"I hold myself like a god" - Atomica, The Next Day Extra [x]
David Bowie was no stranger to being idolised and adored. Actress Evan Rachel Wood wrote about her fan encounter with Bowie in the fan magazine Glamour, stating, "I didn't grow up in a super-religious household. Religion was more about tradition than a spiritual practice, but I didn't mind at all. My religion was art. Most importantly music. And Bowie was my god." [x]
It is this level of celebrity worship that I want to discuss today, as I continue my series on The Next Day Extra tracks. So "let's get this show on the road" and let's get to one of my all-time favourite Bowie songs: "Atomica".
As O'Leary writes, "Released as one of the Extras, it shares with its fellow bonus tracks a cheekiness, a sense of randomly-aimed parody, a labored looseness. 'How others must see the faker,' Bowie once sang. But he was never a good faker, it turned out. He was the sort of counterfeiter who couldn’t resist altering whatever piece he was fabricating, so that any close look would reveal a forgery with its own strange intentions."
"Atomica" was actually one of the first songs written and recorded for The Next Day, starting in May 2011 at The Magic Shop, with the vocals not being recorded until a year later in 2012. However, despite being one of the first songs written, it was eventually relegated to a bonus track and was finally released on The Next Day Extra the following year in 2013. [x] As Pegg wrote:
...the song remained unfinished at the time of the principal sessions, despite being one of the first pieces to be recorded: it was tracked on 2 May 2011, the opening day of the sessions. "Some songs like 'Atomica', needed more work and were assigned to the back burner intentionally for future releases," explained Tony Visconti, who was of the opinion that the track "could've been a highlight of The Next Day had we finished it back then." Ear Slick's guitar part was added in July 2012, and Bowie didn't record his lead vocal until 26 August 2013, nearly six months after the release of The Next Day.
I can't help but agree with Visconti that "Atomica" should've been included in the main work. As aforementioned in the "So She" post, the main album The Next Day predominately focuses on using Bowie's own persona and body of work to create a heavily self-referential mythos in which he, as David Jones, writes and performs as his final character: Bowie. Every song on the album has a perfect echo to some event in Bowie's life as seen by the public as well as to some previous album (musically, lyrically, and thematically). A larger exposition on this claim will be done later, but for now, I want to assert that "Atomica" fits perfectly into this larger thematic work both musically and lyrically.
Musically, Pegg described the song thusly:
"The verse lyrics are a mouthful, sung at an intense pace," observed Visconti. "Gerry Leonard and David Torn swirl madly around each other's styles. Gail Ann Dorsey is poppin' the bass and Zach Alford is on drums, slamming away."
Not for the first time in The Next Day's sessions, the spirit of Lodger raises its head, albeit by a roundabout route. The opening and closing moments of 'Atomica' - a naked drumbeat accompanied by agile picks on rhythm guitar - are near-identical to the opening bars of the 1988 re-recording of 'Look Back in Anger'. It's a fleeting echo, and it vanishes once the track is up to speed and bedded into its guitar-sparking, bass-slapping post-glam groove...Indeed, the echoes of Bowie's previous musical work are sprinkled throughout the song. The rhythm guitar picks, as Pegg pointed out, as well as the fast-paced lyrics ("African Night Flight", anyone?). While O'Leary wrote of the song:
It’s one of the central ironies of Bowie’s work. Even when he tried to create mediocre, keep-your-head-down music, he kept making stuff that couldn’t quite pass. His mannequins would bother and even unnerve shoppers. “Shake It” is pretty dire 1983 R&B, but it wouldn’t have passed muster on many R&B stations of the time—its odd lyric, which Bowie seems to lovingly mock as he sings it, stringing phrases across bars; its fanatic castrati backing vocals; its lumpen rhythms.
On a bonus track released in 2013, Bowie seemed to pull off the trick at last. “Atomica” begins as simulacrum, drawing from the past three decades of music without grounding itself in any. Its opening 30 seconds could play anywhere—an Urban Outfitters, a Cheesecake Factory, or in the background of a home improvement show or a Korean cartoon—and wouldn’t draw attention. The lead guitar riff, nicely keeping in bounds; the tastefully popped bass; the seemingly programmed cymbal fill; the first lines—I’m just a rock star, stabbing away. All safely anonymous, as is the refrain, whose lyric seems to have been generated by bots.
But by the refrain, things have started going awry. Bowie jams twice as many syllables as should fit into his verse lines (“when-you’re-head-o-ver-heels-and-the-magic-is-there-but-im-POSS-i-ble–POSS-i-BLE”). He sings “police” like “puh-leeze,” rhymes “covered-up pool” with “purple tulle.” And after the second refrain, the track sinks into a hole of fixation, with Bowie moaning that “I….hold myself…like a god,” over and over again, until he looks ready to abandon the song. Snare drum fills and synthetic strings don’t rouse him. It takes the opening guitar riff, working as a defibrillator. “Atomica” marches out in its crooked way, stamped as yet another Bowie song.
For instance, in the past, he appealed to celebrity as related to the old Homeric tradition of "Glory". In The Iliad, Homer examines whether it would be better to die in battle with Glory or to maintain a peaceful existence to die anonymously in old age. It's clear that the former is regarded as the higher honour, and it was what the protagonist Achilles ultimately chooses as his fate. Thus, death was seen as the ultimate key to accessing the rewards of Glory - that of being renowned throughout the land, and, through this fame, achieve immortality through the memory/spirit of oneself that remained in the hearts and minds of men.
Meanwhile, Bowie too considered celebrity as it related to death. Specifically, how death could cement the previously discussed immortality of someone. Bowie was fascinated by the idea of how death could revive a person's life/career, as evidenced in works like "Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide" and "It’s No Game (Part 1)" which contains the lyrics, “Put a bullet in my brain/And it makes all the papers". More chillingly, it also seems to be referenced in Bowie’s last album ★. "Lazarus" offers an uncanny level of perception into his own legacy, and how his death would be the resurrection of his career. Not to mention how the untimely death of his famous friends like John Lennon and T. Rex also most likely affected Bowie's personal outlook on this relationship between celebrity and immortality.
He also appealed to celebrity as it pertained to persona and leadership. The idea that a person behind the famous facade could be someone else, and that the persona is who people want to follow - not the ordinary man behind the curtain, as it were - was revolutionary at the time. In the 1950s a rockstar was seen as no one other than himself. It was trendy - the appeal of the performance lay in the performer being just like you. This authenticity was expected and demanded.
However, in the 1970s, led by the effervescent Bowie, would change this. As evidenced by his lyrics in "Song for Bob Dylan", "Now hear this Robert Zimmerman,/ Though I don't suppose we'll meet/ Ask your good friend Dylan,/ If he'd gaze a while down the old street,/ Tell him we've lost his poems,/ So we're writing on the walls,/ Give us back our unity,/ Give us back our family,/ You're every nation's refugee,/ Don't leave us with their sanity". Here, Bowie addresses both Bob Dylan the Celebrity and Robert Zimmerman the Person in his song. He recognizes that the two are different people. Bob Dylan could lead a movement. Robert Zimmerman was only a man. And the man had abandoned the movement he was the symbolic figurehead of. However, a different symbol could take his place. And this character would be out of this world. Literally. Bowie's fascination with person and persona reached its peak most clearly in his creation of the Rockstar's Rockstar: Ziggy Stardust.
An amalgamation of real life eccentrics and rock stars, Japanese and British gay culture, and other influences like literature, fashion and the space race, Ziggy was envisioned as the Ultimate Rockstar. As Rolling Stone wrote about the character, "...Ziggy had achieved what Bowie set out to do – he altered music forever by introducing the notion of the rock star as a fearless changeling who could recast image and persona when necessary, whether the audience was ready or not."
"Atomica" offers a sly nod to this earlier persona. As evidenced in the lines, "I'm just a rock star stabbing away/I'll take the - I'll take the leave for another day". Here, Bowie himself is now the character portrayed as the Ultimate Rockstar. He too is a shallow rock star just "stabbing away" at his craft, holding his audience under his spell ("When you're head over heals and the magic is there, but impossible/Possible"). Thus, the song's lyrics are perfectly balanced with the right amount of swaggering arrogance and cheeky self-references to Bowie and Ziggy (the characters) and David (the person) as Rock Stars.
Additionally, Bowie considered the relationship of celebrity and leadership as it specifically pertained to shaping the minds and hearts of the masses. In particular, he highlighted this leadership's relation to the zealous following and adulation it inspired. And it is this level of worship that would inspire a superficial rock star to take on a god complex.
In another interview, he elaborated on this idea, saying, "Most people still want their idols and gods to be shallow, like cheap toys. Why do you think teenagers are the way they are? They run around like ants, chewing gum and flitting onto a certain style of dressing for a day; that's as deep as they wish to go. It's no surprise that Ziggy was a huge success."
In fact, Bowie's largest examination of celebrity was typically related to a god complex and the madness it inspired. In "Atomica" this is evidenced by my favourite part of the song - the bridge in which Bowie repeats, "I/Hold myself/Like a god/Like a god".
However, in his career this exploration of a god complex was predominately done in the guise of his most well-known character: Ziggy Stardust. He once wrote as Ziggy a raunchy track entitled "Sweet Head", which was eventually cut from the seminal album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Here, Bowie-as-Ziggy sings with relish the rather erotically blasphemous lines, "Traumatics thick and fast, your faith in me can last/ Besides I'm known to lay you, one and all// Look south the way your mother dwells/ If she knew what's going down, she'd give you hell/ I'm the kind of man she warned me of/ Till there was rock, you only had god"
The constant adulation and performing as Ziggy took its toll on Bowie, who began to blur the lines between himself and his own creation. As he stated, "At first, I just assumed that character onstage. Then everybody started to treat me as they treated Ziggy: as though I were the Next Big Thing, as though I moved masses of people. I became convinced I was a messiah. Very scary. I woke up fairly quickly." [x]
Thus, a god-complex for Bowie is also inexorably entwined with madness. This is evidenced in "Atomica" by the lyrics, "They protect you from the voices/Protect from the visions/Protect you from the silence for another day". These voices and visions - and worst of all silence - are all part and parcel for Bowie's Rockstar who is just "stabbing away", who believes himself to be a god and all that entails - an over-inflated idea of infallibility, belief in being/a desire to be an object of worship, and a general sense of pride or arrogance in such abilities/characteristics.
And as such, Bowie the Rockstar arrogantly chooses to ignore the dangers of having a god complex ("I'll take the - I'll leave the sins for another day"). This is similar to Let's Dance, in which Bowie used dance as a metaphor of distracting oneself from the loss of spirituality in culture. Then, he portrayed how our paltry celebrities have replaced God as objects of worship. Now, this theme is revisited once again in "Atomica" when he asserts that, "These modern people sure know how to live/When you're head over heels and the magic is gone - It's impossible - Impossible". There is no more magic to be had, as compared to the first stanza, but you're already too far gone to do anything about it.
But before it looks too grim, it's worth pointing out that "Atomica" is no song of Ziggy's. It's a song meant for Bowie. And Bowie-the-character's Rockstar in "Atomica" isn't quite as series, although it does refer to his dark past. Instead, "Atomica" is an upbeat, cheeky nod to his previous characters. As Pegg stated, "Bowie sings the archest of lyrics, at once swaggering and self-effacing: 'I'm just a rock star stabbing away ... A modern scholar / Just let me know if I sing too much'. In the bridge he keeps a straight face while majestically crooning, "I hold myself like a god, like a god," and it is left to the fantastically silly chorus to reassure us that none of this is to be taken seriously."
Not to mention the silly lines sprinkled throughout the piece such as, "That we shall swim in a covered up pool/Impossible/Impossible/By the white trees dressed in purple tulle". This Rockstar doesn't live in a dystopian society like Ziggy, but rather enjoys the rich drapings of Celebrity. And he doesn't suffer from the inner-torture of Ziggy being adored either, as evidenced by the rousing chorus of, "Let's get this show on the road/Let's get Atomica/Let's rock till we explode/Let's get Atomica!" Bowie's Rockstar doesn't mind his following, and cheekily encourages it too.
Thus, "Atomica" is both a nod to Bowie's continued examination of celebrity and a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of him as the Ultimate Rockstar with the Ultimate god complex. And indeed, the cheekiness of the song makes it one of my favourites. As Ricky Gervais talked about in an interview, he sent Bowie a birthday email that said, "'Happy birthday - 50, eh? Isn't it time you got a proper job? - Ricky Gervais, 42, Comedian.' And he sent back, I have a proper job. - David Bowie, Rock God."
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