1. Outside bears the subtitle The Diary of Nathan Adler or The Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue. A Non-Linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle
David Bowie’s best album of the 1990s took a while to be accepted. It’s a strange, difficult, often self-conscious record that veers wildly away from the audience-friendly approach of Black Tie, White Noise into darker, stranger territory. It both aligns Bowie with the industrial rock of Nine Inch Nails (and their 80s forebears, Coil and Nurse With Wound), while also returning to one of his most enduring muses, Scott Walker, who was in the process of reinventing himself as a serious avant-garde musician.
Not only was the music darker and stranger, but 1. Outside’s songs (culled from more than 27 hours-worth of material) are regularly interspersed with baffling, frightening and, if we’re completely honest, occasionally a little embarrassing, spoken interludes, with Bowie putting on a range of voices to tell the story of the “art-murder” of Baby Grace Blue. A hit along the lines of Modern Love was noticeable by its absence.