DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

David Bowie's Diamond Dogs

Glenn Hendler author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:5th Mar '20

Should be back in stock very soon

David Bowie's Diamond Dogs cover

Provides a window into a moment when both phantasmatic and real relationships between straightness and queerness, between blackness and whiteness, and between utopia and dystopia, were in flux; Bowie in the mid-1970s both exemplified and had a hand in creating the complex and contradictory opening of possibilities now seen as the hallmark of that decade.

After his breakthrough with Ziggy Stardust and before his U.S. pop hits "Fame" and "Golden Years" David Bowie produced a dark and difficult concept album set in a post-apocalyptic "Hunger City" populated by post-human "mutants." Diamond Dogs includes the great glam anthem "Rebel Rebel" and utterly unique songs that combine lush romantic piano and nearly operatic singing with scratching, grungy guitars, creepy, insidious noises, and dark, pessimistic lyrics that reflect the album's origins in a projected Broadway musical version of Orwell's 1984 and Bowie's formative encounter with William S. Burroughs.

In this book Glenn Hendler shows that each song on Diamond Dogs shifts the ground under you as you listen, not just by changing in musical style, but by being sung by a different "I" who directly addresses a different "you." Diamond Dogs is the product of a performer at the peak of his powers but uncomfortable with the rock star role he had constructed. All of the album's influences looked to Bowie like ways of escaping not just the Ziggy role, but also the constraints of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. These are just some of the reasons many Bowie fans rate Diamond Dogs his richest and most important album of the 1970s.

[Hendler’s] textual analysis of Bowie’s lyrics and the influences of the album is deep, yet he doesn’t skimp on musicology … This 33 1/3 is worth reading even if you know nothing about Diamond Dogs. * Bomb *
This latest volume of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series sees US academic Glenn Hendler manfully take a crack at forensically unpacking the disparate ingredients of Bowie’s greatest future dystopia Diamond Dogs and passing with flying colours. * Shindig! Magazine *

ISBN: 9781501336584

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 162g

168 pages