With those words David Bowie opens his album exploring a very bleak, post-apocalyptic dystopian future in which humanity tries to eke out a survival in a landscape populated with mutants and paranoia.
Now, in any context that’s some pretty heavy dope. But as subject matter for an album, it’s quite ballsy. Of course, if there was ever a time in which the Gotterdammerung of the end of the world could be subject matter for a rock album, it was the 70’s. Consider that while the 70’s got a lot of things very wrong (leisure suits, soft jazz, etc) the one thing it not only got right, but got righter than any other decade before or since was post-apocalyptic dystopian paranoia. The books and movies of the 70’s were filled with the fait accompli of the world ending in a massive firestorm of H-bombs leaving a wasteland of desolation.
Good times.
So, Bowie deciding to make an album drawing heavily on both 70’s apocalyptic paranoia and Orwellian dystopia? Yeah, baby!
Side 1:
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Side 2:
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Diamond Dogs is very bleak in both lyric and sound. The music is very raw and occasionally desperate, and features passages considerably adulterated with electronic elements. Not in the sort of minimalist electronic ambience of his Eno years, but more in a gnarly savage way. Which fits perfectly, because the world of Diamond Dogs is gnarly and savage, filled with dangerous scavengers called Diamond Dogs:
Crawling down the alley on your hands and knee
I'm sure you're not protected, for it's plain to see
The Diamond Dogs are poachers and they hide behind trees
Hunt you to the ground they will, mannequins with kill appeal
Even more good times.
Beyond that, Bowie again shows that he retains an almost cellular understanding of the jaded disaffection, selfish nihilism, and bloody-minded need for rebellion of adolescence, and in the process he seems to have quite accurately predicted the coming punk movement – at least in terms of the youthful agita and cynicism of Rebel Rebel:
You've got your mother in a whirl / She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl
Hey babe, your hair's alright / Hey babe, let's go out tonight
Just as Diamond Dogs tells of civilization in transition, it also tells of Bowie in transition. DD
marked the last of Bowie’s “glam” albums, on the way to a more artistically experimental phase. And the result is an album that not only draws the curtain on Bowie’s glamness, but also served notice that glam itself was beginning to end.
I hadn’t listened to DD start-to-finish for a while, so when listening this time I was surprised at how much memory came flooding back. Sure, it helped that it was in the evening and I had already settled in with a drink, but nonetheless the experience was pretty cool. Diamond Dogs is absolutely a time-capsule in the sense that even though the music and themes and certain lyrics are quite dated and quaint by today’s standards, it was one of those situations where the music served as the portal by which I could go back to being 14 and confused and sullen and pessimistic, and when music was a reflection of overall paranoia and uncertainty of the time.
And that was cool.
Up next: The beginning of the end for the last true American Rock-n-Roll band
