Week 22 | Heathen (2002)

Heathen is one of my favorite albums. It is certainly one of the albums I have listened to most repeatedly in the time since it was released. Unlike most other Bowie albums, it doesn’t have a few standout songs that I tend to add to playlists— all the songs are consistently good but work better together. It is an album about anxiety and obsession, released at the dawn of the post-9/11 newly anxious world. Once again, Bowie made art that spoke to the moment.

I don’t remember my very initial reaction to Heathen. I can imagine it not being the type of album that comes off as great upon first hearing it. By the time it was released, Bowie had established a pattern of making an album every two years or so, all of which were on the spectrum of good to near great, but none of which were generating genuine hits. I was pretty satisfied with this output. My own pattern was to buy the new album as soon as possible and start listening to it over and over until I figured out whether I liked it (or, more accurately, how much I liked it). In this case, I realized I liked it a lot and kept listening.

As is often the case with Bowie albums, the opening, build-up and culmination are well planned. The opening sounds of “Sunday” are at once soft and immediate. The song establishes the ominous sense of looming threat that continue with “Slow Burn,” “Afraid,” “5:15 The Angels Have Gone,” and the closing song, “Heathen (the Rays)”. Most of the other songs, starting with “Cactus” and including “I’ve Been Waiting for You” and “I Would Be Your Slave” are about obsession. There are a few other songs in there to break the mood, like “I Took a Trip on s Gemini Spaceship” (a glam-era cover of a song by none other than the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, whose name influenced the development of a certain Bowie alter-ego many years earlier). “Slip Away” manages to be both funny and ominous, and includes the great line, “Out in space its always 1982…”

So its worth noting that despite the maturity of this album, that yes, there are a bunch of space references. This is, after all David Bowie, and he likes to maintain continuity despite his shifting styles. Heathen indeed was a shift from his previous few albums. Most of his output from 1988, with the two Tin Machine albums, through 1997, with Outside and Earthling, were hard-driving rock albums (the exception being the more eclectic Black Tie White Noise in 1993). Perhaps as a concession to age, Bowie made a radical shift in 1999 with the much softer album, “hours…”. To make the point that he was more or less spent, Bowie put a softer version of himself on the album cover holding, Pieta style, an exhausted— or dead— looking version of himself similar to how he had presented over the past few, hard-driving years. That album even includes a song called, “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell.” I’ll write more about “hours…” later, except Bowie hadn’t quite gotten it right. While not awful, “hours…” is a weaker work, at least to me. While toning it down, he was also trying to be experimental, attempting to figure out how the ascendant internet could fit into music-making. Many of the songs from “hours…” are adapted from a video game soundtrack, and one of them included lyrics chosen from an online fan-contribution contest.

Bowie tossed all those gimmicks and experiments aside for Heathen. It is as if he realized he could return to many of his standard themes — time as an enemy, the threat of a dystopian future, and once again space— without jumping up and down and looking like a middle aged man failing at an attempt to look like his youthful self. Without rejecting rock and roll, Bowie would continue with a softer style for his remaining albums, all of which would turn out to be strong.

Most of all, as with most Bowie albums, the real reason I like it so much is that I like the way it sounds. So much so that it is probably in my top five (and certainly in my top ten.