer drew lines between the successful classes—and the outsiders they perceived as enemies.

The great crime of the 1980s was the claim to democratic freedom of self-identity; more often than not, there was significant pressure to keep quiet about “deviant” lifestyles that differed from the normal majority, to repress dissent, and, even where exclusion remained common, to say nothing. On Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Roger Waters gives a roll call of minority groups to be put against the wall, singled out, ready to be shot; the psycho–horror show within the context of stadium rock concert of 1979 would come to seem pre- scient in the wake of large-scale international massacres.

In “Scream Like a Baby,” the totalitarian regime pursues a stripping of identity as people are shaved, numbered, and dehumanized through chemical castration, concentration camps, and conversion therapy; this plays out around the skipping keyboard tones, making its jaunty kitsch all the more jarring and surreal. The goal is for deviant people to be fixed, cured, and reassimilated—in this context, it is society (the real monsters) that makes them freaks.

In the movie of Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall, the track “Empty Spaces” segues into “What Shall We Do Now,” where Roger Waters reels off a proto- Radiohead stream-of-consciousness shopping list of trivial lifestyle choices, consumerism, and extreme acts violent self-destruction, interchangeably banal and stripped of meaning, perhaps inevitably ending “with our backs against the wall”—the worst habits of the 1970s merging to become the habitual excesses of the 1980s. In the long bridge of “Scream,” Bowie offers a response to the broken opportunities where Sam would not conform or could not be made to fit; at its end, he is accused of standing out. From consumerism, mixed-race relationships, and military service, he rejects the values of a society that has rejected him.

After the singer’s drawling fugue, George Murray’s spiraling bass notes climb the scale before shrinking back as slurring synth notes fall away Bowie’s speech degenerates into mental collapse. Where on “Fashion” Bowie used beats and breaks in his singing, for “Scream” he turns this on its head; the voice is as dissociated from language as it is from the crowd, and Bowie struggles to get the words out: “now I’m learning to be a part of . . . su . . . su. . . su . . . socie-socie-society.”

Bowie echoes Roger Daltrey’s verbal tic in the Who’s “My Gen- eration”; choking with disgust on the forced words that are not even his, he cannot stomach the supposed ideal of the better life. The thought of trying too hard to belong in a world he had already rejected, the voice is broken on the wheel; he can no longer piece together a free sentence or articulate his own feelingsbefore the toms and stabbed guitar chords jolt us back into the final chorus and Bowie lifts us up into the vortex of the scream again.

Bowie’s vocal inflections across the album carry “sounds of pre–meaning language.” Alongside the repetition of “society,” Jun Tanaka contrasts Bow- ie’s dynamic use of Japanese as noise from “It’s No Game (No. 1)” with the repeated sibilance of his other vocals:

“Scary Monsters”: “S-cary monster-s, s-uper creep-s”

“Because You’re Young”: You can hear back of “a million scars” the sounds “s . . . s”

All these sounds coalesce as an acidic hiss that leaves a burning wound caught in the listener’s ear (Tanaka 2021).

Bowie would note that his “Sweet Thing” triptych echoed a “profligate world” similar to that explored by Rechy and subsequently the chaotic persecuted state of “Scream,” a homosexual encounter as disposable pleasure, especially for the bisexual or closeted “straight man.” Where underground sex offered romance without the tangle of love, the motion is quickly forgotten after the dancing shoes are removed. The freedom and free love of “Sweet Thing” is flipped into a nightmare, a crime of both thought and passion, now tainted as a source of criminal guilt. “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)” encapsulates youthful rebellion but accelerates toward a headlong death drive of sexual encounters in darkened rooms and finally the romanticized suicide of jumping into a river holding hands. Now he watches Sam jump into the furnace singing old songs they loved; a soundtrack of the same music that led them down a doomed path, their final leap is not into the freedom of love but shared annihilation.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

First They Came
—Pastor Martin Niemöller, 1946

Where Sam experiences his backseat breakdown turned confession, we are left to wonder if he is in fact the alter ego of the narrator’s own suppressed homosexuality.Without a last name, Sam is a paper-thin target, a straw dummy onto which the singer projects his deepest fears (Tanaka 2021). Sam shares a situation with the “I” narrator of the song where Bowie merges first and second perspectives such that their fates are intertwined; the voice remembers Sam falling but claims he has forgotten the light of day—was he ever really there?

The threat of being disappeared lingers throughout “Scream.” Shadowy half-light figures merge in and out of the scenery, uncertain friend or enemies, as with Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where a number of people are gradually erased from a photograph, their absence coming to mean they were never there, leaving behind a floating hat where a person once stood. Sam is everyone on the wrong end of a truncheon or blacklisted by state censorship, a noncitizen deemed less than human, nudged out of their own history. Here Sam’s story only survives secondhand. In Britain during the

1980s, there was a broad sweeping together of liberals and socialists as politi- cal dissidents, along with anti–nuclear weapon campaigners, striking miners and their families, union members, Roma and Traveller communities, protesting homosexuals and lesbians—they would all be targeted as undesirable and antipatriotic persons, so political persecution set the wider population against the imagined enemy within.

Resisting this narrow shadow play, Bowie showed some commitment to people whose lot was very different from his own. He allows Sam his passions, loves, and dreams but shows them cruelly snatched away perhaps through hatred and ignorance, though we never find out his crime. Sam lingers in the memory of his mysterious friend because “he was like me”; the narrator, perhaps to his regret, is the one that got away.

Although the song closes with an outright denial—that they “never had no fun”—the singer’s thought crime becomes an act of bad faith, erasing his own past.Again, Koestler and Orwell spring to mind. After their experiences of sudden liberty, Winston Smith and Julia, the heroes of 1984, are just as quickly made mental prisoners again, passing each other by as familiar strangers, living ghosts with no past and no future, only the terrible present to endure. Does “Scream” end with the song’s narrator surrendering Sam to the thought police in order to save himself? If so, the traitor knows their crime and keeps it hidden; seeing Sam exterminated when it could just as easily have been him in his place, maybe it doesn’t make any difference when the watchword of authoritarianism becomes self-policing and mutual betrayal: I am no longer my brother’s keeper; I am both his accuser and his assassin.

Bowie’s proximity to gay culture was more about general queering and queening, an extension of his campest performance sensibilities. Walking the line between appropriation or celebration of gay culture as a largely straight white male, it never hurt him to play to this “other” audience who would embrace him if not as a champion then as an attractive, charismatic song- writer who never turned them away or condemned divergent sexual identities. He enjoyed the freedom that gender fluidity and androgyny allowed him to play within, but his interest was personal; he purposefully distanced himself from any crusade, protest line, or open-voiced support.

“Bowie opened a space where it was permissive for sexuality to be much, much larger than standard heteronormativity. He opened up a much wider field of sexual possibility.” In 2016, Simon Critchley told the Politico website, “Uncertainty about what he exudes—his androgyny—was what drew people in.” Bowie kept much of the attitude and his sympathies extended far beyond his own sexual proclivities. The one-sided conversation of “are you gay?” was kept going well into 1980 across several interviews, which Bowie always passed over as a tired old question that he had already answered years earlier.

By 1980, Bowie had all but shed the trappings of gay fashion and gender- bending clothing, toning down blatant eccentricities, preferring instead a gentlemanly metrosexuality, the modish male, hinting at natural effeminacy, sometimes with a hint of eye shadow or mascara around the eyes or founda- tion to smooth out his skin and sharpen his features. This compromise with camp only made him even more appealing to both sexes. New Romantic figures such as Boy George would often cite Bowie as a groundbreaking influ- ence on his teenage years, creating more space in which he could be himself and from there achieve creative expression. Bowie spoke about bisexuality in public when few others would; this later encouraged George O’Dowd to assert his own homosexuality in 1985.

In the 1990s, Bowie seemed to find the greater freedoms and confusion of modern sexual politics tiresome. On the soundtrack to The Buddha of Suburbia, he casually throws out the line “sometimes I fear/that the whole world is queer”—recognizing a world still full of prejudice and stigma? Elsewhere, he complained that everyone was declaring themselves bisexual as he had once done; marking a point of identity crisis in trying too hard to appear different, special, or unique, it had devolved into a fashionable new norm. Per- haps when Bowie declared the tag meaningless, he meant that sexuality was now more widely accepted as being fluid and nonpolarizing, that labels no longer helped anyone. He would never return to the radical gender extremes of his earlier career; it was a phase he had outgrown, a look he had shed or toned down, the end of an artistic social experiment.

In Bowie’s Books, John O’Connell (2020) notes that the image of a boot stomping on a human face (forever) of Orwell’s 1984 is dotted throughout Bowie’s song. Certainly at the time of writing, it feels that in reality it has never stopped, like the beating heart of a timeless clock. We are offered the image of the body stepped on so hard that it cries out, as when the victim was an infant, like a human animal. Bowie’s point perhaps reaches wider: if it is done to them, it might be done to us too. After prolonged torture and brainwashing, the internal struggle of 1984 forces Winston Smith to love his tormentor, Big Brother; he calls for his pain to be turned against his former lover: “Do it to Julia!”

In the outro of “Scream Like A Baby,” we hear the sonic motif of hammer and boot stomp, stripped of Bowie’s vocals, drums thud and echo, resounding with the shallow victory of a now emptied-out social space. The song succeeds in exposing the human condition of the individual set against an authoritarian society that has become intolerant of their existence. It is important to shout out before these dissenting voices are crushed to become a scream and then cruelly and permanently silenced.

Silhouettes And Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s
Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) [2023]

1980 — David Bowie stands at the crossroads of the decade where avant-garde pop, new wave and post-punk meet to confront the ghosts of his past and fear of the future.

With the Blitz Kids and the New Romantics emerging in his wake Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) bids farewell to Bowie’s golden years of the 1970s. Entering a world of paranoia, alienation, and state terror racing towards the end of history, Bowie faces up to brute realities of the emergent Eighties society and doomed romance of fading youth

This is David Bowie as pierrot clown of everyday romance, suffering and song — when the mask finally slips to reveal David Jones, the man within.

Featuring exclusive interviews with close collaborators discussing the making of the album and hit singles “Fashion” and “Ashes To Ashes” Silhouettes And Shadows explores the songs, the times and the sounds of Bowie’s new decade.