'Silhouettes and Shadows' by Adam Steiner
Some say that David Bowie’s 1980 Scary Monsters was his last great album. I don’t agree, but maybe the real point is that by the early ‘80s rock had few frontiers left to conquer. Bowie had already staked claims across a wide soundscape and Scary Monsters might have been his final plunge into the sonic unknown.
Adam Steiner might have been unborn when Scary Monsters was released. He discovered it years after release on cassette at a thrift store—and it had impact on him. Silhouettes and Shadows rambles while providing plausible insights, including, as the ‘70s ended, “Bowie was forced to live under the shadow of his earlier brilliance and now felt the weight of it bearing down on his future.” Scary Monsters had an urgency and anxiety lacked by many of Bowie’s later albums, including that same old sense of impending apocalypse that haunted him through the ‘70s. Steiner proposes that London and New York were on Bowie’s mind when he recorded Scary Monsters, “two cities made interchangeable with a sound that is utterly modern, hip, slick, and front-loaded with intensity.”
