Accompanied by a fairly generous DVD on the making of the album, and an extra CD of remixes, alternate versions and oddities, David Bowies’ 1993 ‘Black Tie, White Noise’ is now reissued as a strictly limited edition CD boxed set. True to his word, Bowie is again seen questioning all established values, all taboos – and searching only for that dislocate sense of self that a true visionary could trace and then expand. Only this time those values are his own and he’s found a grab-bag of bubbling Prozac at his disposal too.
Dealing with his weird androgynous, bi-polar sexuality head on for the first time in his career, Bowie wastes no time in declaring his ‘closet heterosexuality’. Whilst some have lamented the album as little more than ‘songs about his wedding and how happy he is’ it could loosely be transcribed as a formal shedding of the esoteria and alien posturing that characterized his career up that point. It’s more positive for want of a better word.
Marked by a strange and frivolous gaiety (‘Miracle Goodnight’) ‘Black Tie, White Noise’ promotes the giddy exuberance of Lester Bowie’s trumpet playing and David Bowie’s own ignominious trumpet blowing (okay, his sax). It’s bright, it’s sunny and it’s assuredly mainstream. Amplified by the funky, jazzy scorings of producer Nile Rodgers the album may not be the return to form hoped for in the wake of the abortive ‘Tin Machine’ project but it’s an occasional pleasure all the same, if only for the Scott Walker cover, ‘Nite Flights’ and the inexplicable Morrisey cover – ‘Gonna Happen Someday’ (a man who Bowie memorably describes as an ‘androgynous Alan Bennett’. Smart words.
If anything, it’s a little over produced. The untidy, Phil Collins-esque reworking of ‘I Feel Free’ bears testament to this. It’s not a lack of ideas here; it’s a lack of discipline. It’s one thing to engender ‘musical accidents’, it’s quite another to produce real causalities.
** The album is only available until 31st December 2003.