“Never been known to fail...”
David Bowie’s ninth studio album, the Bowie/Visconti/Maslin produced Young Americans, was released fifty years ago on this day in 1975.
A top ten album in both the US (#9) and the UK (#2) it also furnished Bowie with his first ever #1 US single in the shape of the Bowie/Lennon/Alomar composition, Fame.
Young Americans still sounds a remarkable work today and Jason Draper’s enthusiasm for it shines through in his latest epic, posted below: ‘Young Americans’ at 50: A Track-by-Track Guide to David Bowie’s “Plastic Soul” Album.
The image here is from the shoot for the Young Americans TV advert.
#YoungAmericans50
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‘Young Americans’ at 50: A Track-by-Track Guide to David Bowie’s “Plastic Soul” Album By Jason Draper
Full of slick grooves and sparkling riffs, the eight ‘Young Americans’ songs gave life to David Bowie’s vision of “plastic soul”.
David Bowie had been edging towards soul music as early as 1973, when he opened his US TV special, The 1980 Floor Show, with a new funk-indebted song, ‘1984’. With wah-wah riffs slicing their way through the following year’s Diamond Dogs album, a wholesale reinvention as a blue-eyed soul singer seems, in retrospect, like a natural development for Bowie – although the pace at which he was evolving remains staggering. As proven by this guide to all eight songs on Young Americans, his immersion in the music coming out of Black America in the 60s and 70s – not least the floor-filling sounds of Philadelphia International Records – made for one of the biggest creative about-turns of his career. Slick, soulful and full of daring, Young Americans is vintage Bowie.
‘Young Americans’: A Track-by-Track Guide to Every Song on the Album
‘Young Americans’
The time: 1975. The place: A downtown discotheque in Anywheresville, USA. A crack of drums, and the band slide into the slinkiest groove yet heard on a Bowie record, with David Sanborn’s in-your-face saxophone calling hormone-fuelled adolescents to the floor. “My Young American was plastic, deliberately so,” Bowie said of the inner-city characters he placed at the centre of Young Americans’ title track, opening his love letter to Philadelphia soul with a narrative of nervy newlyweds seeking to find their way through mid-70s North America, with all its capitalist traps and political murk. Doing for his target audience of soul boys and soul girls what ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ had done for the burgeoning glam scene of the early 70s, ‘Young Americans’ was an astute clarion call that truly broke Bowie stateside when it went Top 30 on the Billboard Hot 100. “It worked in a way I hadn’t really expected,” Bowie later said of the song. “Because while my invention was more plastic than anyone else’s, it obviously had some resonance.”
‘Win’
“Plastic” may have been Bowie’s preferred descriptor for the eight songs that make up Young Americans, but ‘Win’ reveals how malleable the concept could be. Twinkling guitar and reverbed sax characterise this impassioned ballad, whose fluid time signature, slipping seamlessly between 6/8 and 4/4, reject any notions of uneasy rigidity in the material. “The chord structures are much more of a European thing than an American thing,” Bowie once said of this slow-rolling triumph. “But it imbued the muscular qualities of soul music pretty accurately, and I got these pretty heavyweight American musicians working on it. It gave it some sound of a kind of a fake authenticity to it.” Emotionally, too, the song marks a triumphant early high point on the album. Calling it “a ‘get up off your backside’ sort of song”, Bowie gave ‘Win’ some of the most affecting lyrics found on Young Americans. Seemingly a shot across the bows of all those who would sit and hope – in vain – for Bowie’s failure, ‘Win’ hits the mark and then some.
‘Fascination’
After making a casual comment about ‘Young Americans’’s backing vocals, a fledgling singer by the name of Luther Vandross found himself thrust into the role of arranger, leading Ava Cherry and Robin Clark, wife of guitarist Carlos Alomar, through harmonies on many of the album’s tracks. Then only 23, the future ‘Never Too Much’ hitmaker also displayed his nascent songwriting chops, loaning Bowie an original tune he’d penned, titled ‘Funky Music (Is a Part of Me)’. Rewriting it as ‘Fascination’, Bowie had his band dig deep into the song’s groove, with plenty of squelchy low end sitting beneath elliptical lyrics that speak of desire. “He said he didn’t want to be so presumptuous as to say ‘funky music’, since he was a rock artist,” Vandross later explained of Bowie’s lyric changes. “He said, ‘Do you mind?’ And I said, ‘You’re David Bowie, I live at home with my mother, you can do what you like.’” Two years later, when recording the self-titled debut album by his own band, Luther, Vandross re-cut the song under its original title and using his own lyrics.
‘Right’
Reflecting on the Young Americans recording sessions in the BBC documentary David Bowie: The First Five Years, Robin Clark explained the difficulties of capturing the call-and-response vocals that elevate Right from a strong groove – what Bowie described as “putting a positive drone over” – to one of the most distinctive songs on the album. “That was so hard,” she said. “David had like a puzzle. He brought this paper to us, and he said, ‘This is how I want you to sing this.’ It wasn’t a straight, ‘Just sing it linearly and melodically.’ It was, ‘I want it to jump in here, and I want you to jump out there, and jump back in here.’ That, too, was the first time I’d ever seen anything like that in my life.” The vocal acrobatics he teased from his trio of singers during the song’s mid-section were almost impossible to replicate live. On record, however, they goad Bowie on as he redefines himself yet again: “Never no turning back,” he sings. “Never been known to fail.”
‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’
With it’s gospel-tinged uplifts and softly crooned backing vocals, ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’ masquerades as a slow-dance number (“He’s so divine, his soul shines”), but it harbours more urgent concerns. It was a “Watch out, mate, Hitler’s on his way back” song, Bowie told NME shortly after the release of Young Americans, adding, “It’s your rock’n’roll sociological bit.” He had already walked the line between rock idol and messianic leader on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars, and, with a prescient eye on the ways in which politicians manipulate the media to their own ends, Bowie ensured that lyrics such as “He’s got his eye on your soul, his hand on your heart” carried altogether more sinister undertones. Building in intensity over its six and a half minutes, ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’ sounds like a rise to supremacy in itself, as requested by Bowie in his handwritten notes to producer Tony Visconti: “The sound throughout this [last] section should become more and more Spectorish and powerful.”
‘Across the Universe’
Originally recorded by The Beatles for their final album, Let It Be, the John Lennon-penned ‘Across the Universe’ had always been a favourite of Bowie, who would call it “a portrait of the spiritual heart of where Lennon was at”. After befriending Lennon in New York City, Bowie invited him to Electric Lady Studios in January 1975, specifically to cut a cover of ‘Across the Universe’ during what would be one of the final Young Americans recording sessions. “I thought, Great, because I’d never done a good version of that song myself,” Lennon told Melody Maker the day after the album’s release. Dropping the Sanksrit mantra of Lennon’s original (“Jai guru deva om”) and upping the intensity with his own rich vocals and layered guitars, Bowie, by his own estimation, “hammered the hell out of” the track. He would go on to remove three songs from the album’s planned tracklist – ‘John I’m Only Dancing (Again)’, ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’ and ‘Who Can I Be Now?’ – in order to make room for this cover, plus an original number worked up with Lennon in a flash of inspiration that would provide the album’s unforgettable closing track.
‘Can You Hear Me’
Originally cut with Lulu for an aborted project with the Scottish singer, ‘Can You Hear Me’ is, like ‘Win’, another deeply emotive Young Americans song that belies the album’s “plastic” tag. An early Bowie version – later released on the “lost” album The Gouster – is a sparse soul ballad with Bowie’s vocal front and centre. In its final guise, ‘Can You Hear Me’ floats on conga and Visconti-scored strings, the fullness of the arrangement doing nothing to deter Bowie from delivering a delicately poised performance. “This is a real love song. I kid you not,” he told NME, although he refused to say who it had been written for.
‘Fame’
It’s perhaps no surprise that one of Bowie’s most enduring songs dealt with one of his life-long preoccupations: celebrity and its artifice. Developed from a riff on ‘Foot Stomping’, an old R&B number by The Flares, and reflecting conversations that Bowie had had with John Lennon (“We spent endless hours talking about fame, and what it’s like not having a life of your own any more,” he later told Musician magazine), ‘Fame’ takes an acerbic look at life lived under the media’s glare, where “what you get is no tomorrow” and “what you need you have to borrow”. Recorded immediately after committing ‘Across the Universe’ to tape, ‘Fame’ features Lennon on piano, acoustic guitar and backing vocals, although the former Beatle’s biggest contribution, as Bowie later put it, “was the energy, and that’s why he got a credit for writing it. He was the inspiration.”
Indeed, ‘Fame’’s distinctive guitar riff is unmistakably the work of Bowie’s latest recruit – and soon-to-be crucial collaborator – Carlos Alomar, while its cut-up, fuzzed-up deconstruction of fame could only have come from Bowie’s brain, his pitch-shifted vocals seeming, by turns, mocking and disorientating as they cascade towards the ultimate snub for a “sleb”: “What’s your name?” His first-ever US No.1, the song cemented Bowie’s profile stateside, and its stock would remain high throughout his career, appearing in his setlists right through to the tour for the Reality album. With covers by artists as diverse as Duran Duran, Scott Weiland and Smashing Pumpkins, samples in tracks by Public Enemy and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and syncs in TV and cinema, ‘Fame’ – which Bowie himself would revisit in a ‘Fame ’90’ remix – has spoken to everyone who’s found that having a public profile isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “There’s very little about it that anybody would covet,” Bowie told Q magazine in 1990. “I still have my favourite times when I’m not recognised, or at least left to my own devices.”
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Buy the ‘Young Americans’ 50th-anniversary vinyl reissues and merch at the David Bowie store.
