Not-an-essay on Station to Station
http://rusty-halo.com/wordpress/?p=2867
I’ve been completely obsessed with Station to Station for the past few days. I adore it. I think I love it even more than Ziggy Stardust; I think it’s my favorite Bowie record.
I want to write a big long essay to explain why it moves me so powerfully, but I don’t have time (I’m trying to get a huge work project done before Writercon and, oh yeah, preparing for Writercon), so here’s a bunch of snippets I would have turned into an essay.
Notes scrawled on the back of a scrap paper while riding the subway:
Station to Station = search for transcendence
by articulating it so well it becomes itself transcendent
The search for transcendence (through love, religion, art…) is a recurring theme in Bowie’s work, explored through another lens in Ziggy Stardust (see this essay I did have time to write), but Station to Station is more impressionistic, less explicitly narrative.
In a proper essay, here would be bunch of quotes from Station to Station explaining how the songs tie in, although it’s fairly obvious anyway if you listen. The opening train sound, the title (stations as in traveling, but also stations of the cross), “searching and searching” and “what will I be believing and who will connect me with love?” and the (failed) attempt to connect of “Stay” and the entirety of “Word on a Wing” (idealization of religion as the answer) and “Wild is the Wind” (idealization of romantic love as the answer). The sense of desperate longing and underlying emptiness that pervades throughout, particularly in the vocals of “Word on a Wing” and “Wild is the Wind,” in direct contradiction to the lyrics.
Even the cover-Bowie as Newton from The Man Who Fell To Earth, entering the space ship to return home to his family, who function in the film as the perfect representation of home, love, happiness, purpose, meaning (and who are idealized, impossible to reach, and probably already dead).
Note scrawled slightly later:
there are realms of human experience that are inaccessible to language
Which 1) I think is a summary of something Bowie said in one of the DVDs I just watched, 2) explains why writing this essay is actually futile and makes me wonder why I feel compelled to explain everything that I find meaningful with inevitably inadequate words, and 3) is why Station to Station and music and art in general are important, because they express and communicate aspects of human experience that language can’t. (Here, have a link to a vaguely related NY Times article about how language shapes-and limits-perception.)
I also think that Station to Station affects me so much because the process of getting into the album required me to get past some of my prejudices and widen my own musical vistas.
This album connects and communicates on a level than words can’t convey. It has its own language; you can only understand by listening to it.
The two things that recently spurred me into obsessing even more about Station to Station are:
Bowie’s philosophy of love as explained in 1976, which you can see reflected in Station to Station, and which freaks me out because I totally agree with him:
Click to viewThis comes after a nifty performance of “Stay,” btw.
(I find this particularly surreal not only due to the random spaced-out Henry Winkler and the fact that it’s followed by a karate lesson but because Dinah Shore in mannerism and commentary is a dead ringer for my mother-it’s like my mom hopped into a TARDIS and went to 1976 to interview David Bowie.)
Bowie in 1999 explaining that the Station to Station era was the darkest period of his life and then performing “Word on a Wing”:
And on a completely shallow note … I’m sorry that his life sucked at the time, but the Thin White Duke was the hottest of Bowie’s personas. I could look at photos of him all day. I adore the minimalist/German Expressionist/film noir imagery… oh how I wish I could go back in time to one of those concerts!
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