As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent, you asked for the latest party
The seventies musical landscape was littered with rock operas that never came together, big supposed artistic statements that the record companies weren’t keen on or the artists just couldn’t pull off. With Diamond Dogs, Bowie just wanted to do an album about Orwell’s 1984 but couldn’t get the legal go-ahead. By this point, he had done what he needed to do to cement his legacy. With the pair of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane just a year behind, he was free to do more or less whatever he pleased, and this grim, shabby dystopian glam concept piece is exactly that. ‘This ain’t rock ‘n’ roll! This is genocide!’ he screams between the first two songs, and it’s a nihilism and horror-flick mood that permeates Diamond Dogs.
Put in motion, Diamond Dogs is more William Burroughs than George Orwell. The drugs, bad sex, and humanoid monstrosities that populate this, as well as the deformity, suicide, and disgust are beat generation hatefuck, and inspired by the same dadaist writing experimentation. This misbegotten child of an album wedged between Bowie’s best loved glam incarnation and his more critically revered Berlin experimental years is often ignored, but at its best is better than any of them, not to mention more fierce and driven. The first six tracks, side one of the original LP, create one of the strongest sequences he ever put together.
The opener, “Future Legend” is a nasty little spoken word induction into the seedy post-apocalyptic future we’ll be spending some time in – giant rats, mutant horrors, the streets filled with rotting corpses. The imagery is much the same twisted futurisms that Gary Numan would draw on a few years later, but of a squelching underfoot organic yick rather than Numan’s sterile steel machinations. ‘Just another future song, lonely little kitsch,’ Bowie sings in “Diamond Dogs” after describing roving bloodthirsty gangs of exterminators, people without faces, and a mythical leader living atop the bombed-out Chase Manhattan Plaza. Then it’s on to the genius three song suite of “Sweet Thing”, “Candidate” and the reprise of “Sweet Thing” which bring things down to street level – ‘We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band, then jump in a river holding hands’ (which always reminds me of HST – ’so we ate some mescaline and went swimming.’). “Rebel Rebel” closes out the side and it is wildly out of place here, much more an artifact of his androgyny-centric prior work, but still a fantastic single.
The second half is a bit more experimental and a bit less successful. “Rock ‘n’ Roll with Me” is decent but a bit bland. “We Are the Dead” recovers brilliantly from that with swaying, delirious ugliness. “1984″ is a bit of an oddity with its disco strings, the most glaring leftover bit of rock opera to make it to the album, but it’s still irrepressibly engaging. “Big Brother” howls for salvation with weird synths and brass.
The 30th anniversary version adds a disc of extras that are of varying interest. There’s a couple of demos from the proposed rock opera, “1984/Dodo” (decent), “Dodo” on its own (damned good), and “Alternative Candidate” (weird, disconnected), which mostly show that this album was a better venue for his creativities than the theoretical opera (maybe it’s just my distaste for the ubiquitous 70s soul back-up vocalist). Also included are two alternate versions of “Rebel Rebel” – the US single version which is an inferior version with a bunch of silly effects thrown on and a pretty lame 2003 rerecording from the Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle soundtrack, a cover of Springsteen’s “Growin’ Up” (Bowie was clearly quite taken with Greetings from Asbury Park NJ), an unnecessary edit of “Diamond Dogs” from a K-Tel best of compilation and a pretty excellent remix of “Candidate” from the film Intimacy.
The album is one of his best and most unusual. This reissue adds nothing utterly essential, but it’s mostly pretty good (or at least interesting), and the included book detailing the history of the album’s evolution is nice to have.
****1/2
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