There is historical fiction. There are the literary cousins of memoir and family history. Then there is the canny, lyric hybrid Elizabeth Graver conjures in Kantika, the 2023 novel that tracks her own family’s 20th-century journey from Constantinople to America, by way of Barcelona and Havana.
Don’t worry: Ellis Island and its many literary tropes do not figure here. Those are generally reserved for Eastern Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews. Graver’s people are the decidedly Mediterranean, metropolitan and mercantile Sephardic Jews, first invited to the Ottoman capital by Sultan Bayezid II, in 1492, following the Christian Reconquista of Spain.
Four centuries on, the author introduces her great grandfather, the cultured, haute bourgeoisie owner of a textile concern, until he isn’t. After retooling his factory during The Great War, to produce military uniforms, the new Turkish government absconds with the business. Or so Alberto Cohen tells his wife and children.
Did Ataturk really take their livelihoods and social standing by eminent domain? Or did this charming-but-passive sensualist fritter or perhaps gamble it away instead? Such questions are rarely meted out for certain, not in real life, not within families, certainly not looking back across generations. Graver is unflinching in her fleshing and framing of such consequential gossip. Yet the novelist can also absolve or blame or leave ambiguous all the saucy or ambivalent bits, pretty much at her whim. To the narrative’s great benefit.
Fiction Reveals Grandma as Go-Getter
And so Rebecca — our protagonist, the author’s maternal grandmother — decamps with her penniless relations for Barcelona, just as she comes of age. There she marries a largely absent dullard because four centuries after the Inquisition, in what would shortly become Franco’s Spain, Sephardic men are hard to find. She builds a business and bears two children, only to be widowed at 30. Her older sister, already emigrated to the U.S., makes her a speculative, trans-Atlantic match with another widower, Sam Levy, whom Rebecca meets in Havana. As a test. Twenty-four lusty hours later they are married and aboard a boat bound for New York City.
Stories of American immigration tend to concentrate less on the old country, where conditions obliged one to light out for new territory in the first place. I am grateful that more than half of Kantika is set abroad because not everyone in a family might choose to emigrate, or is allowed to. Rebecca waits two years for her boys to join her in America, for example; her aged parents expire before their papers & passages are secured.
What’s more, the folks who do manage to leave tend to self-select according to their strength of self, adventure and determination. To some extent, these metrics account for the can-do immigrant spirit that has, in large part, made the U.S. what it is. After the same fashion, it enabled and informed the distinct culture of the American West.
In short, the sad sacks tend to stay home. The same goes for those immigrants who get dragged to a new world and never leave the old neighborhood. (In Greater Boston, where I grew up, they have a name for those folks: The Lace-Curtain Irish.)
There are plenty of sad sacks in the Cohen family, in any family, and this story does not ignore or pigeon-hole them. But Rebecca is determinedly bound not necessarily for bigger things but the next thing, all the while singing and cajoling, striving and faltering, dusting herself off and risking it all again. America and its celebrated dreams do not magically lift her blended family out of working-class hardship. In several not-insignificant respects, she was sold a bill of goods (by her sister!). Yet Graver still depicts Depression-era Queens and this new, extended family with a clear-eyed, richly detailed generosity that feels deserved.
So, what made Grandma Grandma?
The Cohens and Levys will never be confused with the high society Sephardim of Steven Birmingham’s esteemed 1971 history, The Grandees. But neither did he create characters as earthy and captivating as Rebecca. Working in non-fiction, he didn’t create them at all. The humans who populate Kantika, while technically the fabrications of a novelist, nevertheless feel markedly genuine — because, in these pages, the reader recognizes them as actual historical figures, relatives and literary characters all at once. This genre Graver cleverly contrives here. It can’t be her own invention, can it?
Either way, her sketches of fin de siècle life by the Bosphorus, the portraits of her great grandparents in particular, and the language of those newly arrived in Barcelona, then the boroughs of Gotham, all ring very true. As do the black & white photographs that headline the chapters. I took the time to study each one, delighting in my recognition of these blood relations we’ve come to know via the unfolding drama.
These components and others all deliver such splendid narrative impact because, it seems to me, they strike the reader as more authentic and intimate than mere details in a work of fiction, while never succumbing to the gloss of memoir or family history. Because the author is clearly moved by the epic sweep of this tale, so are we.
The word “kantika” means “song” in the old Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino, the accent of which Rebecca never shakes. One imagines that Graver herself — a Boston College professor whose 2013 novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the National Book Award — was enthralled by her grandmother growing up. And perhaps a bit intimidated by such a robust, borderline domineering, still-rather-foreign figure.
Graver and I attended Wesleyan University together in the mid-1980s; we didn’t really know each other, but we did share several English classes. Perhaps the cynical, white-bread nature of the New England small college initially led her to dismiss as mere mythos her grandmother’s literary potential. Credit the free-thinking Jesuits in Chestnut Hill and maybe a tenure track for leading her back to subject matter, a legit heroine’s journey, that was there all along.
The inimitable Bob Barker, flanked by “Price is Right” eye candy Janice Pennington (left) and Anita Ford.
As yours probably does, my alma mater hits me all too frequently with some manner of e-newsletter cum fund-raising communiqué. One can hardly escape the memories stirred/jarred by all this WesContact, which is surely the way they want it. In any case, a recent MailChimp morsel revealed, among other things, that three Wesleyan University faculty, among them Nat Greene, had received The Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. While this particular tidbit proved interesting enough to peruse, I’m only now addressing the nostalgia it prompted — immersed as I am, third party, in the college experience of both my kids.
The first thing to say is that my cohort and I attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., alongside an actual Binswanger — Benjamin Pennypacker Binswanger to be exact. Never knew him but my housemates and I made note of his titanically pretentious name the first week of school freshman year and never forgot it. Never tired of mocking it, either. Always wondered if he was related to Princeton’s Jay Binswanger, winner of the first Heisman Trophy…
Wesleyan Professor Nat Greene
More to the point, Nat Greene was one of these recent Binswanger honorees. I took a couple classes with him but the first was a survey of European history 1815-1945, and I remember it best because it was the only class I ever took with my housemate Dennis Carboni, an art history major whose course load never again overlapped with mine (classical history/modern American lit).
Greene didn’t necessarily tilt the material toward “social” history, an approach then sweeping uber-liberal bastions like Wesleyan. His hewed more to the traditional “Great Men, Great Events” approach. I remember the syllabus included a book of his own scholarship, “From Versailles to Vichy: The Third French Republic, 1919–1940”, which a) struck me at the time as being pretty awesome, that this guy was teaching from his own work; and b) still resides in a bookcase somewhere here in my house, for reasons completely bewildering to my wife. An entertaining lecturer and no-nonsense grader of essays (all testing was conducted via manic, long-hand scribbling in those little blue booklets), Greene was a fine professor, the sort I hope Silas and Clara will experience at some point in their academic careers.
Nat Green Class at 10, Price is Right at 11
But here’s what I remember most from my class with Nat Greene: It ran from 10 to 10:50 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings in the old PAC building — a few steps from the manhole where we often plunged down into Wesleyan’s famous tunnel system, the subject of another remembrance perhaps. If Dennis and I didn’t dawdle after class, we could race home to my off-campus apartment and catch The Price Is Rightat 11 a.m.
Yes, The Price Is Right. It became a sort of ironic obsession for me but something more than that for Dennis, as many things did. It gave me great pleasure to watch him obsessively game this once-seminal game show.
I’m not sure that college kids go in for this sort of thing today, awash as they are in video content and on-demand entertainment delivery choices. However, during the early 1980s, TV was a sort of novel diversion for college kids. We had grown up with it, of course, but had virtually no access to it at school. And so, great delight was taken in the ironic devotion to retrograde programming like soap operas in dorm lounges and late-night reruns of shows like the Rockford Files and Star Trek — things we would never bother watching when home with our families. My sophomore year, my housemate and I came by a tiny black-and-white TV that I’m pretty sure we carried with us the next three years, to three different houses, deploying along the way a staggering array of make-shift aerials including one that involved a pumpkin wrapped in aluminum foil.
The Price is Right fell right into this determinedly low-brow TV consumption, representing, as it did, all that was bourgeois and mass cultural — a great pleasure following high-blown, Nat Greene-led discussions of Marx, Captain Swing and Bismarck’s deft wrangling of German principalities. While Dennis’ note-taking habits at the knee of Professor Green were notoriously suspect, Bob Barker proved another matter entirely. While watching the show, Dennis kept copious notes on the price of every consumer item so that he might later blurt out a winning price before any of the three official contestants. When some dishwasher was revealed from behind the curtain, Dennis would browse his cheat sheet while everyone else in the studio cooed with consumerist abandon (take that, Karl!).
“Whirlpool, eh? That’s upmarket,” Dennis would muse strategically. “I’m going with $538.”
And invariably, it was so — or near enough that Dennis would have earned, in our demented fantasy world, the right to bound up on stage to mug with Barker at close quarters.
Our College/Young Adult Families
I heard an interesting interview a few years ago with writer/director Noah Baumbach and his partner Greta Gerwig, star of his movie, Frances Ha. Gerwig, then 28, talked about how several characters she’s played on screen ]stumble through their mid-20s in an unhinged emotional state — not necessarily because of new adult demands being foisted upon them, but rather because the surrogate families all 20somethings create for themselves at college (and just afterward) invariably fall away, sometimes bit by bit, but always in ways that unmoor. I remember this dynamic: We gathered these people upon leaving our actual families, and Gerwig explained that she was completely taken aback when close college and post-collegiate friends moved away, took jobs that contravened all she had assumed they stood for, or married someone whose presence effectively severed or weakened these bonds — bonds that young, college-educated folk believe are strong and meaningful enough to last forever.
I find Gerwig’s observation to be spot on. I remain close to several friends from college and that immediate-post collegiate period, including Dennis, but many more did fall away over time for reasons that were surely legitimate but felt to me, at the time, like a sort of casual betrayal. I mean, these were people I lived with, for years — they contributed to the shaping of me and presumably I reciprocated in some way. It makes one value all the more those who’ve not fallen away, but it also makes one sad and wistful that all we have to show for these folks, now lost, are weirdly disconnected memories, the odd anecdote, and persistent wonder as to whom they turned out to be.
I stay in pretty good touch with Dennis but there are probably a dozen others I haven’t spoken to for many years now. I wonder how they’re doing, beyond the superficial info I might gather on Facebook (were they, or I, to indulge in such a thing). If we tripped over each other somewhere, would we trade grand truths? Would we trade Nat Greene recollections or their equivalents before falling into the banter we perfected and found so very absorbing all those years ago?
AUBURN, Maine (Feb. 15, 2017) — David Bowie was introduced to me via my older sister. Janet brought home Hunky Dory at some point late in the Nixon Administration and when she wasn’t playing it to death, I played it to death. In truth I hardly ever bothered with Side 2 because that’s how my barely juvenile musical mind operated at the time. Side 1 had everything I thought I needed: the radio song, “Changes”; a screamer that Janet and I used to goof on together during car trips (“Oh, You Pretty Things”); and my favorite track, the always haunting and beautiful “Life on Mars”. Once I got to college and lived in close quarters with a more fully developed Bowie enthusiast/savant, Dennis Carboni, I would learn that Side 2 wasn’t just superb (“Song for Bob Dylan”, “Andy Warhol”) but indicative of Bowie’s genre-busting album and persona to come (“Queen Bitch”).
[I wouldn’t dream of posting anything regarding Bowie without Dennis’ input. His annotative comments appear below, bolded and bracketed.]
It’s been more than a year since Dennis and I spoke of this and many other things the Tuesday following Bowie’s death, in January 2016. He confirmed what I remember us discussing all those years ago, in the wee hours, confined only by the sterile cinderblock walls of our codependent dorm lives. Bowie wasn’t just consistently 2-3 years ahead of every other rock ‘n’ roll artist in terms of musical direction and fashion sense. He typically hinted at his next departure on the back end (Side 2) of his previous album.
[I like how you wrote, “Dennis and I spoke of this and many other things,” which recalls the lyric, We passed upon the stair, we spoke of was and when — from “The Man Who Sold The World.”]
Bowie’s career didn’t begin with Space Oddity in 1969. He’d been around since 1965, when this shot was taken. A reminder that icons we associate with a particular decade didn’t arrive fully formed from the brow of Zeus.
On the generally ethereal Hunky Dory, that clue was, of course, the propulsive and utterly sublime “Queen Bitch”, which heralded the coming of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, one of the great, pure rock (and proto-punk) albums of the decade. To say that Ziggy himself was one of the great “roles” played by any rocker of the period is not necessary, for no one else even attempted this sort of serial shape-shifting back then. Bowie turned this trick 4-5 times throughout the decade — hippie folkster to Ziggy to glam rocker to blue-eyed soul man to Thin White Duke — and competed in this regard only with himself.
[I’ve been reading the blog, “Pushing Ahead of the Dame.” You may know it, but check it out if you don’t. It’s fascinating. Yes, “Queen Bitch” is perfect because it starts with the acoustic guitar C-G-F progression à la Hunky Dory, then switches right to an electric C-G-F à la Ziggy.]
My sister didn’t own the Ziggy album. Indeed, while I knew several cuts well (from FM radio play) I wouldn’t fully absorb it until the early 1980s. She did, however, possess one more Bowie LP: David Live, Bowie’s first official concert release where, once again, he shows us a transition in the making: from the hard-edged glam of Diamond Dogs to the Philly soul of Young Americans. I am not ashamed to admit that I love this particular Bowie period, this dalliance in what he later, somewhat ambivalently referred to as “plastic soul”.
It does shame me to admit, however, that until I was 12-13 years old, I thought this dude’s name was David Live. Indeed, he looked and sounded so different from the Hunky Dory-era Bowie, I thought they were two different guys.
David Bowie as Cultural Touchstone
Dennis Carboni, better known by our particular cohort simply as The Bone, arrived at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., with several well developed musical obsessions. We didn’t bond over them all. I was as confounded/repulsed by The Human League as he was by Neil Young. But we did find common ground in ELO and Steely Dan — and it was through him that I learned to love and appreciate Bowie, and Prince. Part of the reason I was so drawn to these artists was indeed The Bone’s singular, boundless and utterly guileless enthusiasm & advocacy. It wasn’t enough for Dennis to know every song on every album, to know who played each instrument on each track. This was the level of his relatively casual Steely Dan obsession, for example.
“Thin White Duke” Bowie, an image taken from the same session that produced the cover for the ubiquitous ChangesOne album.
The Bone took it up several notches for Bowie, more or less patterning his own persona, physical presentation and style on the Thin White Duke and Berlin Bowies of the late 1970s — the David Bowie of Station to Station, Low, Lodger and Scary Monsters. These albums, these personae had inspired Dennis to his hair like Bowie did during his famous 1979 Saturday Night Liveappearance, wherein he performed “Boys Keep Swinging”, “TVC15”, “The Man Who Sold the World”. It meant selling his stereo to buy a sewing machine, so he might properly peg his jeans — often installing zippers to turn this trick. It meant shaving his legs, an act that mystified fellow jocks on the track and football teams at staid Orville H. Platt High School in Meriden, Conn. Such acts stood out even at notoriously boho Wesleyan.
It goes without saying that Dennis owned every last bit of vinyl produced by Bowie through 1982, when we all showed up in Middletown as freshmen. And, for the record, he was free to sell his stereo because his roommate had a better one.
Through Dennis I came to know each Bowie album intimately. For example, over a period of weeks our freshman year, Dennis chaperoned my close listening of Pin Ups, Bowie’s beguiling album of ‘60s covers, issued in 1973 (we loved it; Rolling Stonehated it). Much has been written these past few weeks about the generosity of Bowie’s artistic spirit and he did collaborate with, write songs for, and serve as commercial and artistic patron to so many: Mott the Hoople, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed… And so it made sense that Bowie, on Pin Ups, would shout out to the Yardbirds, Them, early Pink Floyd and several more influences from his ‘60s evolution — when Bowie was not some callow teen but leader of his own folky band.
Yet even so: Who takes time between the triumphs of Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs to put out an entire album of covers? With Twiggy on the cover alongside him?
The coolest thing about Pin Ups, however — or so I learned from The Bone — was Bowie’s cover of The Who’s “I Can’t Explain”. This was the age of turntables, of course, and Dennis revealed to me that this track could be played as a dirge, at the standard 33 rpm, or as a piece of pristine proto-punk when one simply toggled the turntable to 45 rpm. That blew my mind: Best secret vinyl ruse since the Paul is Dead “campaign”.
[I gave all my Bowie vinyl to my sister. I’m an idiot. I know. Without the vinyl, I wasn’t able to re-hear the amazing 33@45 “I Can’t Explain”, so I just installed the 45rpm app and listened to it on iPhone. Memories came back strong!]
Or Heroic Nights and Ubiquitous Compilations
Come the following academic year, 1983-84, I had moved off campus, to 114 High St., while Dennis and perennial roommate/stereo sugar daddy Dave Rose made house in a different double somewhere in the miasma of late-60s, brutalist dorm architecture that was (and remains) Butterfield C. It was here one night, sometime during our sophomore year, that I popped over unannounced — that’s what people did back in the pre-mobile age —only to find the lights down and “Heroes”, the single, playing on the stereo.
Rose was operating a baby spot, wherein The Bone — effectively bathed but darkly clad in coat and tie — could be seen mimicking Bowie’s expressions and hand-gestures from the Heroes album cover. This went on for some time; such was the power of the kooky, spot-on spectacle. No photographic record exist. Such was the age we occupied at the time. Today we’d havde captured everthing video and, by now, achieved the rank of Internet Sensation.
[I’m glad you have these memories; it feels so good to hear these things that happened… I know it was me, but I just didn’t store the memories well enough. They come back when you trigger them. Funnily, for me it’s easier to remember things like eating pancakes (or Tex-Mex stuff?) and listening to Hall & Oates’ H2O down at your place on High Street.]
Having spent the better part of my freshman year boning up, as it were, on the complete Bowie catalogue, I was in a position to turn up my nose at a few things: The first was Changes One, a compilation, Bowie’s first, released in 1976. At Wesleyan, I’d estimate this album was a mainstay in 75 percent of the record collections I happened upon. As ever, however, the “best of” route proved a dangerous step on the path toward self-administered down-dumbing. Because Changes One merely scratched the surface of Bowie’s enormous appeal. I took to evangelizing my peers to hit the Princeton Record Exchange — a traveling music flea market that showed up on campus twice a year selling perfectly good used vinyl for 10-25 cents a pop — to properly fill out their Bowie collections.
A Recession from Popular Influence
In time, I’d also turn up my nose at what many consider Bowie’s last “influential” album. Let’s Dance hit in the spring of 1983. It featured some good quasi-pop songs, including a few (the title track, “China Girl”, “Modern Love”) that garnered serious “radio play,” a term that had recently been expanded to include “video” play on the nascent MTV.
The ’80s were tough on everyone. See here the blown-dry, bleached-blond, Let’s Dance-era Bowie.
Bowie toured in support of the album and I had the pleasure of seeing him at Schaefer Stadium along with 60,000 others in the fall of 1983 — my very first stadium show. David live would prove magnificent in a pale-yellow, double-breasted linen suit. Studio Master? Not only. He held the audience in his palm by dint of a prowling, feline stage persona, these new hits, and two dozen further samplings from that massive catalogue of his.
Yet his previous decade of prolific hit-making, risk-taking and trail-blazing would ultimately prove the rub when it came to Let’s Dance, not to mention the dozen or so albums Bowie issued thereafter: They didn’t measure up. In the immediate sense, Let’s Dance followed a run of albums that was nothing short of spectacular: Station to Station, Low, Heroes, Lodger and Scary Monsters are masterpieces all, each utterly unique and 2-3 years ahead of would-be tastes. Thanks to Bowie’s seamless transition to the video format, Let’s Dance sold well and kept the dream alive, as it were. But artistically, it was nothing terribly special — indeed, it veered dangerously close to pop, something Bowie always hovered above.
In the longer term, for most all of us (including professional tastemakers these last 30 years), Let’s Dance would prove Bowie’s last true hurrah. He continued to issue a diverse collection of albums. I particularly liked the IDEA of his simply being part of a band (Tin Machine, 1988-92) though he three albums it produced (two studio, one live) didn’t moved me much.
[Nothing to add here apart from the fact that I love Let’s Dance, even though I know the “rock” critics do not. I do think Bowie has been somewhat relevant of late, in both 2013 and 2016. But that may be, sadly, because first he returned after a decade away (issuing Next Day, a powerful album) and then released the greatest final statement (Blackstar) in the history of rock.]
Bowie Ruled the post-Beatles World
Many of the retrospectives and obituaries I’ve read since Bowie’s January passing hint at this last point of contention: that while he assiduously avoided repeating himself — and the cynical formulas that would have sold out once-a-decade nostalgia tours, à la The Rolling Stones — Bowie’s cultural relevance tapered off markedly following Let’s Dance.
While this observation is undeniably true, it does gloss over the fact that from 1971 to 1983, Bowie ruled the post-Beatles world. And no one in the rock ‘n’ roll era, not even the Fab Four, was ever so consistently mode-shattering and commercially popular, over such a long period of time. We can throw straight out the window any further comparisons to the Stones, Zep, REM or any other “bands” — for these were collections of talents, while Bowie was just one man. He proved an individual who assembled bands, looks, sounds and trends pretty much on his own. No individual can claim such an artistically varied, unfailingly daring but still popular run of form.
Dylan? Yeah, he went electric and did a country album. But he shifted shape hardly at all in terms of persona. The only individual who has even attempted this sort of long-term trick is Prince, who managed 6-7 years of arguably comparable output — and sexual non-conformity — before eventually bowing under the pressure.
[Do Michael Jackson or Madonna merit mention?]
Only a fleeting one, you Bone. MJ was a child star, then a full-blown pop icon on the strength of two albums (Off the Wall, Thriller) before riding out his days as a physical, commercial and emotional oddity — not an artist or even a reliable popsmith. Madonna had the shape-shifting down but not 1/10th Bowie’s talent or vision. Lady Gaga works in this space but managed just 2-3 years of relevance. Now she’s singing the national anthem at Super Bowls.
Bowie turned this very difficult trick for 12 years, all the while fostering the work of others, all the while pushing the popular envelope, not just in music but in film and fashion. Indeed, no one in the history of rock ‘n’ roll was so “mainstream” successful while simultaneously inhabiting the avant-garde.
[Are critics afraid to speak of this? Do they think they are belittling all the other artists if they mention the concept you discuss? It’s a perfect closing.]
Heroes-era Bowie
The Man Understood Exits
We’re not quite done: In the 2-3 weeks following Bowie’s death, the music and fan communities issued a sustained outpouring of affection for the man, his music, that enduring commitment to the avant-garde, and his basic humanity. Amazinglly, the latter quality never did get lost amid the trying-on of so many on-stage, public personae. To me, a pair of paeans stood out.
The first was an 18-minute podcast segment produced by The New Yorker, wherein reporter Sarah Larson sat with a fellow from the techno-jazz ensemble that backed Bowie on his last album, Blackstar, issued just weeks before his death. The story of their meeting up is interesting enough on its own: Apparently Bowie wanted to do a jazz-inspired album and anonymously scouted these guys at a couple gotham clubs. He floated the idea of this project via email. Utterly gobsmacked, the band agreed. Bowie then collaborated on the recording without the slightest trace of ego — never mentioning to his new mates that he was terminally ill, for example.
Near the end of the pod segment, Larson asked the saxophonist, Donny McCaslin, whether he’d listened to Blackstar since Bowie’s passing. Twenty seconds of dead air ensued, as the poor bastard tried to gather himself. No, not yet.
The second was a BBC documentary that aired in 2019 on PBS called “Five Years”, where the filmmakers detail these astounding musical and theatrical transitions Bowie authored at the peak of his powers. I can’t recommend these 90 minutes highly enough, as they encapsulates and confirm much of what I describe above, in far greater detail. They also deploy Bowie’s own words, those of his various collaborators, and an amazing collection of period images, sound and video — 75 percent of which I had never before seen or heard.
Bowie himself makes the pivotal point: He really didn’t see himself as a rock ‘n roll star, more an actor who takes on a role, immerses himself therein, then discards it for the next one.
That sentiment seemed to me spot on, though we’ve barely touched on the man’s film work, which also fits neatly into this continuum. Still, fixating on this idea too rigidly does risk our diminishing the incredible body of musical work that grew out of this role-playing — a catalogue that never felt derivative of itself, that was often popular but only rarely veered into “pop”. King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, a featured guitarist on Heroes and Scary Monsters, had some really cogent things to say in Five Years about the making of those two albums, and Bowie’s music in general. He greatly appreciated the freedom he was granted to spin his twisting, screeching guitar riffs, adding what he considered elements of “danger” to otherwise straightforward melodies. Listen to a track from Scary Monsters like Fashion or It’s No Game. You’ll understand what Fripp means.
This documentary was the first time I’d ever seen Fripp speak on camera. He comes off like an avuncular but highly mischievous university semiotics professor, one who just happens to be an aging guitar god/visionary. He points out that Bowie had a genius for using scatalogical things like a Fripp guitar lead — or broadly provocative themes like androgyny, race-mixing, fascism and drug use — to purposely unsettle the listener.
In the doc, Fripp amplifies the point, explaining that it’s precisely this element of menace that separates mere pop from “rock ‘n roll”. The Brit allows that idea to hang there for a moment before sitting up a bit straighter in his chair and adjusting his gaze to look more or less straight into the camera. Lifting an eyebrow ever so slightly, Fripp explains what that danger truly means to the listener: “It means, you might get fucked.”
