Julian Shah-Tayler’s “Hunger City” and the enduring warning of “Diamond Dogs”

The timing of Julian Shah-Tayler’s recording of the entire Diamond Dogs album could not be better. The album not only turned 50 this year, but also served as Bowie’s warning about the dangers of fascism’s allure. Seems like that’s something we, especially those of us in the US, should be contemplating at this moment in time. Julian will be joining me to discuss his album, which he’s titled Hunger City, along with his acclaimed original album, Elysium, on Saturday, so come back for that. But I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the material itself—the songs and larger message of Diamond Dogs.

Bowie set out to make an album and possible musical based on George Orwell’s 1984. It turns out that Orwell’s widow was still alive and she put a stop to Bowie’s plan. So instead of a 1984 musical, Bowie articulated his own dystopian vision, set in what, in the album’s introduction, is referred to as “Hunger City” (though Bowie didn’t stray too far from 1984, with three songs making direct references to the book).

Diamond Dogs opens with a spoken word description of a world turned upside down. Feral gangs and mutant vermin roam post-apocalyptic streets amidst the aftermath of some unarticulated societal breakdown. As the album progresses, we get songs about doomed lovers, the “savage jaw of 1984,” and at the album’s heart, the surreal “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)” that is less descriptive than evocative of a murky world of hopelessness in which the logical conclusion to date night is suicide. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you knew all that already.

What didn’t occur to me until recently is that Bowie made a very deliberate choice in placing “Big Brother” at the end, rather than the beginning of the album. What’s more, the song is not so much a condemnation of Big Brother, or even really about Big Brother, but about the appeal of Big Brother. “We want you, Big Brother,” cry his would-be followers. Has the rest of the album established the kind of chaos and disorder that would lead a society to the point where it would give up its freedoms and place its agency in the hands of a fascistic dictator? Or does the final song tell us how we got to the point, as described in the rest of the album, in the first place?

It wasn’t the first nor would it be the last time that Bowie took on the idea of the demagogue’s appeal. In “Savior Machine” (1970), Bowie describes how the world took the hand of “President Joe” who offered a too-good-to-be-true promise of salvation. The personification of that plan, the “savior machine,” pleads with the masses to disagree with it and stop it before it arrives at the conclusion that the best way to eliminate all problems is to eliminate everything. Later, in “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” Bowie describes a charismatic figure who sweeps his public off their feet with made-for-TV qualities and a nearly divine presence. Later still, Bowie would embody his Thin White Duke persona, an “Aryan type” and made pro-fascist comments that Bowie would later disavow. In retrospect, it seems like the Thin White Duke was an extension of the concept of what Bowie had already been playing with, that a frenzied crowd can easily fall under the sway of a potentially dangerous demagogue, religious leader, or rock star. All three would see crowds reacting in a similar way from the stage.

Bowie’s larger point was that despite the danger to a society that’s willing to give up its agency and turn it over to an authoritarian, there is nonetheless an appeal. But Bowie assumed that everyone would recognize that the end result would be bad. If the punchline to Diamond Dogs is, “we want you, Big Brother,” Bowie assumed that he didn’t have to explain why that sentiment is perverse.

So, in case our society needs a reminder, Julian Shah-Tayler’s Hunger City give us an excuse to revisit Bowie’s half-century old album and hear it in a whole new way.

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Julian Shah-Tayler, a UK-born, LA-based musician with a prolific background in original dark electro-pop, merges his own style with David Bowie’s legacy in his latest project, Hunger City, a reimagining of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album. Known on stage as The Singularity, Shah-Tayler is not only a dedicated Bowie fan but also a skilled artist in his own right, having released several original albums and regularly performing with The Band That Fell to Earth: A David Bowie Odyssey, a tribute act where he channels Bowie’s energy and charisma. Shah-Tayler’s personal affinity for Diamond Dogs, the first Bowie album he ever owned, and his admiration for Bowie’s genre-blending artistry inspired him to take on the project solo, allowing him to honor the original while adding his own evocative and at times sinister edge.

To hear Hunger City and for more on Julian, click HERE.

And come back on Saturday to hear from the man himself in an exclusive video interview!