David Bowie Cover of the Week: Harmony Punks perform “I’m Afraid of Americans”

“I’m Afraid of Americans” is slowly creeping up the list of Bowie songs I find most often in my review of covers posted over the past week. It still isn’t as common as “Heroes,” “Space Oddity” or “The Man Who Sold the World,” but it’s on the rise. (I wonder why.) That said, I thought this live version by Harmony Punks was outstanding — I selected it to feature for no reason other than I like how it sounds.

And it isn’t just that I like the sound of the performance— though that I do. I was also impressed by the quality of the live recording. I often encounter live recordings of performances that I can tell sounded great in person, but the recording quality is flawed. Too often, live recordings are improperly balanced, or feature too much crowd noise, and live videos are often too distant or too shaky. This is doubtlessly because anyone with a phone can make a bootleg these days. It seems like this band took pains to record this performance using more professional equipment, and though I won’t pretend to try to sound like I know what I’m talking about here, I’m thinking that someone actually mixed the recording. Anyway, the result is pretty smooth.

Harmony Punks describes itself as “a catchy and emotive alternative rock trio with strong harmonies from Tucson, Arizona.” The trio includes Jason Kelly on vocals and guitar, Marshall Prescott on bass and vocals, and Matt Wineinger on drums. This song was apparently recorded a few weeks ago at a new music release show in their hometown. I learned from a text exchange with the band that they have requests to record “I’m Afraid of Americans” in the studio and possibly put it on their upcoming album.  Having discovered the band through this song, I’m going to be sure to keep an eye out for that. In approaching the song, they listened to the original Bowie track and the collaboration track with Trent Reznor and then adapted it into their own distinct version. 

I think I’m on solid ground to say that “I’m Afraid of Americans” is Bowie’s best-known song from the 1990s. The 90s was a strange time for Bowie in that he was churning out some great music, little of which was recognized as such at the time. It had become something of a joke that each successive album was labeled by some critic as “his best since ‘Scary Monsters.’” This was a kind of relativistic praise that reminds me of the premise of the unintentionally insulting love song, “You Are So Beautiful,” the title of which sounds nice enough, until you get to the qualifier in the actual lyrics— “to me.” Perhaps my memory is wrong, but I don’t remember as many qualifiers in the critical response to Bowie’s surprise comeback album, The Next Day in 2013. Blackstar was greeted as a staggering work of genius, especially after Bowie died. And while I agree that those were two strong albums (to say the least), I also thought from the time of their release that so, too, were many of Bowie’s 90s albums (which, by the way, largely sold well and provided the foundation of what seemed like nearly non-stop successful touring).

So, what was going on in the 90s? I think, in part, a narrative had set in that Bowie reached a creative nadir in the late 80s and had a long way to go to crawl out of his hole. The narrative, however, overtook the reality. Bowie had (wisely) stopped trying to replicate his past successes. To the extent that the appearance he adopted around the time “I’m Afraid of Americans” was released in 1997 looked like a middle-aged Ziggy Stardust, it was a corrupted form that took on a nearly demonic edge. Bowie turned 50 that year, the same age as the has-been “cracked actor” of the 1973 song of that name. Bowie intentionally presented his late 90s self as having lost an innocence he never had in the first place.

After Earthling, the album on which “I’m Afraid of Americans” appeared, Bowie essentially gave up any pretense of making music for young audiences at all. And that reminded us that we, too, were aging.

But “I’m Afraid of Americans” managed to stand out amidst all that. Trent Reznor’s involvement, at least in the video, made it a little more cool for the kids. And the song’s title gave it a kind of universality, not unlike “Heroes,” that made it adaptable for purposes that were probably far from Bowie’s mind while he was recording the song. “Heroes,” a song that really isn’t about heroes, is often performed to honor heroes. “I’m Afraid of Americans” tends to make appearances when we Americans are up to our fearsome ways.

The thing is, I don’t hear any of that undergirding Harmony Punk’s version of this song. One of the musicians (I think it is Marshall Prescott) jokingly calls it a love song, but then does nothing to suggest it carries a message for our time or anything else. The band just plays the song, and it sounds great.

I think, over time, Bowie’s larger 90s output is increasingly being recognized as great. I’ve often observed that now that Bowie’s catalogue is (sadly) complete, it all exists at once. To someone just coming to Bowie, Space Oddity exists alongside Blackstar. Earthling is as much a Bowie album as Ziggy Stardust. We no longer experience a “new” album as being in reaction to anything that came before it. Blackstar was the first Bowie album for some (and as I am often reminded, so was the Labyrinth soundtrack). So, in addition to this cover sounding good, which is why I selected it to feature, it is also a sign that the song itself has all but shed its “good…for the 90s” qualifier.