Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

had any misgivings concerning its artistic merit. But I
found it an evil record at the time because of my
personal situation. It made what I just rid myself of
seem cool again. With a major speed thing
beginning to happen among punks at that time, this
is a great piece of art but it’s seriously not helpful
socially.” Low certainly did much to make mental
illness, chemically induced or otherwise, seem a bit
more fashionable, but this is more a triumph of
confidence than some prurient and conscious
decision to spread such antisocial energy as if it
were a dance craze. Bowie made coming apart
seem elegant, but Low, as self-aware as any dawnof-the-decade,
denim-clad-singer-songwriter affair,
gave an often overlooked depth to the act of putting
one’s fractured self back together. Released just a
week after his thirtieth birthday, Low would mark the
beginning of Bowie’s “mature” period. This, when
speaking of rock stars, is of course relative, but Low,
named the greatest album of the seventies by
Pitchfork, provides a well-engineered bridge to elder
states-manhood. Like Iggy, Bowie had now become
a godfather.
T
he divided Berlin that David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Tony
Visconti and Coco Schwab inhabited in early ’77
while recording Pop’s second solo album Lust for
Life and Bowie’s “Heroes,” the only somewhat more
commercially minded follow-up to the heroically