Blue Blue Electric Blue (or "How low is Low?")

1977 was a good year for Bowie fans. Two albums from Bowie (count ‘em, two!). And not just any old albums either – Low and “Heroes” became classics and inspired a whole new generation (yet another generation) of pop stars. There were also the two albums Bowie produced for Iggy Pop, of course, The Idiot and Lust for Life.

Okay, so during 1977 Bowie lost a lot of the fans he’d picked up during Young Americans but they were clearly lightweights. By all accounts RCA also hated Low because they couldn’t hear a single, let alone a hit. They wanted another “Fame” [Footnote 1] and apparently they even asked Tony Defries to speak to Bowie on their behalf, even if just to get Bowie to add lyrics to the instrumental tracks. In retrospect we can all agree that Bowie was at yet another of his creative peaks.

But in Bowie’s personal life 1976 and 1977 were not so great. In addition to ongoing problems with drink and drugs, his relationship with Angie was nose-diving. He also had to take time out of recording Low to sort out a legal dispute leaving Eno, Visconti and the musicians to carry on without him. According to Tremlett’s biography, David Bowie: Living on the Brink, “the album was as depressed as Bowie felt when he made it” (p.273) although “emotions like sorrow, wonder, fear and bewilderment are expressed through tonal layers rather than words” (p.270).

Hmm … that’s a bit of a problem for this site where we’re looking for words signifying psychological processes. It was always going to be tricky analysing the lyrics to this album anyway when four of the tracks are instrumental and another is written in a made up language. But if Bowie is going out of his way not to express things in words that could really play havoc with a psycho-lyrical analysis. If someone is depressed we might expect them to use more emotion words than usual (especially negative ones) [Footnote 2]. On the other hand, if someone goes out of their way not to use such words to express their emotions we might expect them to use fewer emotion words than usual. Then again, if someone is simultaneously depressed and is going out of their way not to express emotions in words maybe the two cancel each other out and they end up using the same number of emotion words as they usually do.

If I was writing this up in a scientific journal I’d probably use a cop-out phrase like “therefore use of emotion words will be explored but no specific predictions are made.”

However, there are other ways that psychological problems can be expressed indirectly through words other than through those denoting emotions.

In a study on the words used by poets who went on to commit suicide versus poets who didn’t [Footnote 3], suicidal poets were more likely to use first person singular rather than first person plural (I, me, mine rather than we, us, our). This was taken to indicate a lack of social integration (me and you as separate individuals rather than we) [Footnote 4]. Words relating to death were also more common in suicidal than non-suicidal poets and words indicating optimism were less common. In fact I’m in the process of writing up a similar analysis for suicidal songwriters and am getting similar results.

So in this analysis we could simply compare the words used in the 7 songs from Low that have lyrics versus the 259 songs from Bowie’s 25 other studio albums. However, because "Warszawa" is not English I’ve excluded that and only included the other 6 songs from Low. Here are the results (I’m only presenting the word categories that differed significantly between Low and Bowie’s other albums).

The three main categories of interest show that Bowie uses words referring to the first person plural, to others [Footnote 5] and to death more in his other albums than he does in Low. In fact, these words don’t appear in Low at all.

This makes some sense on the basis of what we said above concerning lack of social integration (less use of we and other [Footnote 6]) reflecting depression or even risk of suicide. However, I’m not suggesting for a moment that this analysis has identified that Bowie was at risk of suicide during Low. Risk of suicide in poets was not just dependent on lack of social integration but also on less use of words reflecting optimism. In Low the use of optimism words did not differ significantly from their use in other albums. Risk of suicide in poets was also indicated by a greater use of death words. Here, Bowie uses fewer death words in Low than he does on other albums, not more. On the other hand, Bowie has been quoted as “[considering] everything as a way out – even suicide” although this was said later and in relation to “Heroes” rather than Low [Footnote 7]. This rather begs the question as to which is lower, Low or “Heroes”. That’s an analysis we’ll have to leave until we explore the Berlin Triptych later.

So what about emotion words?

As it turns out, there was no significant difference between Low and Bowie’s other albums on the basis of use of emotion words. The average use of negative emotion words is around 3.3% in Low and 2.3% in Bowie’s other albums while the average use of positive emotion words is 7.6% in Low and 3.3% in Bowie’s other albums. If anything, it looks like Low uses more than twice as many positive emotion words as Bowie’s other albums but this is due entirely to Subterraneans, a very short song (22 words) which repeats the word “care” four times and so is somewhat misleading. In any case, the difference is not statistically significant because of a technical statistical issue [Footnote 8].

It does beg the question of how many emotion words Bowie might have used if he hadn’t gone out of his way to express emotions through tones rather than words. Nevertheless, Bowie’s psychological problems during this time do still leak out in his lyrics through reflecting his lack of social integration.

Any other differences between Low and Bowie’s other albums worth talking about?

Well there are a couple. On average, Bowie uses home words more often in Low than in his other albums (1.9% vs .4% respectively). This seems to be due largely to references to rooms in “Breaking Glass”, “What in the World” and “Sound and Vision”. Rooms could indicate a place of safety and refuge or even a place of isolation and separation from others.

Finally, although eating words are very uncommon generally in Bowie’s work (only about .14% throughout all of his non-Low albums), he doesn’t refer to eating at all in Low and this difference is statistically significant. It’s not easy to determine whether this is meaningful. It may just be one of those differences that occurs at random. On the other hand, the album was recorded at the residential Château d’Herouville which Bowie had hired while the catering staff were on vacation. He and his cohort came down with sickness and diarrhoea, a time when obviously eating is not top of the agenda.

I suspect this particular result is spurious. I left it in purely to pique your interest and to invite your theories.

What in the world…?

We began by asking “How low is Low?”

The answer seems to be that it is low in some ways but not low in others. Specifically, if low is taken to be reflected in words indicating a lack of social integration then Low is low. But if low is taken to be reflected in negative emotion or optimism words then Low is neither lower nor higher than Bowie’s other albums. Then again, if low is taken to be reflected by the use of words relating to death then Low is actually less low than Bowie’s other albums.

So Low is a bit of an enigma. It’s an album I’ll come back to in another psycho-lyrical analysis when I look at the Berlin Triptych altogether.

Bibiography

Low
Changes
Bowie on the Brink

Footnotes

Footnote 1: Thank goodness Bowie didn’t give it to them. “Fame” has always been one of my least favourite Bowie tracks

Footnote 2: In fact this needn’t always be the case. Sometimes people who are depressed aren’t aware that they’re depressed and so may not talk about their sadness per se. Sometimes people are more aware of other changes like an inability to derive pleasure from things they normally enjoy (anhedonia), a lack of motivation, difficulty concentrating, loss of appetite, sleeping too much or too little etc.

Footnote 3: Stirman, S.W. & Pennebaker, J.W. (2001). Word use in the poetry of suicidal and nonsuicidal potes. Psychosomatic Medicine, 63, 517-522.

Footnote 4: The results of this study were taken to support a social theory of depression rather than the hopelessness theory. Read (Stirman) to find out more

Footnote 5: Use of the second person singular and plural (i.e. you) aren’t included in this category. In fact Bowie uses you slightly more often (although not significantly so) in Low as he does in his other albums, 5.4% vs 3.8% respectively

Footnote 6: “Be My Wife” with the lines “Please be mine / Share my life / Stay with me / Be my wife” seem to be about social integration but actually they reflect a desire for it, almost a pleading for it, on the basis that it doesn’t already exist. It may even have been a exhortation for reconciliation with Angie (as, apparently, Golden Years was) but the very fact of the exhortation indicates a problem in the relationship

Footnote 7: Welch, C. (1999). Changes: The Stories Behind Every David Bowie Song 1970-1980. London, U.K.: Carlton.

Footnote 8: It concerns differences between the variances of Low versus Bowie’s other albums … I’ll leave it at that for now