10 - Low
No, those things aren't contradictory at all. He had the psychological car crash that was The Man Who Fell To Earth. The music he was writing because he thought he was the composer as well as the actor was rejected, exactly the way Fame told him it would be. He's got a drug habit to kick, France and Germany are way cheaper to live in for his self rehab (he doesn't like heroin so West Berlin's rising opioid epidemic is quite helpful in that regard), Iggy Pop and Brian Eno are there to help him explore things he sucks at (namely electronic soundscapes and dance). It was going to be a bad album anyway he chose to approach it, and the fragments of brand new experimentation are what he has to work with.
We're listening to the soundtrack of his life after all, and you can't have the comeback until you live through the fallout (maybe not coincidentally in the actual iconic epicenter of your WWII fueled neurosis, where nobody actually cares about a burned out British pop star).
To recap, he's done the naive martyr, the reluctant martyr, the Indulgant, and the Crucified. Now we sift through the rubble and rebuild. We're all conscious of the bizarro absurdity of burned-out Bowie shaping Iggy Pop's transition to solo artist when the Stooges and Iggy were the model for the Spiders and Ziggy, right? Now they are sitting in the same German apartment looking at each other saying "i don't know, what do you think? Brian, what would you do if this were a Roxy song?"
So, obviously i say it's a terrible album but think it's great, and that should probably remind you of McCartney. That album had song fragments and instrumentals too. That album was rage fueled spite turned giddy DIY experimental glee. Freedom from the machinery of your own creation.
I swear, it's impossible to slough off that "here's Bowie's version, better than the original" feeling. You can't really predict what thing he's going to act out next, but you know it's going to be an award winningly convincing performance.
11 - Heroes
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