Free David Bowie's Low by Hugo Wilcken Page A

reading of the Tiomkin/Washington song “Wild Is the Wind.” Bowie’s neurotic croon on
Station to Station
—which owed more than a passing debt to Scott Walker—cranked up the drama value another few notches, adding to the weirdly tense atmosphere of that album. In complete contrast, Bowie comes over flat and monotone on “Breaking Glass.” The alienation is still very much to the forefront, but it’s no longer romantically overwrought. It’s withdrawn and autistic. (One of the curious things about the album is how it surrenders what look like Bowie’s strong points: his voice and his lyrics.) Iggy Pop’s deadpan delivery on
The Idiot
is probably something of an influence, but in any case Bowie escapes the exaggerated vocal stylings that had characterised his work to date.
    The lyric is also a fragment. There’s no verse and chorus, just a few lines sung flatly, with a weirdly random emphasis on certain words (“Baby, I’ve BEEN breaking glass in your ROOM again/Don’t look at the CARPET, I drew something AWFUL-ON-IT”). And there’s no baroque imagery, no throwing darts in lovers’ eyes. Alomar is not wrong to say that “Breaking Glass” is the light, silly song of the album, because there is something comic about the lyric, something of the child who knows he’s been naughty. But there’s also something creepily psycho about it, and the tension between the two is what makes it work.
    In “What in the World” and “Sound and Vision,” the bedroom is where we retreat to, to shut the world out. But the room in “Breaking Glass” is an altogether darker place. It’s the locus of occult ritual. The track’s title is most probably an occult allusion, and drawing “something awful” on the carpet certainly is. “Well, it is a contrived image, yes,” Bowie said in 2001. “It refers to both the kabbalistic drawings of the Tree of Life and the conjuring of spirits.” The single-line “Listen” and “See” are also strangely incantatory (as well as presaging “Sound and Vision”). Is Bowie commenting on the doomy, fetishised existence he’d led in Los Angeles? Or are the magical obsessions still current? Probably a bit of both. Although LA marked the highpoint of his cocaine psychosis and related occult fixations, they subsisted, and it was years before he could entirely shake them off. Throughout 1977 and 1978, the letters he would send friends and associates were marked with special numbers, to which he would ascribe occult meanings. While recording
Low
, he refused to sleep in the Château’s master bedroom on the grounds that it was haunted. (And he seemed to persuade the others that it was too. Visconti: “The talk every night seemed to be about the ghosts that haunt the place.”) Paranoia was a constant problem in his working relationships, to the point that even close collaborators like Visconti could come under suspicion. The hallucinations, too, persisted. “For the first two or three years afterward, while I was living in Berlin, I would have days where things were movingin the room,” Bowie later recalled, “and this was when I was totally straight.”
    The lyric seems to have been composed in cut-up Burroughs fashion, where Bowie would take phrases he’d written and rearrange them in disorientating ways, trying to break down the sense for new meanings to emerge—or to cancel each other out. “Don’t look” is followed by “See”; and “You’re such a wonderful person” is followed by “But you got problems, I’ll never touch you.” The lyric is like a conversational fragment in which a psychotic who has just trashed his girlfriend’s room is telling her that
she’s
the mad one. It’s a solipsistic world in which the psychosis is projected onto the other. The lyrics and intonation are without affect, without angst or self-awareness; we’re seeing the psychosis from the inside.
    That solipsism seems to me to be one of the psychological keys to the album.