Glenn Hendler is the author of a 33 1/3 book on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album. This interview follows on from my initial Bowie book research; where I was able to ask Glenn about his listening experiences of Scary Monsters and his thoughts on crime, terror and thwarted love across Bowie’s discography.
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Kingdom Come – David Bowie does Television
If heaven was ever a place on earth by 1980 David Bowie had yet to find it. Adopting “Kingdom Come” a song written by Tom Verlaine, as his chosen cover for Scary Monsters, Bowie elevates the lyrical struggle with God and the search for an afterlife into a new realm of spiritual angst.
/REMAKE//REMODEL///RELIVE – HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAVID BOWIE [2023]
In astronomy we allow for the shift of light years to bring images of stars and planets to us long after they have faded and completely disappeared from our little universe. We witness these events of the past as if they were occurring in the present day but really we are catching the aftermath of their glow – having drifted beyond the half-way point of their explosive birth. So it has been with future-history of David Bowie, the original pop starman whose birthday it is today (the same day, though not the year, as the original king of rock and roll, Elvis Presley 8/1/1935) begging the question – where is his legacy now?
“WHITE LINES, BLACK MAGIC” David’s Dark Doings – And How He Escaped To Tell The Tale: David Bowie’s Station To Station and the “Berlin Trilogy”.
By Ian MacDonald. First published in Uncut Magazine, October, 1998. “I ran across a monster who was sleeping by a tree. And I looked and frowned and the monster was me” (David Bowie, “The Width Of A Circle”, 1971) EMI’s latest batch of mid-price Bowie reissues, discs released at full price in 1990-1, consists of the 1976-8 sequence, Station To Station, Low, “Heroes”, and Stage. It might have been truer to his career to have made a foursome of Low, “Heroes”, Stage and Lodger – the “Berlin Trilogy” plus their complimentary live album – and to have corralled Station To Station with his other “American” albums, David Live and Young Americans.
NINE INCH NAILS AND THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN VIOLENCE: BEFORE AND AFTER COLUMBINE [1994-1999-20??]
Nine Inch Nails “Big Man With A Gun” portrays a negative character in order to question the media-saturation and gangsta-rap glamorization of gun violence and straight, white violent masculinity, highlighting the use and abuse of firearms in America. In spite of this, the song and Nine Inch Nails’ music in general, would stand accused of directly inspiring and causing gun violence in the form of the Columbine High School shooting of April 20, 1999.