Boys Keep Swinging being one of those David Bowie tracks that should’ve been a huge hit (and it did actually chart in the UK), but the Americas of the late 1970s just weren’t ready for a song about boys being boys, cutting their moves, striking their poses, popping cherries, checking out other boys, looking good in uniforms. Certainly not one sung by a known alien.
In which the alien aka David Jones aka David Bowie comes clean and reveals he’s really human after all. “I remember hearing this a lot in 1980 – memories of Ronald Raygun running hard for the White House, the hostage thing ongoing in Iran, a clash of civilizations apparently … the realization of how utterly doomed and damned we all were if couldn’t find a common humanity beneath all our bullshit gods and politics. The supreme challenge of learning to live with someone else’s mental and spiritual health issues. Same as it ever was.” (Philip Random)
“A nifty bit of Bowie genius from 1979’s Lodger, the comparatively overlooked album that capped off his so-called Berlin Trilogy. So-called because Lodger was actually recorded in Switzerland and NYC in and around various tours. But Berlin was never far away from Bowie’s heart and brain in those days, the friction of its divided soul fueling mutant sounds and angles that couldn’t seem to help invent the future — the decade to be known as the 1980s.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 