It’s time now to talk about how well David Bowie and Brian Eno predicted the future in 1995 with an album that few would like or understand until decades later. Its deeply unfashionable title alone should make it clear why nobody was interested at the time:
1. Outside: The Nathan Adler Diaries, Or The Art Ritual Murder Of Baby Grace Blue : A Non-Linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle
Outside is a concept album, the first of a planned three-part trilogy that never materialized. It’s a cyberpunk noir murder mystery. 21st century London is plagued by a new trend among the wealthy and cultured – brutal murders undertaken with the greatest aesthetic care, beautiful exhibits created from the corpses. Nathan Adler, a detective in the city police’s Art Crime unit, is wandering the streets interviewing suspicious characters from across society to try and identify the murderer of a preteen girl discovered dismembered in an art museum, her nerves pulled out and strung intricately around the room. “A sort of nerve net… A sort of internet, as it were. We might be here for… quite a long time, here in this web.”
Though the internet was in its awkward adolescence at the time, Bowie and especially Eno were deeply interested in it, and it shows. The album’s lyrics are full of oblique references to 90’s era internet terminology, including some pretty obscure cybersecurity slang, as one one character calls another a “shoulder surfer” and a cult leader shouts out to his followers the title of this thread.
The album’s narrative is fractured and nonsensical. Its songs are interspersed with little monologues from various suspects (all played by goofily modulated Bowie voices, and his acting is a delight). A lonely old porno shopkeeper, an upper class artist with a fetish for chrome, a young falsely imprisoned black man mixed up with shady artists and some kind of cult obsessed with the prospect of societal progress through the internet. There’s absolutely not enough information given to come to any kind of conclusion, and every fact you can glean contradicts every other one.
Through all this stalks “the Minotaur”, the real killer, some kind of memetic virus that traverses our fractured culture. The drive-to-create that animates outsider artists. Trauma, mental illness, cruelty, greed, it’s the force that transmutes these feelings into creation.
Though this album didn’t at all fit into its time, in many ways it is deeply of its time. Its whole serial killer obsession is very Silence of the Lambs and Se7en. It’s suffused with that weird millennium anxiety we all know and love from stuff like Strange Days, Pre-Millennium Tension, and Y2K news reports. Much of the album sounds very 90’s industrial grunge, kind of a free-jazz-infused Nine Inch Nails sound (indeed, Bowie toured with NIN for this record). But within this album there’s a kernel of something that resonates far better today than it ever could have back then.
Today we live in the world of Outside. Our daily lives and our civic lives have in many ways been subsumed by the internet. We’re all in the cult. Postmodern culture and neoliberal capitalism have steadily progressed since the 90’s, and objective truth seems more elusive than ever. Psychopaths are more empowered than ever, and they’re allowed to openly play, projecting their neuroses onto society and forcing us all to revolve around them. They kill in new and exciting ways, and they boast about it. They never face any real consequences, and we all know they never will.
Plus the music fuckin’ bangs.
