5pm_weds | seventy. [THEME: the seventies] (Reply)

Big Brother
Artist: David Bowie
Album: Diamond Dogs
Year: 1974
♥: Alright. Shut up. Because I tried, honestly -- I went through my dad's old LPs; year-searched iTunes a dozen times; racked my brains for a week.
But let's be serious: there is no 1970s for me without David Bowie (and, truthfully, there would probably be no obsessive love of music -- and thus no

5pm_weds -- for me without David Bowie. Fuck, there'd probably be no me without David Bowie. I'm barely giving him his due by posting him for the..cough..fourth time).

Once I accepted that, it came down to selecting a song.
[slash perhaps the most initially difficult/eventually simplest task of my song-selecting life.]

Bowie was most universally acclaimed in the 1970s; from this decade, you get all those hits you'll hear on classic rock radio every now and then: "Ziggy Stardust" and "Rebel Rebel" and "Changes" and ""Heroes"" and so on. Bowie knows how to write a lasting radio hit, no question -- but, and it's not just my bias talking, he also writes a beautiful album. In the 70s, he was prolific, coming out with essentially an album a year -- and they were good. Each has its own flavour and its own individual gems, and it is ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE to pick a single song from his 70s career. So cue Jill tearing out her hair, trying to find a song that encapsulates "70s Bowie" and/or "the 70s generally" and/or something emotionally powerful ---- every song is all of those things. shdjksgk.

And then, this morning, I was skimming the tracklist for Diamond Dogs -- which is in my top 3 Bowie records. It is a brilliant, though aborted, attempt to set George Orwell's 1984 to music, and the literary influence runs through every song. Though I can't claim to know 1984 as well as I know Animal Farm, it's a book -- and a genre, i.e. dystopian future fiction -- that affects me deeply. And people play with the concept, Radiohead had "2 + 2 = 5", but Bowie went full-stop fucking CONCEPT ALBUM with it. Winding into the emotional intricacies of the characters, the unsettling atmosphere of the setting, both musically and lyrically, Bowie creates a broken, dusty, yet eminently futuristic mood that carries throughout this beautiful, beautiful album. And it is, ultimately, so 70s: the decade before the year 1984, when the message that Orwell was trying to convey was most pertinent.

Initially, I thought I'd post another unknown (the gorgeous "Candidate," part of a song triptych -- as is the case with many concept albums, the songs on Diamond Dogs bleed into each other). I was preparing my post, mentally, when my eye caught on track 10 -- "Big Brother" -- and I tilted my head, slightly confused...then BAM. It was like I'd been hit by a train. "OH YEAH," I clapped my hand over my mouth. "How did I forget this song?!"

I have no idea.
This is one of my absolute, all-time favourite Bowie songs, and for about three years I've completely forgotten it existed.

Listening to it again this morning, I was overcome with a sense of the sublime. "Big Brother" is everything I love about Bowie: perfect melody and instrumentation; his gorgeous voice shouting and warbling and still so pure, somehow vocally dancing through the poetry that passes for lyrics.
"Oh give me steel, give me steel / Give me pulsars unreal
He'll build a glass asylum / with just a hint of mayhem
He'll build a better whirlpool
We'll be living from sin, then we can really begin."

There are so many stories I have associated with this song and this album, but that first-listen-in-three-years made me so aware of what really strikes me about Bowie -- I love him. Period. He stands alone. I can leave him for ages but, like no other media in my life (except Leonard Cohen), I will come back to him, and he will be as intense and incredible and influential as he was when I was 11, when I was 13, when I was 16, when I was 21.

"Big Brother" continues into the last track on the album -- "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family." This means that the last "brother" of the song is never sung -- or at least, not within the confines the form dictates. I thought about stitching the two together or posting both, but the fact that this song doesn't actually end -- set aside that it creates that fantastic feeling of being unsettled, incomplete -- says everything I want to say.