David Bowie’s Hauntology: 1. Outside and the Murder of Baby Grace

The following is my paper at the excellent Uncanny Media conference, in Utrecht.

In 1995, David Bowie released an album titled 1. Outside returning for the first time since 1976 to collaborate with Brian Eno, which in itself was cause for interest, since Eno had worked with Bowie on the legendary Berlin-trilogy consisting of Low, “Heroes” and Lodger. It was also just the second come-back album after the mediocre Black Tie White Noise album from 1993, after Bowie’s Tin Machine venture. Many had already written Bowie off as a has-been rock star wallowing in the achievements of the past, but returning to Eno plus the ambitious intent of making a trilogy of albums and even a Broadway musical based on the albums, made fans and critics take note this album. The album did achieve chart positions, favorable reviews and positive fan feedback, and some of the songs were re-mixed by artists as diverse as The Pet Shop Boys and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.

Having said that, the album is hardly what one would call a mainstream rock album, not just because it is a concept album based on lyrics that were cut-up in the style of William Burroughs, but also because it mixed new developments in electronica with more typical rock standards, something Bowie would take further in his next album Earthlings. The unusual nature of 1. Outside is also evident in its full title, mentioned on its sleeve booklet: The Diary of Nathan Adler, or the Ritual Art-Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle. The story told through the songs and a number of spoken intermissions called segues is this art-murder of Baby Grace and the subsequent investigation by one Nathan Adler, a film noir-style detective.

The album thus consists of two significant parts: the songs and segues and the booklet which serves as a frame for the songs. Furthermore, the album songs are all narrated by different characters, so the narrative is pieced together through music, text and images. However, David Bowie functions as the narrative voice of all these characters, as various voice-codings have been employed to distort Bowie’s voice into these different characters, emphasizing their status as separate individuals, yet of course remaining Bowie at the core. David Bowie’s voice and presence can thus haunts the entire album in various uncanny forms, just as all the images of the people in the booklet are distorted images of David Bowie himself.

In what is the first of several uncanny doublings, we realize that Bowie thus speaks both as the murdered Baby Grace, the investigator Nathan Adler as well as the other five characters. Bowie is therefore not only uncannily doubled, but also paradoxically investigates his own murder, in addition to possibly being his own murderer as well – since the trilogy has been left incomplete, we do not have knowledge of who Baby Grace’s murderer is.

In the following paper, I propose that the album’s structure is a gothic labyrinth, haunted by several uncanny mediations of David Bowie, his ventriloquist voice and his simulacral presence as character, creator and ghost, all at once. As the album and narrative is referred to as a hypercycle, we may also wonder about the status of an outside. I will problematize this notion of an outside and focus on what can be termed the album’s hauntological status.

Uncanny Doubles

As the author of the text, Bowie is naturally part of each of the characters of the album, a fact which is even more underlined in music when Bowie sings all the lyrics – there are no duets or guest singers, but instead voice-codings have been used to render each character individual and unique, creating the sensation that we hear different people speaking. The aural medium becomes uncanny in the way Bowie’s presence is modified and altered and we hear him speak not just as Nathan Adler – white, middle-aged detective, probably the closest to Bowie himself – but also as Leon, a young black man, Ramona A. Stone, Algeria Touchshriek and finally, Baby Grace.

In these various roles, Bowie not only changes age, but also gender, race and ethnicity, while at the same time also remaining distinctly David Bowie. Bowie has always been called one of rock’s chameleon and it is certainly very clear in the case of Outside. Bowie’s play with appearance and cross-gendering, something he has done since the inception of his career with personas such Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, is made very real in the album’s booklet, where we find several different representations of the different characters. Again, all these images are manipulated photos of Bowie, visually transformed by make-up and costume, but certainly also by digital imaging. There is a decidedly uncanny effect in these images, seeing Bowie’s familiar face (since Outside is unlikely to be the first album by Bowie the listener encounters) transformed into the unfamiliar faces of Ramona, Leon, Baby Grace and so on.

All of the characters are uncanny doubles of Bowie, and present us with a thematic opening into the narrative, for as we know from Jean Baudrillard, the one “who sees his double, sees his death”, and we may continue with John Jervis’ point, that

We can superimpose the impossible materiality of representation on the impossible immateriality of the self, producing the represented self as spectral body: the very image of death. (Jervis, 16)

Jervis’ point relates to the presence of ghosts, but as I have argued the fact that Bowie (re)presents all the different characters of the story, means that Baby Grace is constantly present as a ghost in all the other characters. What we are confronted with are a number of Bowie deaths – Bowie’s presence clearly haunts the images of the characters, yet none of them are Bowie. Let us, therefore, have a closer look at the character images.

Apart from the different characters that I have already mentioned, we also find the image of a minotaur. Along with the lyrics – where update demons, ape men with metal parts and many other fantastic beings are mentioned – this creates an uncanny world where odd creatures live. The extent to which these beings are meant metaphorically is unclear, making the album status flicker between the fantastic and the uncanny. Although the temporal location is just around New Year’s Eve 1999, just before the popular conception of the new millennium, it is difficult to call this album strictly science fictional. There is, however, a sense of estrangement which pervades the album, along with the booklet. For a Gothic text, this doppelgänger-effect is of course nothing new, but the fact that we are presented not just with one but many doppelgängers makes me argue that we are dealing with a severe identity confusion. Linda Dryden points out that:

The transformations and doppelgängers of the modern Gothic exemplify this slippage of identity, this fragmentation of the self. Identities merge or are masked; individuals hide dark secrets that speak of another self; men and women melt into forms other than their known physical selves or into hideous liquescence; animals become parodies of the human and humans become animalistic.(40-41)

It becomes clear the characters are best seen as the fragmentations of a self, but which self are we talking about, then? While in classical Gothic tales the doppelgängers are doublings of the protagonist, it is difficult to argue that any one in particular is the protagonist. On the other hand, arguing that these characters are doubles of David Bowie also creates a distinctly uncanny blurring of the borders between author and fiction. However, I believe that we can say that it is precisely this blurring of Bowie and the personas he has in the text, is what makes Outside an example of uncanny media. It is in the process of mediation that the text takes on its meaning, in the way the medial processes help generate the fiction itself – Outside could not exist without the shadows of mediations, which turn Bowie into the different characters. In this process, then, Bowie is both murderer, victim and investigator.

The album’s title if Outside and begins with a prelude called “Leon Takes Us Outside”, yet it is not clear where this outside is, or outside of what. I believe that what we are taken outside of, is a stable division between Bowie, character and the representations of these – instead the text finds it place precisely by haunting the spaces between text, representation and reality. Just as Baby Grace is the ghost which haunts and informs the narrative of Outside, so the doppelgängers haunt and inform the album, creating a sense of ontological undecidability which I call a hauntological status, something I will return to a bit later on.

Uncanny Narrative

For now, having pointed out that the meaning of the text lies specifically in its uncanny in-betweenness, I want to return to the narrative which is set forth by the album, especially in the accompanying booklet containing The Diary of Nathan Adler. The diary starts off with the description of Baby Grace Blue’s murder and continues with the investigation of it. However, there are inserts from earlier dates as well, ranging from as far back as 1977, where Adler was in Berlin. We also learn that Adler was born in 1947, and currently lives in New York City, having moved there from London. All these biographical facts match Bowie’s own life, further blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. It is probably no coincidence that Adler’s name is also a homonym of the present tense of the verb to addle – the good Detective Professor Nathan Adler is surely an addler of the narrative.

In this way, it becomes clear that the story we are presented with can be considered non-linear in its presentation, but there are also traces of how time itself becomes fractured and fragmented. The fact that the murder takes place just before the new millennium is hardly coincidental, further adding to the many borders becoming unstable and being crossed. We hear Nathan Adler describe an encounter with Leon Blank in this way:

He couldn’t wait for 12 o’clock midnight / He jumps up on the stage / With a criss criss machete / And slashes around cutting a zero in everything / I mean a zero in the fabric of time itself (“Segue – Nathan Adler”)

Cutting a zero in the fabric of time itself seems to indicate that time stops, is destroyed or at least somehow altered – in many ways, the album’s narrative thus exists outside linear time. I see this as further evidence of the album’s hauntological status, but what I want to focus on here is the way that the detective story and its conventions of clues and suspects turns from a teleological journey into a labyrinthine structure which Adler attempts to navigate. The start of the story is clear, Adler’s diary beginning thus:

It was precisely 5.47am on the morning of Friday 31 of December 1999 that a dark spirited pluralist began the dissection of 14-year-old “Baby Grace Blue”.

But the uncertainties soon begin to creep in, for there are no immediate suspects only three people connected to Baby Grace: Leon Blank, Ramona A. Stone and Algeria Touchshriek. Frustrated with a lack of progress, Adler turns to the “the Mack-Verbasiser, the Metarandom programme the re-strings real life facts as improbable virtual-fact” - a further indication that there is a split between the world of the fiction and our world. What he gets from this experiment is the following string of words:

No convictions of assertive saints believed Caucasian way-out tyrannical evoked no images described Christian saints questions no female described christian tyrannical questions R.A.Stone christian machine believed no work is caucasian assertive saints assertive believed female convictions martyrs and tyrannical are evoked Female described the fabric machine Slashing way out saints and martyrs and thrown downstairs

On this album, as well as earlier, Bowie experimented with the cut-up technique popularized by William S. Burroughs, where pieces of text were physically cut into pieces and put back together in more or less random order. For this album, Bowie had developed a computer program to do the same thing, thus uncannily using a similar technique to create the lyrics for the Outside album that Adler uses to investigate the crime committed. We can see yet more blurring between the levels of reality and fiction. However, to return to the story, Adler actually gains something from the nonsensical string of words that the Metarandom program provides, but rather than moving forward with the narrative, Adler goes back in time and we are presented with two earlier periods of Ramona A. Stone’s life.

In the first, in Berlin in 1977, Ramona was the leader of a suicide cult, and in the second, in 1986 in London, Canada, she was the owner of a body-parts jewelery store: “Lamb penis necklaces, goat-scrotum purses, nipple earrings, that sort of thing”, where she was also pregnant. A significant fact, since that child would be about 14 years of age in 1999, thus being the age of Baby Grace Blue. The most likely suspect is thus Ramona A. Stone, but the challenge we are faced with comes from the attempt at piecing together the clues from the songs to continue the narrative started by Adler’s diaries.

It is evident that the songs do not come in linear succession, since Baby Grace’s presentation is track six, while earlier tracks already refer to her death. It may well be that this is because Baby Grace’s voice has been recorded (the subtitle of the track is “A Horrid Cassette”), but this only adds to the uncanny effect of the album – to hear Baby Grace’s voice, after she has died. However, the main challenge comes from the fact that we do not know who the songs are about. In “Oxford Town” we hear that

Baby Grace is the victim / She was 14 years of age / And the wheels are turning, turning / For the finger points at me / All’s well / But I have not been to Oxford Town (“Oxford Town”)

We know that it cannot be Ramona, since the lyrics also state that “If I had not met Ramona”, but this still leaves both Leon and Touchshriek. The other songs are equally obscure, leaving us within this narrative labyrinth where there seems to be no opening or way out. It is significant to keep in mind, that one of the characters of the booklet was a minotaur whose mythological origins come precisely from a labyrinth. Here, I want to draw on Judith Halberstam’s concept of the monster in Gothic fiction, where she also points to the similarity between Gothic and detective fiction:

There are many congruities between Gothic fiction and detective fiction but in the Gothic, crime is embodied within a specifically deviant form - the monster - that announces itself (de-monstrates) as the place of corruption. (Halberstam, 2)

Certainly, much crime fiction deviance is identified as the place of corruption, but usually in a psychological or sociological sense, rather than the physical sense it has in the Gothic. However, I will argue that the beside from the minotaur, the ape men with metal parts and so forth, there is one more specific monster: the album itself. In this case, monster should not be taken to mean a misshapen being, but rather as Halberstam defines it as when:

boundaries between good and evil, health and perversity, crime and punishment, truth and deception, inside and outside dissolve and threaten the integrity of the narrative itself. (Halberstam, 2)

The album, with its ghostly presences of David Bowie in all the characters, blur the narrative together into an uncanny reflection of itself. This is something which is also very evident in the use of voices and sounds, which is what I will briefly turn to now, before concluding.

Uncanny Media

Just as the images were uncanny doubles of Bowie, the voices that are used throughout the album are also spectral revisions of Bowie’s voice, together with the instruments used. The use of electronic music is something new for Bowie (even if many believe that he helped give birth to the genre in precisely his Berlin-trilogy), and introduces a number of uncanny effects. It has been said about the album, that Bowie and Eno created a number of different roles and let the musicians take on these different roles when they were playing. Even here, then, there is a playing around with the concepts of self. I do not want to over-emphasize the significance of this anecdote, for I myself cannot truly tell the difference in these performances, but just the fact that there was dimension to the recordings, shows the interest Bowie had in destabilizing typically quite clear boundaries.

Bowie’s voice and the changes it goes through remain the most prominent on the entire album. It is most clear in the segues, where specific roles are enacted, but it is also evident in the various songs. Furthermore, we also find strange echoes of voices (“Wishful Beginnings”), different passages of songs that are spoken or inflected completely differently from the main part of the song (“Oxford Town”) and inserted pieces of dialogue (“I’m Deranged”). Bowie’s presence becomes manifold and multifaceted, even more so because he deliberately takes on these different characters and personas.

While different vocal performances are to be expected within an album, it goes beyond this in the case of Outside, as Bowie’s voice is altered beyond that which is possible through regular vocal manipulation. The technology which is inserted between voice and listener – more so than the regular recording and production of an album – is what generates the hauntological space of Bowie-yet-not-quite-Bowie. Let me therefore turn to this hauntological space.

Throughout this paper, I have referred to the hauntological status of Outside. I have done so, because I find it a useful concept in this case, because the album’s ontological status is so weak. The interest of the Gothic – I am drawing again on Halberstam – lies precisely in the collapse of boundaries. In Halberstam’s study, she is particularly interested in the collapse of sexual boundaries, while in this case, I am more interested in the boundaries of identity and mediality. Bowie’s identity has been playfully fragmented for the purpose of this album, haunting the images of the various characters, the sound of their voices and the ears of the listener. Through this strategy, Bowie has shown us how media can turn uncanny, by transgressing the boundaries between performer and fiction.

It is this uncanny medial space between performer and fiction which creates the album’s hauntological status; the reason why it slips between our fingers and our attempts at pinning it down. As the spectral, it is not there, not really and not real. However, this absent presence – to echo the title of this workshop – is precisely what haunts the album, enters into whatever is present and disrupts the closure of the text. As blogger K-Punk has pointed out, excessive presences leaves no traces. Hauntology, however, is predicated on traces, is nothing but traces and uncovers the space between being and nothingness (K-Punk, “Hauntology NOW”).

As a detective story, traces are of course of great significance, but the traces continually disappear and vanish. We are haunted by the spectral presence of Bowie, interrogated by our understanding of a clear separation between reality and fiction, but as I have already pointed out, Outside uncannily disturbs that boundary, leaving us only with a trace of Bowie and a trace of the murderer. In this way, it is almost appropriate that the two later installments – provisionally titled Contagion and Afrikaan – have never been made. In this way, they can keep on haunting us with the almost, but not quite. The murder of Baby Grace will remain unsolved and her spirit will continue to wander freely outside.