Out of Sight and Out of Sounds

Formative-album replay: David Bowie Diamond Dogs. There's a special thrill in discovering and learning to love music that doesn't just unsettle or upset your elders but actually disturbs you. I don't just mean music you don't cotton to on first hearing (Elvis Costello, for one), but stuff that actively repels or shocks you, sometimes even after you've embraced it.

For a white suburban teen in the 1980s, punk, metal, and hip-hop all offered different flavors of transgressive frisson. But it was David Bowie who really burrowed under my skin and haunted my imagination. Mind you, not the Bowie recording in the 1980s; I've written before about how the live album from the Ziggy Stardust film was my original gateway, and I've hailed both the breakthrough of Hunky Dory and the breakdown of Low in this space.

While I found plenty to bend my brain on all his canonical records, there remains nothing quite as creepy-crawly, attractive-repulsive, as the mesmeric, nightmarish 1974 quasi-concept album Diamond Dogs, starting with its startling chimerical cover art and its dystopian framing. The unearthly howls, low synth, and distorted narration that open "Future Legend" ("And in the death...") still never fail to set my teeth on edge; amid the gloom it took me years to notice that Mick Ronson's guitar quotes "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered."

Oh, but wait: It's not Ronson at all. And this offers one clue to the album's grungy, off-kilter sound and fury: Bowie himself is on lead guitar through most of the record, Ronson—his reliable axeman and co-architect of his vaunted glam-rock sound—having departed after the Ziggy tour ("the last show we'll ever play" indeed). So that's Bowie vamping through the distorted boogie of the title track, which as song biographer Chris O'Leary aptly notes, is exhaustingly overlong and has a muddy sound, as if Bowie had "found a discarded tape and overdubbed various slurs and noises onto it." With its dirty sax and tortured vocals, it's the sound of an end-of-the-world party starting, but unlike "Five Years," say, or "Suffragette City," not one you'd want to attend.

The grim scene-setting continues through the stunning "Sweet Thing/Candidate," a William Burroughs/John Rechy-inspired gay hustler mini-suite that has always had a vague whiff of Chappaquiddick for me—i.e., decadence and political scandal with death in the headlights—to a score that is equal parts piano cabaret and glam-rock moping. Bowie manipulates his vocals to sound like a whole cast of characters here, and surrounds them with sax squeals and a positively wrenching guitar solo, one you might call Ronson-esque but much weirder, in which Bowie pushes through his limitations as a player to make something nakedly, jaggedly beautiful. It starts at 3:03:

After that miasma of need and pain, which ends with a distorted-guitar buzz groove that feels inescapably cynical, the clarion riff of "Rebel Rebel" is sweet relief. A sunny headbanger, this celebration of a young androgyne has a distinct passing-of-the-torch feel, as if Bowie sees himself in the generation coming up behind him and is tipping his bippity-bobbity hat. I especially relish the way the two-chord jam eventually locks in place and he essentially starts rapping, Jagger-like, over it, in a way that evokes other two-chord jams from his catalogue ("Aladdin Sane," "Golden Years," "Fashion").

That and the anthemic yet somehow pathetic "Rock 'n' Roll With Me" (ever wonder why the chorus of this ostensible love song goes, "No one else I'd rather be," not "be with"?) are the only respite from the apocalyptic hellscape, which returns in force with the album's last four songs, all of them outtakes from a planned stage adaptation of 1984 nixed by Orwell's widow: the spectral, sidelong gloom of "We Are the Dead," the cop-chase disco of "1984," the haunted, tormented "Big Brother," and the thrillingly chilling grind of "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family" (the last one is purportedly an extrapolation of Orwell's "two minutes hate," with the word "brother" bleated over and over in a disquieting falsetto chorale). If I had to call up one signature sound from this record, it is the fiery baritone growl Bowie musters on the chorus of "Big Brother": "Someone to save us/Someone to follow..." It has the ring of utter conviction, an exaltation of total surrender, albeit not gently but in a way that suggests a patient somehow tying himself into a straitjacket.

Though these last songs have only a passing relationship to the novel that sparked them, together with most of the first side they create their own bleak future legend, not only in their phantasmagoric cut-up lyrics but in the greasy, used aural quality of it all. It is as if you can hear the sweat and spit (and other fluids) sloshing around and seeping into the record's very sound. O'Leary aptly called this "rotten music." I would second that impression, and only add that that is precisely what makes Diamond Dogs so compelling and freshly unnerving even after all these years.

If this descent into the sewer of his imagination was meant to be purgative, it apparently worked: Bowie's next effort was the sleek, invigorating Philly soul of Young Americans.