David Bowie's Diamond Dogs -- Glenn Hendler, Paperback

After his breakthrough with Ziggy Stardust and before his U.S. pop hits Fame and Golden Years David Bowie produced a dark and difficult concept album set in a post-apocalyptic Hunger City populated by post-human mutants. Diamond Dogs includes the great glam anthem Rebel Rebel and utterly unique songs that combine lush romantic piano and nearly operatic singing with scratching, grungy guitars, creepy, insidious noises, and dark, pessimistic lyrics that reflect the album's origins in a projected Broadway musical version of Orwell's 1984 and Bowie's formative encounter with William S. Burroughs.

In this book Glenn Hendler shows that each song on Diamond Dogs shifts the ground under you as you listen, not just by changing in musical style, but by being sung by a different I who directly addresses a different you. Diamond Dogs is the product of a performer at the peak of his powers but uncomfortable with the rock star role he had constructed. All of the album's influences looked to Bowie like ways of escaping not just the Ziggy role, but also the constraints of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. These are just some of the reasons many Bowie fans rate Diamond Dogs his richest and most important album of the 1970s.

Author: Glenn Hendler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 03/05/2020
Pages: 168
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 6.40h x 4.70w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9781501336584

About the Author
Glenn Hendler is Professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University, USA. He writes on popular and unpopular literature in the 19th century, film, television, and contemporary cultural politics. He is author or editor of several books, including Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2001) and Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2007).