Lyrics I Can Show You Where Duchamp Lives I Dont Know Why Im Shivering
New Killer Star.
New Killer Star (single edit, video).
New Killer Star (Jonathan Ross, 2003).
New Killer Star (Today Prove, 2003).
New Killer Star (France ii, 2003).
New Killer Star (Tardily Evidence With David Letterman, 2003).
New Killer Star (Last Telephone call with Carson Daly, 2003).
New Killer Star (A Reality Tour, 2003).
New Killer Star (Die Harald Schmidt Bear witness (@36:fifty in), 2003).
New Killer Star (Rove Live, 2004).
New Killer Star (live, 2004).
17 March 2003: Walked effectually Battery Park at lunchtime. Tourists wearing Statue of Liberty headbands; two Ghanese men selling watches from suitcases; a strange lifelessness to everything. Walked through Castle Clinton, west to the shattered globe that used to stand in the plaza of the Trade Center. Went to a bar after piece of work with D, H and G for a St. Patrick's beverage. "When we've taken out Hussein, we're going to accept out that guy in North Korea," D said. But he didn't want the NCAA tournament to begin simply to have to be postponed.
Instead of heading north, he walks downwardly to Canal Street, with its scaffolds and traffic, men selling bootleg DVDs and CDs on blankets spread on the sidewalk (he spies a ChangesBowie, its cover art in the wan smear-colors of an crumbling printer; he considers buying it, realizes he has no cash). He takes Church Street. He picks upwards the sometime burning smell effectually the fourth dimension he crosses Chambers and at Barclay he stops. Barriers fence barriers. Backside steel and aluminum grates ten or xx feet high are long-necked cranes, a tortoise-like dump truck porting dirt around. People move in sagging lines, making lethargic pilgrimage. They accept pictures of themselves and their friends in front of a construction site. Men in American-flag hats and baldheaded eagle sweatshirts sell photographs of an exploding edifice.
The words come shortly plenty. Meet the corking white scar/over Battery Park… Or is it great white star? The bloodied earth or the place nosotros dream of escaping to?
A white scar is one that's nearly healed, but the skin tin can lie. His friends remember to come across if he'south ready to get out yet: I'm not ameliorate, he says. I'chiliad non going to be better. He keeps a lost urban center in its head and every day he loses another piece of it. Was there ever a guy with a cobbler stand on Dey Street? Where were the non-fiction books in the Borders: upstairs or downstairs? Were in that location trees in the lobbies? What kind? How tall were they? What color were the walls of the Cortlandt St. station? Who but we remember these? No, we forget them, too.
5 April 2003: It is strange–you wouldn't know this conflict was raging from any walk through New York. Few conversations are nearly it; protests are generally small and confined. Some graffiti—Bush Is Hitler sort of thing. The war has become this sort of abstract, bad news from far away, like daily reports of a great forest burn down somewhere.
"I'm not a political commenter, simply I recall in that location are times when I'1000 stretched to at least implicate what's happening, politically," Bowie told an interviewer in 2003. "At that place was some need, in a very abstract way, towards the wrongs that are being fabricated at the moment."
"New Killer Star" shares qualities of other "public" Bowie songs. The lyric's run of precipitous, asunder details call back to the trounce-shocked narrator of "Fourth dimension Volition Crawl"; its lyrical tone is a muted, older version of the raging, bewildered man who's flipping through TV channels in "It's No Game." Simply its first verse addresses a political "bailiwick": the empty bowl that once was the World Trade Center, the sutured hole in the footing. The rest of the song'south a homo trying to distract and persuade himself past watching the skies, watching idiot box, cottoning his retentiveness with scenes from old films.
"At that place is a feeling [in NYC] that it's non over yet," Bowie told Virgin Radio dorsum habitation in June 2003. "I think everyone's sort of expecting something to happen. I call up the thought of terrorist action in confined and restaurants and that kind of thing, being cited as targets, is somewhere in everyone's heed."
So he winches up a routine. The song construction is the four-panel-grid of a comic strip (the bubbles and actions/the lilliputian details in color): establishing shot, showtime joke, build joke, punchline. So here: riff, verse, pre-chorus, two-office refrain (punchline: the title's a British musician mocking the way the President of the United States pronounces "nuclear"). 8-bar suspension. Repeat. The backing singers and the drums follow the same shifting patterns throughout, as if keeping to a map. The guitar/bass riff becomes the pre-chorus vocal melody (duh-DAH DAH, "I'k READ-Y"). In the refrains, the singers are replaced by a loftier keyboard line, and so they're called back in for the closer (cue tambourine). Do it twice and you're out. The only variables in the mix are some thin, distorted, sometimes looped guitar altercation by David Torn, which sing through the track like phone wires.
I read someone a while back (blanking on the proper name) who said that Bowie should ideally lack nationality—that he was best every bit a Swiss resident, a man seemingly without a country or culture. Simply Bowie'south life in Switzerland was a ready of lost, comfortable years. He'd been more live as an creative person when he was a Beckenhamite and a Londoner, when he was a Berliner, even a Los Angeleno. In Switzerland he'd been make clean. He needed a city's dirt in his claret once again. And so without fifty-fifty intending it, he'd get a New Yorker. Past 2003, the only residence he owned was in the urban center. He'd raise his child there. He's nevertheless pretty much at that place.
"It'south a fleck like being on holiday in a place I've always wanted to go to, that doesn't come to an stop," he said of living in New York. "I ever feel like a stranger here. I am an outsider. I really am however a Brit, there's no avoiding it. Simply I've got friends here. I probably know this town improve than I know the new London…I tin can walk effectually here and find my style far better than I can in Chelsea. I've forgotten all the streets. [He mimes befuddlement]. Where did Clareville Grove used to exist?"
The anthology he assembled in early on 2003 was his "New York" album. Not in the style "Heroes" had been, he told Interview: "In Berlin, I was really dealing with a lot of negativity that I had to lose." Whereas in New York "in that location's a certain energy you become here. I really felt the sidewalk," he told Mikel Jollett. (You lot could say Bowie hedged his bets, ownership in 2003 a 64-acre mountain almost Woodstock with the rumored intention of building a retreat there, though apparently he never has.)
So "New Killer Star" distilled a New Yorker's emotional reaction to her metropolis condign the stage of a national tragedy, used as the justification for national retribution (which includes the torture report whose grotesque details have leaked on a slow baste the day I finished this piece).
NYC was, and still is, disliked past much of its land. Two examples from my Nineties: a security baby-sit at Dallas/Fort Worth Airdrome, asking me my final destination, and then coldly shaking his head and saying "I'thousand very deplorable to hear that." A man in an Amtrak train bar auto outside Philadelphia, asking me where I'yard from, growing agitated, pushing into me. "I was in that city in one case and I did non like it. Me and that city do not get along." There was a compact of sorts. People who lived in NYC were pitied but were generally left alone. There's a David Johansen song written during the Guiliani years, in which Johansen complains that the old order—guys like him ranging around on the street, tourists on buses gawking at him—had started breaking downward. They had started getting off the buses, he said. Later 9/11, it got worse.
"Others are watching united states [now]. I don't think nosotros e'er felt that earlier," Bowie told Anthony DeCurtis shortly afterward he finished Reality. "There'south a slight unease. We really felt freewheeling and that 'tomorrow belongs to usa,' anything can happen. Now at that place'due south not quite that swaying surge of hopefulness."
4 May 2003: We went to the Village Hush-hush to see Hammell on Trial, a eye-anile baldheaded man who swears a lot and punishes his acoustic guitar. "Where were the weapons of mass destruction?" he yelled. "A few guys in a tent with gasoline is not a weapon of mass destruction!" "What do you know, human?": drunk voice in audience.
"New Killer Star" was a typical magpie construction for Bowie: its bass/guitar riff (in function by Tony Visconti, retained from the demos) was essentially the chorus hook of Trivial Peggy March'south "I Volition Follow Him," with a bear on of Blur's "Coffee and TV." Nicholas Pegg noted how some of the vocal was lifted from ""87 and Cry," from melodies to chorus hooks (and you realize how much the "disgraced" Never Let Me Down is resurfacing on this anthology).
It was Reality's pb single, and information technology had some hooks: Torn's "stuttering" opening guitar riff, the song tags that enliven the verses, the subtle way the verse'south A minor chord is swapped for a bright A major in the pre-chorus, the chiliad refrain that promises an escape road. "Iiiii've discovered a star!" Bowie sings, Gail Ann Dorsey and Catherine Russell cheer him on. Even if it turns out to be another thing to lay waste matter to a chunk of the city, information technology even so shines nicely, hanging in the sky above the park. He'll exist optimistic even if it kills him. "The ghost of the tragedy that happened [in NYC] is reflected in the song, but I'1000 trying to brand something more positive out of it," he told Performing Songwriter. "We take to assume that for every piece of awfulness at that place'south a good matter…[but] I'thousand telling you it's a struggle to discover a ray of hope."
Maybe it was in that location on the ground, on the streets, somewhere nonetheless in the beaten-upward, gentrified, overpriced, domesticated old bird of a city. "I still dearest this boondocks. I can't imagine living anywhere else," Bowie admitted to DeCurtis. "I am a New Yorker: It's strange; I never thought I would exist."
Recorded: (bankroll tracks) January-February 2003,(lead guitars, vocals, overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass Studios. Released 16 September 2003 on Reality and equally the anthology's pb-off single on 29 September (the unmarried edit, which trims intro and outro, appears on Zilch Has Inverse): considering it was released equally a DVD single, "New Killer Star" didn't qualify for singles charts, then information technology officially charted nowhere in the world).
Acme: Beth Keiser, "Fritz Koenig's Sphere Dedicated in Battery Park," March 2002; Joshua James Arcady, "Ground Naught" ix/11/02; Christian Brothers High School band visits Ground Zero, March 2003.
All journal entries by me: NYC, 2003.
Source: https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/new-killer-star-2/
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