David Bowie's Diamond Dogs

Description

After his breakthrough with Ziggy Stardust and before his U.S. pop hits "Fame" and "Golden Years" David Bowie produced a dark and difficult concept album set in a post-apocalyptic "Hunger City" populated by post-human "mutants." Diamond Dogs includes the great glam anthem "Rebel Rebel" and utterly unique songs that combine lush romantic piano and nearly operatic singing with scratching, grungy guitars, creepy, insidious noises, and dark, pessimistic lyrics that reflect the album's origins in a projected Broadway musical version of Orwell's 1984 and Bowie's formative encounter with William S. Burroughs. In this book Glenn Hendler shows that each song on Diamond Dogs shifts the ground under you as you listen, not just by changing in musical style, but by being sung by a different "I" who directly addresses a different "you." Diamond Dogs is the product of a performer at the peak of his powers but uncomfortable with the rock star role he had constructed. All of the album's influences looked to Bowie like ways of escaping not just the Ziggy role, but also the constraints of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. These are just some of the reasons many Bowie fans rate Diamond Dogs his richest and most important album of the 1970s.

Glenn Hendler is Professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University, USA. He writes on popular and unpopular literature in the 19th century, film, television, and contemporary cultural politics. He is author or editor of several books, including Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2001) and Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2007).

[Hendler's] textual analysis of Bowie's lyrics and the influences of the album is deep, yet he doesn't skimp on musicology ... This 33 1/3 is worth reading even if you know nothing about Diamond Dogs. * Bomb * This latest volume of Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series sees US academic Glenn Hendler manfully take a crack at forensically unpacking the disparate ingredients of Bowie's greatest future dystopia Diamond Dogs and passing with flying colours. * Shindig! Magazine *