Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

carry around with him in his bag.
“Those were heady times,” Plati says today. “You
felt like you were in the middle of a major change as
far as how music was being captured and then
manipulated. We were excited about the technology
as far as the ability to move things about in a freer
manner than we had been accustomed to. It was
early on as far as making records inside of
computers, and we used that to a great degree on
Earthling.”
Most consider Earthling Bowie’s “drum and bass”
album in the same way they view Joni Mitchell’s
Hejira to be her “jazz fusion” record or Trans as Neil
Young’s “New Wave” album or Morrissey’s Kill
Uncle as his “rockabilly” album. It’s simply another
case of a veteran artist pursuing a sound with which
he or she has fallen in love. “David was the first
person to play me jungle and drum and bass in
about 1992,” says Gabrels. The genre’s hallmarks
(rapid-fire bass, hailstorm percussion, flashes of
distorted guitar, sampling, sudden dramatic pauses)
dominate Earthling’s tracks, like “Little Wonder,”
“Battle for Britain (The Letter),” “Telling Lies” and
“Dead Man Walking.” All of these were farmed out to
club DJs and producers to be remixed.
A Trent Reznor remix of the album’s first single,
the typically prescient “I’m Afraid of Americans,”
gave Bowie his first major radio hit of the nineties. It
was well deserved. “Americans,” a funny, crunching
indictment of his gun-and-gas-guzzler-happy
adopted home, may have been Bowie’s finest single