Alex Storer and Inside Outside Preview
My guest for tomorrow’s interview is Alex Storer, author of the new book, Inside Outside, which we will be discussing. As you might guess from the book’s title, it is about Bowie’s 1995 album, 1. Outside (which I will refer to hereafter as Outside), which happens to be one of my favorite albums.
Outside has been one of my favorite albums since it was released, and I was surprised that it was revisited as a divisive work in some of the Bowie retrospectives following his death. A pessimistic, bordering on scary concept album, a typical criticism was that it was too pretentious and that the spoken word segues between songs were unnecessary. Less often articulated, some fans and critics think of Bowie as a creature of the 1970s and maybe 80s, and everything that came after gets lumped together as uninteresting until Blackstar. I mean, to each his own, right? But for me, my Bowie really was born in 1987 when I attended my first Bowie concert, a stop in Toronto on the Glass Spider Tour. Thereafter, part of my personal Bowie experience involved getting excited for the new album, going to the concert, and listening to the album over and over again until the cycle began anew, usually two years later.
Outside was really the first album around which this entire cycle played out for me, since Bowie hadn’t toured behind Black Tie White Noise or Buddha of Suburbia. Alex will talk about the excellent tour, which I saw in Pittsburgh. Bowie actually began touring before the album’s release, which was bold. Bolder still was his teaming with Nine Inch Nails, who at the time were the hot, newish band. I saw with my own eyes a phenomenon that Alex notes— some fans showing up just for them and leaving when Bowie took the stage. Bowie, in 1995, was supposed to be old hat. For some, that reputation carries forward to this day— which is strange because it applies to the Bowie of the 90s but not the Bowie of the 2010s or certainly not the immortal icon that Bowie has become. Being a Bowie fan is once again cool, but that wasn’t necessarily the case in 1995.
But the Outside concert was supremely cool. Bowie and his band slowly supplanted Trent Reznor and his band in a blended transition from one act to the next. Bowie was harder and louder than he had been, maybe ever. This concert wasn’t for the Let’s Dance crowd, but it was for Bowie fans. I rank it as my second favorite Bowie concert (the first was a later, intimate performance during the Reality Tour at Shea’s Performing Arts Center in Buffalo).
As for the album, the main reason I keep listening to it is that I like how it sounds. True enough, it is a long album, but there isn’t a point that I start wishing it would end. Indeed, I was hopeful that Bowie’s stated intention of this being the first in a series (thus the “1”) would play out. It didn’t. I like the subsequent album, Earthling, but at the time I was disappointed that it wasn’t Outside 2 (which actually had a name— 2. Contamination).
Actually, I so like the sound of Outside that I’ve devoted less time contemplating the lyrics than I have and do for many other Bowie albums. There’s a lot to contemplate— too much for this post. But a few things stand out in retrospect. The first is that the anxiety associated with the then-pending new millennium was central to the album’s theme. The thin and nonlinear “story” having to do with a ritualistic murder connected to an “art crime” is less important to what the album is actually about than it seems at first take. Bowie, who had always been interested in art, was really, really into it at the time and through Outside managed to marry two of his worlds.
The murder, murderer, victim and not-entirely human impulse to violence were all recycled Bowie themes. There’s a destructive element of Bowie’s lyrics, and really his whole presentation that often hides in plain sight. Bowie didn’t simply shift personas, characters and motifs— he kills them off. His was a cycle of death and reincarnation, but the new birth necessarily involved death, which came about at a time and in a manner of Bowie’s choosing. He later said that his apocalyptic themes were actually about the personal, not literally the world (I’m paraphrasing). In this sense, Bowie was a bit of an accelerationist. The old world needs to burn for a new and better one to rise, and by “world” that also meant “self.” This idea came to explicit life in Bowie’s last project, the play Lazarus, where the Bowie stand-in, Thomas Jerome Newton, can only liberate himself by killing “Girl,” a possible figment of his imagination (not unlike a Bowie character). Aided by another possible illusion, the murderous Valentine, Newton frees himself by plunging a knife into Girl, who immediately comes back with a new identity, which is essentially a self-actualization.
Outside telegraphs all (or, at least most) of this. Girl of Lazarus is similar to Baby Grace Blue of Outside. Valentine is similar to the mysterious Minotaur. At least one of the new songs for the play, the serene “No Plan,” seems to be an almost direct response to Outside’s tense “No Control.” The coming turn of the century threatened cosmic-level disruption, but whether on a big or small scale that is necessary for renewal.
That said, to paraphrase one of the characters on Outside, I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s so much more to say and to write about this album, which is a good reason to come back tomorrow to hear from Alex, who wrote an entire book on the subject!
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The embedded video by Marc Lowe presents Leon, the unreleased 1994 album-length project by Bowie and Brian Eno that developed out of the sessions for 1. Outside. Arranged as a three-act “hyper-cycle,” it incorporates music that would later appear on 1. Outside alongside material and extended character monologues that did not make the released album, including contributions involving characters that do appear on the album — Nathan Adler, Baby Grace Blue and Algeria Touchshriek. For this version, the sound has been adjusted, the material reordered, and the cover art refreshed. Marc added some explanation in the beginning, but if you have never heard Leon, you might want to check this out.