Bowie Revisited: The Buddha of Suburbia

Cover to the original 1993 release

David Bowie's 2nd album release of 1993 was 'The Buddha of Suburbia.'  This collection  remains one of the most mysterious in the oeuvre - one key reason for this has been the complete silence on the subject from the man himself.  Apart from one single release, there was no promotion for the album - no talk shows, no tour - in fact, none of the songs on this album have been performed live on any tour.  The music of 'The Buddha of Suburbia (BoS)' is left to speak for itself - unfortunately for this album, 20 years after its release it is still difficult to grasp what exactly the music is trying to say.  'BoS' is a dense (lyrically, its impenetrable), sometimes dreary, and often dull work.  It does, however, contains moments of excellence, and it truly is one of DB's most experimental works.*

'BoS' began life as pieces of music DB contributed to a BBC TV show of the same name, but he must have felt there was enough there to pull longtime collaborators Erdal Kizilcay (multi-instrumentalist) and David Richards (co-producer/mixer) into the studio to flesh the soundtrack pieces into full-fledged songs.  The results were something of a mixed bag.

The title track (released as the lone single, to deaf ears) gets things started and is the 1st of what I'd consider to be 3 standout tracks. Sung by the artist at his Cockney-est, the song is a backward-looking piece, which for good measure and before send off, quotes the chords to 'Space Oddity,' and lyrics to 'All the Madmen.'  The pulsing dance beat and distorted vocals of 'Sex and the Church' is followed by the jazz-no-wait-it's-trip-hop of 2nd standout 'South Horizon.'

The dirge 'The Mysteries' is sorrowfully pretty, but is about 3 minutes too long.  A couple of shockingly 'conventional' songs follow: the stoccato rock/rap of 'Bleed Like a Craze, Dad,' 'Strangers When We Meet,' which would be given a fuller sound when it was re-recorded for 1995's 'Outside,' & the shimmering 'Dead Against It.'  Don't ask what it's about, but the dreamy stand-out 'Untitled No.1' has got a gorgeous melody.

Cover to the 1995 re-issue

The album wraps up with the instrumental 'Ian Fish, U.K. Heir,' a gently plucked guitar describing the melody of the title track, over a mild drone.  This piece isn't a million miles away from something you might find on side 2 of 'Heroes,' and is followed by a completely superfluous re-tread of the title song, with an even more superfluous Lenny Kravitz guitar solo bolted onto the end.

The best moments on this disc rival anything Bowie has released over the last 20 years, but as a top to bottom listening experience, 'The Buddha of Suburbia' functions best in context as link between the bright creative re-emergence of 'Black Tie White Noise' and the dark, paranoid, wild experimentalism of his next project.

*when using the word 'experimental' in reference to DB's work from as far back as the early 1980s, it should be read 'personally experimental,' as in: trying methods, sounds or styles of which he has not previously made much use.  Long gone were the days when a Bowie album helped spawn a movement, be it glam, punk, New Romanticism, etc.  His work then wasn't as 'experimental', as what I'd call 'inventive.' His later works' schizophrenic genre-hopping and dabblings in garage-rock, dance, jazz, etc., while not cutting edge, were nonetheless daring experiments by an unsatisfied artist searching for alternate methods of creative expression.