David Bowie Embraced His Age On ‘Hours…’
Twenty-five years ago, David Bowie released his 22nd solo album, Hours… He clearly felt that it was a transformational album, and he telegraphed that on the album’s cover. Bowie has always seemed to play different characters on each of his albums, going to back to Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke. On the cover of Hours…, we see a spiky-haired Bowie, looking very much as he did on the cover of 1997’s Earthling, laying motionless. His head is in the lap of another Bowie. This one is very much alive, and has longer hair. It’s as if he’s saying, “That version of me is gone, here’s the new version.” But this felt like a different kind of tranformation.
Bowie was never one to revel in nostalgia in the way that most of his peers do. He “retired” his greatest hits and his solo career on a massive tour in 1990. At the time, he announced that he was going to dedicate himself full-time to his new band Tin Machine. Tin Machine marked a new beginning for him. After the massive success of 1983’s Let’s Dance, he tried commerical appeal, with diminishing returns, on 1984’s Tonight and 1987’s Never Let Me Down. Bowie got tired of that game. He didn’t seem interested in playing to people his age, necessarily.
Tin Machine was a heavy rock band. They introduced an avant-garde guitar hero named Reeves Gabrels, and they appealed to a younger and more aggressive audience. Bowie wasn’t looking to have his new songs played alongside Elton John and Tina Turner’s new records. He wanted to be peers with the Pixies and Jane’s Addiction. Tin Machine was relatively successful in that regard. But, as happens with most bands, they ran their course. He returned to his solo career, keeping Gabrels as his guitarist.
His next few albums–1993’s Black Tie, White Noise, 1995’s Outside and 1997’s Earthling saw him diving deep into different varities of electronic dance music. The tours relied heavliy on new material, only sprinkling in a few older tunes. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails remixed a few tracks (“The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” and “I’m Afraid of Americans”) and the two co-headlined a 1995 tour. They even sold Bowie/Nine Inch Nails t-shirts. Bowie was clearly looking to fit in with a younger and edgier audience.
But when he started working on Hours…, he was in his fifties. By that point, Reeves Gabrels was Bowie’s guitarist, co-writer, co-producer and was his musical director. I spoke to Gabrels in 2017 about his time with Bowie, which ended with Hours…. Gabrels wanted to continue on the path of Earthling, but Bowie had different ideas.
“His circle of friends was more in his age group and they were listening to Luther Vandross and things like that… and I wasn’t,” he told me. “He actually made a comment to me at one point, ‘I want to make music for my generation.'”
But he was also looking for a bit of the mainstream pop success that he enjoyed in the ’80s. For the first single, “Thursday’s Child,” he was interested in having Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas from R&B superstar group TLC sing backing vocals. But Gabrels told Bowie that such an obvious play for mainstream recognition would not be a great idea. He told Bowie, “I stopped listening to you when you sang with Bing Crosby! I was so pissed off I didn’t buy your next two albums! Now we’ve acquired the audience that we wanted, and you’re gonna put TLC on the record, and they’re going to say, ‘F— him!'”
All those years later, he admitted, “‘Cool’–in quotes–is a very subjective thing. I was David’s friend, and his guitar player, musical director, co-producer, but I was also a fan. I felt like I was protecting his ‘thing.’ I wanted to make sure he stayed cool and stayed connected. He was a voracious chaser of new things. But not every new thing [should be chased].”
The “thing” that Bowie and Gabrels created in the ’90s was very edgy and hip. And while Gabrels was interested in staying there, he’d forgotten that he was no longer in Tin Machine. In a prior interview, he admitted that he sometimes forgot that he was no longer Bowie’s bandmate, but his guitar player. And Bowie was reckoning with mortality in a way that Gabrels wasn’t yet.
“Thursday’s Child” was the album’s first single (Gabrels’ friend Holly Palmer ultimately provided the backing vocals). Bowie’s last big song and video was the 1997’s Trent Renzor remix of “I’m Afraid of Americans.” The video co-starred Reznor as a deranged stalker following Bowie around downtown New York. The song got played on active rock and alternative radio, and positioned him as part of the zeitgeist a quarter century after his first hit, 1972’s “Changes.”
In the video for “Thursday’s Child,” he’s confronting something very different: himself. The entire video is David looking in the mirror in a bedroom, alongside a woman, as they prepare to go out; or maybe they just go back in and they’re calling it a night. He sees their younger counterparts in the reflection. The adult Bowie, as we know, looked impossibly handsome into his 50s, and the woman that he’s with (probably in her 40s) is beautiful. But he is transfixed by looking at their younger selves. He briefly kisses the younger woman, but then flashes back to reality. We don’t learn much about his relationship with the woman he’s with. There’s affection there, but not too much. Are they tired of each other, or just tired? I remember that when the video debuted in 1999, many of my friends and peers thought it was slow and even boring. I imagine that they might get a bit more out of it now.
I’d always felt that Bowie seemed superhuman, or just non-human; it’s an image he crafted and curated over decades. And I was somehow surprised that he was using a sink in the video. It seemed so… normal, for a guy who always avoided seeming like a “regular guy.” And maybe that’s what he was confronting: five decades into his life, he was no longer trying to be anything else. He was sitting with the idea of being a middle-aged man.
The rest of the album has its more rocking moments (notably “The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell”). But the real highlights are more introspective: “Survive” (in which he asks, “Who said ‘Time is on my side?'”) and “Seven.” I always gravitate to “Thursday’s Child.” Whenever I listen to the album, I repeat that track. The title doesn’t really mean anything; as he said during his VH1 Storytellers, it was the title of Eartha Kitt’s autobiography, a book he enjoyed when he was 14 (he noted, “This song is not actually about Eartha Kitt”). The song is likely not autobiographical (he told Uncut that it isn’t), but there’s definitely some truth in the video. Like most everyone else, David Bowie used a sink. And he was with us long enough to experience the effects of aging, something that everyone lucky enough to live into their 50s and beyond experiences. And that might have been the most daring part of Hours… Bowie dared to be relatable, maybe for the first time.
