I listened to David Bowie’s Earthling properly for the first time in many years today and, hand on heart, I came away thinking it might be a better album than Scary Monsters.
That was surprising, as Scary Monsters is firmly established as one of Bowie’s great records, while Earthling tends to sit somewhere below the recognised classics, one of those later-career records commonly dismissed as merely “meh”. Even people who admire it often introduce it with a qualification. It is Bowie’s drum-and-bass album, his late-1990s experiment, or the record on which a fifty-year-old man tried to keep pace with younger musicians.
Listening to the album without carrying those judgements into it, I heard a concise, aggressive and remarkably coherent record made by an artist who still sounded excited by making music.
There is no disguising when Earthling was recorded. Released in 1997, it is full of frantic programmed drums, distorted guitars, electronic noise and the sense that its machinery might shake itself apart at any moment. “Little Wonder” immediately evokes The Prodigy, while the album’s darker industrial textures recall Nine Inch Nails and The Downward Spiral .
The Nine Inch Nails connection was real. Bowie and the band toured North America together in 1995, with their performances overlapping during a transitional section in which both acts shared the stage. Bowie was not merely hearing this music from a distance. He was performing inside it night after night.
The exchange between Bowie and Trent Reznor is fascinating because the influence travelled in both directions. Bowie’s experimental work had helped shape Reznor. Nine Inch Nails took some of those ideas, made them harder and more claustrophobic, and returned them to the culture in a form suited to the 1990s. Bowie then absorbed some of that energy into his own work. Reznor later remixed “I’m Afraid of Americans” and appeared in its video.
This is not simply an older artist copying a younger one. It is one generation feeding another, then responding to what came back: a positive feedback loop.
Following fashion or remaining alive?
The drum-and-bass influence caused difficulty for Bowie’s reputation. Some critics interpreted it as evidence that he was chasing fashion rather than setting it.
This was a reasonable question. Bowie did not invent jungle or drum and bass, and by 1997 those forms were already well established. Using contemporary sounds is not automatically innovative, and attaching a fashionable rhythm to an ordinary rock song does not transform it into art.
But Bowie had always absorbed the music around him. Soul, funk, electronic music, the New York underground and European experimental music had all passed through his work. We tend to call that reinvention when a younger artist does it. When an older artist behaves in exactly the same way, it can suddenly be interpreted as desperation.
Bowie’s own catalogue demonstrates how this process worked. “The Jean Genie” was built around a familiar blues figure, part of a musical lineage running through Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” and Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy.” Bowie did not pretend that every recognisable Bowie sound had arrived fully formed from some private artistic universe. His particular talent lay in recognising possibilities, combining borrowed materials and turning them into something unmistakably his own. Earthling applied much the same method to drum and bass and industrial rock, except that critics were less forgiving when the music being absorbed belonged to a younger generation.
The earlier Rolling Stones offer a useful comparison. During the 1960s and 1970s, they did not protect a fixed definition of the Rolling Stones sound. They absorbed soul, country, psychedelia, funk and whatever else they were listening to at the time.
Some Girls responded directly to the music surrounding them in 1978. “Miss You” drew openly from disco, while “Shattered” and “Respectable” carried the speed and nervous energy of punk and late-1970s New York. The Stones had invented neither movement, but contact with contemporary music disturbed their habits and gave the band renewed urgency.
Later, the Rolling Stones gradually became custodians of their own image. They have continued to make worthwhile music, and both Blue & Lonesome and Hackney Diamonds have their merits, but the established idea of the band is no longer in danger. The riffs, the swagger, the tongue and the enormous tour remain securely in place. They have become, to a significant extent, their own heritage act.
That is the natural destination for many successful artists. Audiences want familiar songs, promoters want reliable shows and the commercial reward for risk diminishes. An artist can continue making perfectly respectable records while the sense of possibility steadily disappears.
Bowie could have toured with his existing hits and no one would have batted an eyelid. Instead, he continued to seek out music that excited him. For all the calculation involved in his career, he retained the enthusiasm of a listener and often seemed faintly astonished by his own success. Perhaps David Jones always retained enough distance from David Bowie to keep the creation in perspective. The characters could be enormous, but the man constructing them understood that they were constructions. His later appearance in Extras, in which he willingly turned “David Bowie” into part of the joke, offers a revealing example. None of this means he lacked ego or ambition. It suggests that he could take the work seriously without treating his own mythology as sacred. On Earthling, he does not sound like an institution protecting its reputation. He sounds like a music fan who has heard something thrilling and wants to discover what he can do with it.
The changing speed of time
Our relationship with time changes as we get older.
When we are young, a year can feel like an enormous space in which several different lives might be lived. Bowie could release Hunky Dory in 1971, become Ziggy Stardust in 1972, move through Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups in 1973, and arrive at Diamond Dogs in 1974. By 1975 he was making Young Americans. A year later came Station to Station, followed by Low and “Heroes” in 1977.
He could sound like a substantially different artist almost every year.
That pace becomes harder to sustain with age. Time appears to accelerate, while the amount that can be fitted into a day seems to contract. Personal available energy changes, responsibilities accumulate and work that once occupied an entire creative world must compete with the rest of life. A two-year gap begins to feel like six months. Most of us eventually find ourselves wondering how we once managed to fit so much into a day.
We should therefore be careful about judging the later work of an artist against the rate of transformation achieved in youth. It is unreasonable to expect a fifty-year-old Bowie to reinvent himself every twelve months simply because the twenty-five-year-old Bowie could.
What is striking about Earthling is that Bowie was still moving unusually quickly. It arrived only around sixteen months after Outside, yet it already represented another shift in emphasis. It was shorter, more physical and more directly engaged with the music surrounding him. At fifty, Bowie was not transforming at quite the impossible speed of the 1970s, but he had not stopped looking for the next thing either.
Personally, I would sooner hear innovation across a body of work, including the occasional failure, than wait decades for an album that has been polished until the life has vanished from it. Peter Gabriel’s i/o is my own example. I love Gabriel’s work, but after more than twenty years without a full album of new material, i/o arrived impeccably produced, carefully presented and available in multiple mixes. Plenty of people admired it. I thought it was dreadful: over-controlled and lifeless.
Earthling is the opposite. It might occasionally fall flat on its face, but it is at least an artist moving forwards.
New York music, London voice
There is another aspect of Earthling that receives surprisingly little attention: Bowie’s accent.
His singing voice had never been fixed. From the Anthony Newley influence of his earliest recordings onwards, he had used pronunciation, pitch and theatrical delivery as parts of whatever character he was creating. American soul left its mark on the mid-1970s records, just as different voices emerged elsewhere in his catalogue. Yet on Earthling, his London accent is particularly conspicuous. Once noticed, it becomes part of the experience of the album.
That is especially interesting because Bowie was not living in London. He and Iman were based in New York, and much of Earthling was made at Looking Glass Studios there. The rhythms draw upon British drum and bass; the guitars connect with American industrial rock; the production is international and technological. At the centre of it all is a voice that often sounds emphatically London.
It would be easy to manufacture a neat explanation and claim that living abroad caused Bowie to reclaim his origins. I have found no statement from Bowie confirming that, so it should remain an observation rather than a conclusion. Distance can make people more conscious of where they come from, but whether that explains Bowie’s delivery is unknowable.
What can be said is that the contrast matters. Bowie was living in New York, not London, yet he had rarely sounded more London. Amid the international electronics, distorted guitars and breakbeats, the voice kept returning home.
A different creative partnership
The album’s freshness may also owe something to the people who made it.
Tony Visconti was not involved. Bowie produced Earthling with Reeves Gabrels and Mark Plati. Gabrels brought the abrasive, processed guitar language he had developed through Tin Machine and Outside. Plati, who also engineered and mixed the album, worked with its loops, samples, programming and hard-disk construction. Mike Garson, Gail Ann Dorsey and Zachary Alford added performances that were then cut, repeated, distorted and rebuilt.
That does not mean Visconti would have made a conservative record. His later work with Bowie, culminating in Blackstar, makes that suggestion impossible to sustain. Nor should his absence be treated as the sole explanation for the sound of Earthling.
But Bowie, Gabrels and Plati did not have a celebrated historic partnership to honour. They were working within Bowie’s immediate creative present, discovering what could be done with the technology and musicians in front of them. The result is less stately than much of Bowie’s later work, but it is also less burdened by the requirement to sound like an approved version of David Bowie, created by people familiar with each other’s way of working.
What the critics actually said
It would be easy, but inaccurate, to suggest that critics simply rejected Earthling in 1997. Its contemporary reception was more positive than its subsequent reputation implies.
Mark Kemp in Rolling Stone called it Bowie’s best album since Scary Monsters, although he questioned how innovative its use of contemporary electronic music really was. Q heard an atmospheric harshness it had not encountered from Bowie since the same album. The Chicago Tribune described it as some of his finest music in a decade, while Billboard greeted it as his most inspired and forward-looking work since Let’s Dance.
The disagreement centred on whether the new musical language had become an organic part of Bowie’s work or had merely been attached to it.
The harshest response came from Ian Harrison in Select. His one-star review characterised Bowie as a “middle-aged arena drum’n’bass fantasist.” Mat Snow, who was editing Mojo when the album appeared, later expressed a related objection, arguing that the drum-and-bass elements felt bolted on to capture some of the energy of the moment.
That criticism deserves to be considered rather than dismissed. There are tracks on Earthling where the collision of styles is more convincing than others. At times, the production threatens to overwhelm the underlying songs.
However, the language of the Select review reveals something beyond a musical objection. Bowie’s age had become part of the case against him. He was not merely accused of making an unsuccessful experiment. He was a fifty-year-old behaving in a way considered faintly ridiculous for a man of his age. The review was a musical critic’s version of “act your age”.
I am old enough to remember the Rolling Stones releasing their version of “Going to a Go-Go” in 1982 and being routinely described in the mainstream press as “wrinkly rockers.” Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were both thirty-eight. Charlie Watts was forty and Bill Wyman, the oldest member, was forty-five. They were discussed as though they had wandered out of a retirement home and onto a concert stage.
That was the culture in which rock music existed. It was assumed to belong to the young, and there was no established model for rock musicians continuing creatively into middle and later age. The genre wasn’t old enough for that.
British music journalism was also intensely adversarial and tribal. The NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and later Select did more than evaluate records. They constructed movements, chose sides, created heroes and often attacked them once the moment passed. A memorable insult could be as important as a balanced judgement.
The music press and its readership could also be extraordinarily present-minded. I remember Q publishing a readers’ poll of the 100 greatest albums ever in 2006. Radiohead occupied the first two positions with OK Computer and The Bends, and had Kid A at number ten. Oasis placed Definitely Maybe at number five and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? at number eight. The Beatles’ Revolver was fourth.
These are substantial albums. OK Computer has endured particularly well and remains a credible candidate for any list of great records. The point is not that Q’s readers were foolish to admire them. It is that three Radiohead albums and two Oasis albums occupied half of an ostensibly all-time top ten. The list may tell you something about which records had survived, but it certainly tells you exactly who was buying Q in 2006.
Every musical canon is shaped partly by the moment in which it is constructed. The latest orthodoxy can quickly be presented as the settled judgement of history, while work that does not fit the preferred narrative slips out of view.
Bowie had benefited from this culture earlier in his career. The music press helped establish him as the artist who was always one step ahead. By 1997, that reputation had become a trap. If he repeated his past, he was a heritage act. If he absorbed the present, he was chasing youth.
The album, track by track
Little Wonder
Earthling announces itself with an explosion. “Little Wonder” takes the industrial unease and electronic experimentation of Outside and propels them into something faster, tighter and more physical.
The breakbeats immediately establish the drum-and-bass influence, while Reeves Gabrels’s guitar tears through the track like industrial machinery. Bowie throws cut-up fragments of language into the verses before anchoring the chaos with an immediate and memorable chorus.
The comparison with The Prodigy is unavoidable. It has the same collision of dance rhythms, rock aggression and controlled disorder, reminding me particularly of “Smack My Bitch Up”. But Bowie’s voice, theatrical delivery and peculiar use of language prevent it from becoming an imitation.
Most importantly, the experimentation does not smother the song. Beneath everything happening in the production is an effective single, and it reached number 14 in Britain. It is an extraordinary opening to the album.
Looking for Satellites
“Looking for Satellites” creates more space without losing the underlying tension. Its repeated title suggests someone searching for a signal, a connection or some evidence that he is not alone.
The arrangement gradually becomes more agitated, with Gabrels’s guitar threatening to escape from the song altogether while Bowie’s vocal remains comparatively controlled.
It demonstrates why reducing Earthling to its drum programming misses so much. The electronics provide a new environment, but the subjects of distance, isolation and failed communication are recognisably Bowie. The technology has changed. The preoccupations have not.
Battle for Britain (The Letter)
The title suggests something grand and national, but the battle appears to be taking place inside Bowie himself.
Electronic percussion collides with piano, guitar and a vocal performance that moves between detachment and agitation. It captures the feeling of trying to regain control while everything accelerates around you.
This may be the album’s best response to the accusation that Bowie simply placed fashionable beats underneath conventional rock songs. Different musical languages are fighting for control of the track, and the friction becomes the point.
Seven Years in Tibet
“Seven Years in Tibet” gives the music room to build. The verses are restrained and ominous, with Bowie singing in a lower register over a dark, crawling arrangement. The chorus then arrives in a burst of distorted guitar.
This is closer to industrial rock than drum and bass. It is heavy, threatening and faintly mournful, with the contrast between its sections providing much of its power.
For anyone alienated by the more frantic electronic rhythms, this ought to be the point at which the record’s wider ambition becomes undeniable. Earthling is not dependent upon one fashionable production device. It is pulling several contemporary sounds into Bowie’s world.
Dead Man Walking
“Dead Man Walking” may be the album’s most successful fusion of electronic dance music and traditional Bowie songwriting.
The rhythm moves relentlessly, but the melody is strong enough to survive without it. There is exhilaration in the music and unease beneath it, producing the familiar Bowie sensation of dancing while something troubling is happening.
Age, memory and mortality hover around the song, but Bowie refuses to approach them sedately. At fifty, he is not sitting back and contemplating the passing years. He is racing against them.
That may be the heart of Earthling. It acknowledges ageing without accepting that ageing must mean retreat.
Telling Lies
“Telling Lies” is darker and less welcoming. The rhythm remains fast, but the overall feeling is claustrophobic rather than exhilarating.
Bowie’s vocal is surrounded by layers of electronic sound, creating an atmosphere in which nothing feels entirely trustworthy. The repeated title becomes less like a chorus than an accusation.
This is where the influence of Nine Inch Nails feels particularly strong. The distortion is not decorative. It creates psychological discomfort and becomes part of the meaning of the song.
It is not one of the album’s great melodic moments, but it earns its place by making the record more unsettling.
The Last Thing You Should Do
This is where the criticism of Earthling becomes easier to understand.
“The Last Thing You Should Do” surrenders itself almost entirely to rhythm and momentum. It is repetitive, abrasive and less conventionally structured than the album’s strongest material. Bowie sounds as though he is issuing instructions from inside a malfunctioning machine.
If the electronic rhythms are what you dislike about Earthling, this track is unlikely to change your mind. It also contributes to a degree of listening fatigue. By this stage, the percussion and heavily processed sound can begin to blur together.
Yet Bowie is still doing more than decorating a rock song with fashionable beats. He allows the electronic form to reshape the music itself. Whether the result works is another matter, but the risk is genuine.
I’m Afraid of Americans
“I’m Afraid of Americans” became the album’s best-known song, helped considerably by Trent Reznor’s later single mix and the video in which he pursues an increasingly frightened Bowie through New York.
The album version is less streamlined and arguably less powerful than Reznor’s treatment, but the song itself is superb. Johnny becomes a grotesque embodiment of consumerism, cultural power, casual entitlement and paranoia.
The title is provocative, but the song is more interesting than a straightforward piece of anti-Americanism. Its America is partly a real country and partly a projection of modern anxiety: enormous, commercial, violent and capable of reproducing itself everywhere.
Unlike some elements of the production, that anxiety has not dated.
Law (Earthlings on Fire)
The album finishes with another attack.
“Law” is built around repetition, electronic noise and the increasingly insistent cry of “Earthlings on fire.” It feels less like a self-contained composition than the final stage of the record’s nervous breakdown.
As an individual song, it is one of the weaker tracks. The repetition becomes wearing and it lacks the melodic reward of “Little Wonder,” “Dead Man Walking” or “Seven Years in Tibet.”
As a conclusion, however, it makes sense. Earthling could hardly finish with a tasteful ballad or a reassuring resolution. It ends overheated, overloaded and still refusing to settle down.
Better than Scary Monsters?
Earthling is not a flawless album. Its production can be exhausting, its final third is less melodically rewarding than its first, and some of the rhythms date it unmistakably to the late 1990s.
There is also a strong argument that Scary Monsters contains the greater individual songs. “Ashes to Ashes” and “Fashion” would be formidable competition for anything on Earthling.
But an album is more than a collection of its best-known tracks. It is also a complete experience, and Earthling commits fully to the world it creates. It is concise, aggressive and alive. There is no comfortable retreat into an approved Bowie sound and little concern for protecting his position in the rock establishment.
Not that every established artist must adopt whatever younger musicians are doing. Nor does experimentation deserve applause simply because it is experimentation. Bad music does not become good through courage alone. However, a long artistic career should retain the possibility of movement.
Bowie refused to become the curator of his own museum. At fifty, he could easily have toured the familiar songs, reproduced a respectable version of his established sound and accepted the considerable rewards available to a heritage act. Instead, he made an album capable of exciting people, alienating them and making himself look ridiculous.
Nearly thirty years later, Earthling is still being penalised for sounding like 1997. Yet many celebrated records are products of their moment, and the music Bowie absorbed has hardly disappeared. Drum and bass and industrial rock still command substantial audiences. The Prodigy and Nine Inch Nails remain formidable live acts, while a later generation represented by Pendulum has continued developing the collision of electronic rhythms and rock instrumentation. We do not usually object to an album sounding like its own time unless we have already decided that the particular time was artistically embarrassing. In the case of Earthling, what once sounded like an ageing artist chasing a temporary fashion now sounds more like his response to musical forms that proved remarkably durable.
Perhaps the better question is not whether the drum and bass has dated, but whether the record still possesses energy, purpose and songs worth hearing. Earthling has all three.
Is it really better than Scary Monsters? I am not yet certain. Scary Monsters may reach greater heights, but Earthling feels more consistent than its reputation suggests and far more exciting than the dismissive description of “Bowie’s drum-and-bass album” allows.
Forget the inherited ranking and play it from beginning to end.
If sounding like David Bowie fronting a strange, artier and more psychologically disturbed version of The Prodigy is a fault, it is a magnificent one.
Sources and further reading
David Bowie, Earthling liner notes: production and personnel credits.
Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie.
Chris O’Leary, Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie 1976–2016.
Contemporary and retrospective reception collected in MusicRadar’s account of “Little Wonder” and Earthling.
Q’s 2006 readers’ poll, as reported by David Bowie’s official website.
If you enjoyed this article...
You may also find Cultural Gateways: How Curiosity Begets Culture interesting.
Earthling demonstrates how one artist can absorb the work of others and send the influence somewhere new. The same principle shapes how we discover culture ourselves: The Prodigy can lead us to Bowie, Disney to Stravinsky, Kubrick to Beethoven and even a bread advert to Dvořák.
In this related article, I explore why the division between “high” and popular culture can discourage curiosity, and how one film, song, book or painting can open the door to a lifetime of discovery.
About the author
Paul Clark is the author of The GOOD Book: A Behavioural Operating System for Escaping Debt and Rebuilding Control and the creator of The GOOD Method. If you enjoyed this article, explore more of his writing in GOOD Thoughts, listen to The GOOD Conversation podcast, or join the GOOD Community to receive new articles, podcast episodes, resources and forthcoming videos by email. If there is a subject you would like Paul to investigate or write about, get in touch.