David Bowie Young Americans by: Dan Grimsey Mon:16-Jul-07 Label: RCA Year: 1975 WB rating 59 out of 100

David Bowie’s famous soul, R&B/funk record represented a potentially career-destroying jump into the unknown and was possibly the biggest genre shift for a major star up to that time. Although it did end up giving Bowie his first US No.1 in ‘Fame’ it’s unlikely that this was a calculated move. At the time, most of his fans hated it – glam rock and R&B having never been synonymous.  It’s fair to suggest, that unlike a variety of genre leaps by megastars (Michael Jackson incorporating rap or Kylie Minogue going indie for example) this was not a cynical attempt in making the kids think that he was hip to their jive.

Although an R&B record, and Bowie reputedly being in the middle of an obsession with the R&B singers of the time, there is no sense of David attempting to emulate them. Instead Bowie’s funk was used a base, a soundtrack, for his depiction of a recent American tour.

Despite Bowie’s clear and authentic love for the music, it still seems like a silly idea, since his vocal styling, more often that not, is misplaced with the music, his voice often overshadowed by wild sax playing and the ‘wooops’ and ‘yeahs’ of the backing choir. As such it is only vaguely a David Bowie album, the key performances belonging to the band. Sometimes this works, with all jamming and mighty gospel singing turning ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’ into an epic production, but most of the time this pairing misses its mark.

In ‘Who Can I Be Now?’ and ‘Win’ he also shows off his chops in the vocal department.  Whilst at the time, Bowie going soul, was shocking enough, decades on, hearing him singing what could otherwise be a theme song to a Disney movie is the greater shock – not to mention the pseudo religious lyrics about angels in heaven. It’s slightly disturbing that there are Bowie songs out there that my mother might like, and there are several such songs on Young Americans.

A piece of trivia often noted, is that during the recording of Young Americans, Bowie was hanging around a lot with John Lennon, who ended up co-writing the classic ‘Fame.’  Bowie also does a cover of ‘Across The Universe’ which he over-sings so much that it comes across as a late-night karaoke piss-take of almost Richard Cheese dimensions. It’s remarkable that Lennon was even speaking to Bowie after this performance, let alone then helping to write his first US #1.

Distancing himself from the all-night jams and vocal overextension, ‘Fame’ is beautiful in its simplicity. It brings back a sense of humour to a serious album full of serious musicians and hints at a harbinger of the studio trickery to come in the repetitious “fame” reprieve.

Bowie has always been best when playing an outsider role and describing what he sees, like some sort of alien sociologist. But given that he had American popular culture of the 70s to inspire him should have constructed his characters better than playing the preachy motivational speaker in ‘Win’, with topics livelier than the quite generic song-for-a-seductress of ‘Fascination.’  Bowie usually appeared as though he was trying to say something, even if it was difficult to understand what that something was, amidst all the transsexual rock-stars and Mickey Mouse being a cow nonsense. 

Young Americans was quite an achievement for Bowie, dealing with a genre that was based more on musicianship and less – as was the case for both glam rock before and proto-new-wave-kraut rock afterward – on image. He showed that he could sing power ballads.  More importantly he showed that he was able to switch to an entirely new genre, capture the essence of this genre, whilst still ensuring that it still sounded something like a Bowie record.  But all of these achievements do not make this a particularly thrilling record. It turns out Bowie is human after all.