‘Earthling’: The greatest experiment David Bowie ever made
David Bowie never wanted to stay in one musical lane throughout his career. That was reserved for people who didn’t have that many ideas to work with, and after a while of being one of the biggest names in one genre, it wasn’t all that unusual to see Bowie shed his skin and move on to something else. While that kind of experimentation usually tapers off after a few decades in the limelight, Earthling is one of the most off-the-wall moves that anything that Bowie’s contemporaries could have dreamed of.
Because, really, what were other acts of Bowie’s ilk up to when he came out with this digitised experiment? Sure, The Rolling Stones were still around, but their experiments with The Dust Brothers came off like someone had given them a couple of remixes and told them to make an album. While Jimmy Page was still working off and on, it is a bit uncomfortable to see him working with Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs in retrospect.
For the first time since the early 1980s, Bowie seemed to be in a position of strength again. Before making Earthling, his song ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’ had been given a new lease on life when used in the movie Seven, and since that song had a lot to do with glitchy production, he felt now was the time to dip his toes into the new school again.
After all, the Britpop movement was in full swing, and some of the biggest names in British music were shouting his praises, but now wasn’t the time to go back to Ziggy Stardust. Bowie had his sights firmly fixed on what Trent Reznor was doing with Nine Inch Nails, and the minute Earthling came on, he seemed to coat himself in distortion from the first minute.
While many people may not have seen it coming, ‘Little Wonder’ is one of the greatest industrial pop songs to come out of the 1990s, with Bowie sounding like he’s being fed through a vocal processor amid a sea of hypnotic drum loops. Whereas Young Americans back in the day was a love letter to Philly soul, this was the same thing done with drum and bass music, especially on some of the more groove-centric tracks in the midpoint of the album.
But even when fans knew to expect the unexpected, ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ is one of the purest collaborations to come out of the decade, with Reznor performing on the backing track and tapping into that same type of sinister angle left over from The Downward Spiral a few years before.
In fact, there’s a case to be made that the Reznor on this album predicted where he would go on The Fragile a few years later. Since that album was all about healing from the pure mania of his dark masterpiece, this represents a bridge between those two sounds by sounding effortlessly clean in places and ready to explode at any moment.
And once both of them took to the road, Bowie never looked out of place, either. He had played the role of ‘The Thin White Duke’ and ‘Ziggy Stardust’ before, but this felt like a cyberpunk version of that, which went over like a treat when he broke out covers of Nine Inch Nails’s ‘Hurt’ while on the tour.
But whereas people like Billy Idol failed spectacularly trying to get a cyberpunk idea off the ground around the same time, Bowie’s version works because he believes it. Most artists of his calibre would try to wear certain genres like musical masks half the time, but Earthling sees Bowie wearing his influences so firm against his chest that it might as well be a part of his skin.
