David Bowie Versus Dracula, Part One
Don’t know about you, but I’d certainly pay to see the film.
Last Christmas, the highstreet record shops all decided to clear out the Bowie back catalogue at less than a fiver a pop. I binged like a politician at a half-priced cocaine festival. At one point I had five discs queued up in the car, and brothers and sisters, that is far too much Starman for any one human mind to cope with.
A David Bowie hangover is brutal.
Listening to these albums (these many, many albums) makes me realise how they really are complete works, in the sense that every track fits together as part of a whole. The major songs stand out of course, Changes, Sound and Vision, Golden Years and so on, but while these tracks have a seperate existence outside of the album they also take on a different significance when played as part of a larger piece of work. Not even necessarily in terms of an ongoing narrative, like the story thread that runs through The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, but also as thematically complete albums, like Station to Station or “Heroes”.
Even accepting that Bowie is a one-off, it’s difficult not to descend into old-fartery and moan about the lack of consistency over modern albums. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard plenty of brilliant singles over the past couple of years , but they rarely come from an album worth listening to in its entirety.
It isn’t surprising. We’re in the iPod era now. It won’t be long before the album concept will be the exception rather than the norm, when the need to buy physical objects to gain access to music becomes irrelevant. Entertainment becomes fragmentary, bite-sized downloads making up what Warren Ellis described as ‘burst culture’.
Blogs, mp3s and webcomics are all part of this culture, but monthly comic books and collections are not. Individual issues may have been the forerunner of this type of culture, but with a few exceptions the days of standalone issues are long gone. I don’t mean it as a criticism as I far prefer multi-part stories myself, but God knows the increasingly convoluted continuity and never ending multi-part crossover have long outstayed their welcome.
My biggest problem with these swollen and bloated stories is their lack of coherence. There are too many broken links and inconsistencies, and the more titles that crossover, the less you feel you know or understand. The more information you’re given, the more information you feel you lack.
Every issue should act like a track that builds to a complete album. They shouldn’t all be attempts at a barnstorming single, because that gets old quickly too. All the seperate parts should fit. There’s no doubt this approach works, inevitably in titles that are either completely seperated from an external continuity (like All-Star Superman, or Y: The Last Man), or at best only minimally affected by endless crossover (Green Lantern or Blue Beetle, while not completely divorced from the DCU, to date have had very little interference in the main run, i.e. we haven’t been expected to pick up seperate titles to get a full story, and even when we have the issue’s remained relatively self-contained. The exception of course being the recent Sinestro Corps, but even that stays pretty much within the GL titles).
Which brings me to Tomb of Dracula.
