Scary Monsters

About

Conventional wisdom suggests that 1980’s <i>Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)</i> marked the moment when David Bowie resurfaced from the experimental fog of his Berlin Trilogy and reclaimed his pop-star status. And really, his timing couldn’t have been any better. Right when the incoming music-video era was foregrounding the outrageous visual aesthetics that Bowie always valued, <i>Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)</i> found him in the rarefied position of being both an elder-statesman influence on the prevailing post-punk/New Wave revolution—and also the artist spearheading its evolution into the dominant Top 40 sound at the dawn of a new decade. By this point, Bowie was still cutting-edge enough to reformulate our ideas of what pop music could be, yet enough of a familar brand that he could afford to be self-referential about his own mythos. On <i>Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)</i>, that existential tension yields two of his definitive tracks: the ping-ponging paranoia of “Ashes to Ashes” provides a grim postscript to the Major Tom story introduced back on 1969’s “Space Oddity,” while the mutant funk of “Fashion” subversively blurs the line between trendspotting savvy and authoritarian conformity to the point where you could replace its titular chorus hook with “Fascism!” and the song would still make perfect sense. Those singles helped thrust <i>Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)</i> to No. 1 in several countries, but the album is still very much spiritually in tune with the preceding Berlin Trilogy, to the point where you could consider it the unofficial fourth chapter (even if it was recorded in New York and London). The return of Robert Fripp’s brain-bending guitar noise serves as the connective tissue to the totemic <i>“Heroes”</i>, whether he’s shooting sparks all over the hard-charging title track or providing the emotional undercurrent to the poignant “Teenage Wildlife,” which feels like an art-house spin on a widescreened Springsteen anthem about bygone youth. But <i>Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)</i> is ultimately a testament to how Bowie’s avant-garde sensibilities could bolster his pop ambitions rather than merely corrupt them: “It’s No Game, Pt. 1” may aggressively weed out casual fans with its grinding groove, Japanese spoken-word preambles, and screamed-out verses that push Bowie’s voices to its physical limit. But all that clamor gives way to an indelible middle-eight melody that effectively points the way to the brash Britpop of Blur and Suede. And if Bowie’s past use of covers often saw him modernize the songs of his youth to make them his own, his graceful reading of Tom Verlaine’s “Kingdom Come” feels like a generous act of charity toward an unsung peer, an uncorking of the commercial appeal embedded in otherwise ignored American underground rock. As one of the album’s most insidious sing-alongs puts it, <i>Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)</i> is the sound of Bowie going “Up the Hill Backwards”—a counterintuitive yet wholly successful journey back to the top of the pops.

via Apple Music

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