![]() ![]() There’s one vein of anger in the track: Pete Townshend’s lead guitar (unlike the lyric, this was a post-9/11 response). ![]() Doomsday once meant the End at last, but now even the End wasn’t going to end: it would just keeping come around, again and again, its colors fading with each trip. Kristeen Young offers a piano line that goes lost in a loop. ![]() Even the return of the Borneo Horns (Bowie’s brass section from the Eighties) is rather muted: the likes of Lenny Pickett nose their way into the second verse and later mainly work in support of the bassline. In “Slow Burn” the nearly-static harmonic rhythm of the verses (shuttling between tonic and mediant chords, F to Am/E),* the rounds of Visconti and Bowie backing vocals (“on and on and on and on and on…” “round and round and round.”), suggest there’s nothing new under the sun despite this latest catastrophe. “Slow Burn” is a bled-out, bummed-out apocalypse, a recognition that after living on this earth for a while, you come to realize doomsday predictions have the frequency and excitement of commuter trains. At least the End was more interesting than “normal” life. Apocalypse could be a joyful thing for him-“ Five Years” meant five years of carnival before the End. The most damning, most prophetic lines were in the refrain, written years before the Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib and all the numbing rest of it:īowie had been writing about doomed societies since “ We Are Hungry Men,” with his descriptions of America as being full of killers, his clay model recreation of Seventies New York as Hunger City, the Five Years left to us, and so on. “The walls shall have eyes and the doors shall have ears,” a faint Biblical reference (see Luke 12:3: “whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops”), offered a preview of our national security state. ![]() Bowie said he’d written his lyric before the attacks and that his lines unnerved him, as he’d managed to predict the feel of life in downtown Manhattan that September. There’s no evidence that the panicked post-9/11 atmosphere played a role in shelving “Slow Burn” (for one thing, it was a single in America). Was it too familiar-sounding, coming off as a generic public conception of a Bowie song? A soaring vocal with a few condor cries (the ninth-spanning “slooooooow BURRRRRN!”) a “Heroes”-esque rhythm track a guitar line that set out to trump Reeves Gabrels a doomy lyric. His label had decided to pull “Slow Burn” from the UK (Bowie had diligently sung “Slow Burn” on seemingly every American talk show in June, and had taped a session to air on Top of the Pops), but its disappearance from Bowie’s live sets as well suggests perhaps a collective realization that “Slow Burn” wasn’t going to do the business. He sang it only twice, its last performance at the Meltdown Festival in June. Another curious thing was that Bowie quickly stopped performing “Slow Burn” live. There was no British single released until September, when “ Everyone Says ‘Hi‘” finally arrived to barely break the UK Top 20. Scheduled for a July 2002 UK release, “Slow Burn” never appeared. (He’d ceased troubling the US charts in the mid-Nineties: “Slow Burn” proved no exception). Not in Britain, which by 2002 was the only reliable country for a Bowie chart placing. Well, it was in Japan, Europe and the US. “Slow Burn” was Heathen‘s lead-off single. The End is what we want, so I’m afraid the End is what we’re damn well going to get. Slow Burn ( Late Night with Conan O’Brien, 2002).Īnticipating the end of the world is humanity’s oldest pastime…Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years. Slow Burn ( Late Show With David Letterman, 2002). ![]()
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