“A rather sarcastic song” David Bowie wrote about his second home
There’s never any doubt that David Bowie, be it his 1970s golden album run or the jumbled bag of brilliance and misfires that peppered his output from the 1990s, that the Cracked Actor was always guided by a fierce and unerring artistic antenna.
Except for the late 1980s. The primacy of Ziggy Stardust’s pop seizure and the chilly haunts of his so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy’s electronic exorcisms saw Bowie enter the decade as one of the era’s most essential artists, the famous marketing campaign that promoted 1977’s “Heroes” taglining “There is old wave, there is new wave, and there is Bowie” a more than apt summary of his pedigree between the mainstream and the avant-garde.
Flying to further acclaim with Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) three years later, and buoyed by ‘Ashes to Ashes’ synth-soaked UK chart topper, Bowie looked set to dictate musical trends for another ten years.
Then ‘Let’s Dance’ happened. While a mammoth single and deserving of its global conquer, the ensuing commercial shower that engulfed Bowie off his shiny, MTV-ready number would begin the slow, downward hurtle toward glossy dross. Bowie was a superstar. But with his elevated fame and fortune came a shrivelling of his gusty creativity and former ear to the ground to music’s bubbling innovations, plummeting to a lower ebb with 1984’s Tonight, then free-falling to the future meme horror show of ‘Dancing in the Street’ with Mick Jagger, likewise suffering a crisis of relevancy.
Nadirs were hit hard on 1987’s Never Let Me Down, however. A soggy plod of a record suffering trite production and half-baked conceptual pretensions, and attached to the theatrical bore of his pompous Glass Spider Tour, even Bowie knew he’d strayed too close to the radio-friendly sun before the live dates were through, later immersing himself in the US alternative rock scene to fuel his career reset for the short-lived Tin Machine band.
One of Never Let Me Down Again’s numbers would anticipate his soon-to-be second home. Already touched on in prior cuts ‘The Jean Genie’, ‘Shake It’, and ‘Don’t Look Down’, the Big Apple’s beckoning allure would colour the tongue-in-cheek ‘New York’s in Love’, “A rather sarcastic song about New York, that real vain aspect of big cities,” Bowie confessed to Music & Sound Output at the time. “They’re so pompous and big and in love with themselves”.
While perhaps a sentimental Londoner at heart, Bowie nevertheless stood as New Yorker as it gets since moving to Central Park South’s Essex House Hotel in 1992 with his wife, Iman Abdulmajid, remaining til his death in 2016. Much like ‘Fame’ co-writer John Lennon before him, New York’s appeal to any emigrating celebrity is its cloaking anonymity, a chance to live and work with an incognito lack of scrutiny amid the city’s rich and thriving creative landscape.
It appears that Bowie never quite lost his barbed lens with which he viewed New York, and the States more broadly, running around the urban streets in paranoid mania in 1997’s ‘I’m Afraid of America’, the hounding avatar of ‘Johnny’s imperial threat played by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor.
It’s a cut that always irked Bowie, forever nagged by its unfortunate production. As per his wishes, old Tin Machine guitarist Reeves Gabrels helped record a new version of ‘New York’s in Love’, as well as the bulk of Never Let Me Down Again, for 2018’s Loving The Alien (1983-1988) compilation boxset.
