Prof. Nicholas Greco Preview: On 1. Outside and Bowie in Darkness

My interview tomorrow will feature Dr. Nicholas Greco, Provost and Professor of Communications and Media at Providence University College in Otterburne, Manitoba, who joined me to discuss his 2015 book, David Bowie in Darkness: A Study of 1. Outside and the Late Career. Despite being more than a decade old, the book holds up remarkably well today while offering a perspective originally conceived at a moment just before Bowie’s final act.

In a way, that penultimate status makes Greco’s book like Outside itself (I’m going to drop the “1” for this post). I listen to that album so much I often lose sight of it being very much about the 1990s and the sense of anxiety descending at the “crossroads between the centuries.” The album resists interpretation, by design. On the one hand, Bowie provided more narrative elements, including a story-like insert in the album’s packaging and narration in the form of segues between the songs. But he also warns us that Outside is a “non-linear Gothic drama hyper-cycle.” What does that mean? I’ve read into the meaning of those words before, but I think the larger point is that the album questions our ability to know anything.

The album has the shape and feel of a story, but it is a story without any kind of resolution. The story’s main narrator, Detective Nathan Adler, seems like he’s always on the verge of revealing something, but it doesn’t take too long into the album for us to forget what it is he’s investigating in the first place. Actually, without access to his “diary,” which consists of a lot of words that don’t reveal much, the album itself gives few clues as to what Adler is up to. But also, is that really what this album is about? A detective story? Well, there is a mystery here, but the mystery is everything. We don’t, we can’t know what’s coming, what happened or, as Bowie put it in another song, what’s really happening.

So, Outside, I think, is about a feeling of dread at the realization that certainty is an illusion.

Bowie was tapping into the sense that something potentially cataclysmic, but unknown, would happen when the calendar turned to January 1, 2000. In a sense, he was off by 21 months and 11 days, but in another sense, Outside was not meant so much to be a prediction but more about the sense of disorientation of the moment, in the face of the impending unknown. Of course, we are, all of us, always in that moment, though we were just more aware of being in that moment as the new millennium approached.

Bowie always had an acute sense of the ticking clock. Time was the enemy, in part because Bowie knew that with every passing moment we are inevitably closer to death. The passing of time and the presence of death pervaded Bowie’s catalogue, going back to the 1960s. Part of what Outside demonstrates is that we can’t know what’s coming, other than death. And, from the mumbled dates that open the album, Bowie suggests that its less important to fixate on when that inevitability is going to come because, at the end of the day, it won’t be long.

The story-elements of Outside contain the beginning of threads that trail off. Baby Grace Blue was murdered. Who did it? Can murder be art? Who are these other characters and what are they doing on the album? We never find out, and when we think we’re getting an understanding, we get the rug pulled out from under us. We don’t know and we can’t know. The only thing we can know for sure is that death is coming.

An under-appreciated theme of Bowie’s is this idea that time is running out, and that we are responsible for what we do with that time. Bowie’s 1972 song, “Quicksand,” references “the next Bardo,” the Buddhist realm between death and reincarnation. Outside reminds me of the Epicurean epitaph: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care). The Bardo, it turns out, is not the liminal space— life is.

In a sense, one of Bowie’s messages is that we have this limited time between birth and death to do everything we’re going to do, so we’d better choose wisely. It might be too simple to conclude that Bowie is telling us not to waste our time trying to figure out the album’s story. But he is suggesting to be present within the album, don’t worry about how it ends and don’t focus too much on what has already passed. And Bowie extends this idea that we exist as we are now far beyond our place in time.

Existence in the liminal was always a theme of Bowie, and that sense of being in between was on full display on Outside. This was not simply implied by the album’s chronological setting but also by the evocation of mixed-up things—the Minotaur, “ape men with metal parts,” and confusion over the question of whether one likes girls or boys. Bowie would take on the guise of several characters for the album, further driving home the idea that identity can be fluid. But ok, so what? That’s not new.

Well, no, it isn’t new. Bowie has been playing with this idea for his entire career. Like a moment in time, everything else about our experience is fluid. We are what we are at this moment, not what we were and not what we are going to be, which is unknowable anyway. Bowie would betray this idea in later albums that become far more reflective, but Outside is, in a sense the culmination of the idea that we can be heroes (or…something else) just for one day.

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Greco’s analysis, while somewhat concise, goes in some unexpected directions. Early on, he devotes considerable attention to the all-but-forgotten quasi-documentary film Ricochet (1984), in which Greco recognizes early signs of Bowie addressing themes he would later revisit in Outside. On the other end of the timeline, Greco was writing in time to consider the song “Sue (or in a Season of Crime),” which later appeared on Blackstar, though a version had already been released in 2015. So, Greco was writing about Bowie’s late career without quite realizing exactly how late it had become.

Greco also focuses on aspects of the album that I tend not to pick up on, such as Bowie’s consideration of bodily mutilation as a ritualistic response to the sense that the only part of existence within our own control is our body. Also, Greco views Outside as an expression of Bowie managing his own celebrity status, in part by killing off the last remnants of his Let’s Dance era— pop star identity.

I have to say that there’s much about Greco’s book that I just wasn’t expecting. Outside is one of my favorite Bowie albums. I listen to it often, and often listen to it over and over. I don’t know what that says about my mental health, but I will say that, for whatever reason, I have actually spent less time contemplating the album’s meaning than I have on other Bowie albums.

Anyway, the interview tomorrow will be a great conversation. I enjoyed talking with Professor Greco and, if you’re reading this far, I’m sure you’ll enjoy hearing it.