David Bowie – Hours – 1999

"Throw me tomorrow," David Bowie sings on the title track of his new album, like a man with one last chance. "All of my life I’ve tried so hard; doing my best with what I had; nothing much happened all the same."

The emotion is understated – a cool despair.

"Something in the Air" is a dirge. The "something in the air" is decay. "Lived with the best times; left with the worst; danced with you too long; we’ve raged for the last time; we’ve used what we could to get the things we want." The vocal melody pulses and drifts and the song builds with a subtle bolero-like escalation of feeling.

As a star growing toothless in the spotlight, Bowie’s plight is only a slight exaggeration of an experience becoming more familiar to us all. On "Survive" he will "survive your naked eyes." Which might refer to me, you, his critics, MTV, the time that ignores us all. "Give me wings, give me space; give me money for a change of face." He asks, "Where is the morning in my life?" But he answers that with allusions to "Beatle boys, all snowy white;’ and "Who said `Time is on my side’?"

"Dreaming My Life" takes the existential brooding of Low, which was cast in instrumental abstraction, and captures it with words. I don’t know if Bowie has ever written more clearly, with less distortion, than he has on this album: "Was she never there; was she never? … "At the wrong time; on the wrong day; all the lights are fading now, if I’m dreaming my life." Bowie is deft at selling this ambitious work as if it is a string of love songs. Some people seem to need pop references to validate the dark tone, the depth of statements like "Just one living chance: when the mother sighs; when the father steps aside at the wrong time."

Father/Mother indifference doesn’t matter on "Seven:" "I forgot what my father said, I forgot what he said. I forgot what my mother said, as I lay on your bed. I got seven days to live my life, or seven days to die." Philosophical reflection empowers this record and David Bowie is thoroughly in control of what sounds like a masterpiece. A reference to Iggy Stooge’s "Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell," is obvious on "The Pretty Things are Going to Hell." "You’re still breathing, but you don’t know why; what is eternal, what is damned, what is clay and what is sand?" The last bit is nicely set against "Who to dis, who to trust, who to listen to and who to suss." It’s no longer a drive-in Saturday. This is an album about the noose getting tighter.

I never would have expected this stunning achievement from Bowie. His last few albums have been full of clutter and confusion. "Hours" is stark, lucid, pared down. This may be the best set of lyrics the Moonage Daydreamer has ever written. The background music by Reeves Gabrels, Mark Plati and Mike Levesque is less frenzied than Bowie’s music often has been – the usual dense texture is present, but much more orchestrated around the vocals. His voice is almost empty of the artificial mannerisms that he sometimes seems to lean upon when his content isn’t that compelling. The melodies are right out in the open and their appeal unravels slowly. Most importantly, he doesn’t seem to be trying to relate any longer to that segment of the audience who wants him to be other-worldly, musically "challenging," and a bit of a freak. They, like everybody else confused and divided and conquered by niche marketing, have somewhat abandoned him. He’s faced with the same problems of any of the great aging rock artists who can’t quite parley their aesthetic importance into new acceptance. It’s unlikely he’ll pull off a Carlos Santana – a feat which had very little to do with Carlos Santana, after all. Or even a Van Morrison, who’s pulled off an easy listening coup while staying true to his muse. But the struggle seems to have unlocked both the craftsman in Bowie, and a more natural communicator. Rather than continuing to stand apart from the musical legends he has grown beside, he has, for the moment, shown solidarity with them as a generational voice. Because of this, "Hours" is a provocative document of community.

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