#628 David Bowie - Station to Station

Call it vampire soul. Plastic soul makes this music sound too warm, sounding pliable and colorful. If start with the Plastic label, understand that this is hard plastic, this is harsh lines, this is solid shapes. It is a detached alien overlord exiled too long on earth, too tired of inhaling and fucking everything he can find. He limps with great grace through nightclubs connected endlessly by doors to one another, out the backdoor and into the next, constant movement past downheaded dukes, desperate youths and lie-low beerlight, flashes off of glasses. The doors connect again and again, and there are no streets in between and there is no slowing or stopping, there is no progress, and nothing is lost and nothing is resolved and the only thing that is gained is the incremental experience, the drip of another step through life familiar with barest hope-flecks in the details, the barest glimmers of the new.

Like Iggy Pop and Marc Bolan, Bowie comes out the other side of glam finding that the world hasn't changed, that it can't be changed, that only he can change, but he's nowhere left to change. So the beat plods on, he makes music full of life and soul, and drinks of it in the night, and staggers onward with grace undiminished, with the cool perspective of the undead, the charming grace of one who takes without seeing to need, who has much to tell but would rather wield the promise than the reveal.

And you yourself are charmed, by the promise and the grace and the vision and the intoxicating lack of need. Bowie plays it like the brooding boy, the black sheep you can save, the man your mother warned you about, the one who don't need nothing, who plays hard to get without seeming to play, and you're drawn in 4/5