If “Mass Production” has a visual analogue, it’s David Lynch’s street sets for Eraserhead: a city seemingly purged of human beings and reduced to abandoned train tracks, lifeless tenements and an encroaching darkness. The oppressive “Mass Production,” however, is far from any sort of triumphal Futurism there’s no nobility of the machine found here, just a nihilistic realization that even the cold promise of machinery is a lie. “A great piece of heavy metal cut in a form,” pounding out a new fender every minute, as Pop later described it. The tape, unrolled, would run the length of the room.īowie and Pop were inspired by Pop’s memories of seeing a machine press at Ford Motor’s River Rouge plant. “Like a child transfixed by a train set,” he told Paul Trynka. Thibault recalled Bowie sitting for an hour watching the tape spool around and around. The bedrock of the track was a tape loop of “overloaded industrial noises” that Laurent Thibault had assembled for Bowie and Pop-Thibault pieced the tape together in sections, then made a master tape of the sets of mixes. Pop initially sings his lyric for “Mass Production” (modern life is so dehumanizing that finding a new girl is like finding a new toaster, while the singer eventually realizes he’s just as disposable a commodity) in a voice that Lester Bangs, reviewing the record for Stereo Review, called “synthezomboid.” Pop eventually builds to a groaning run of phrases that he inflicts more than he sings, placing emphasis on whichever sounds he can strangle the most: “you’re not NOTHING NEW,” “it’s THERE in the MIRROR,” “breasts turn BROWN-so WARM and so BROWN.” “Beforrrre you GO,” he drones, “Do me a FAV-orrr…Give me a NUM-berrr…” Dennis Davis’ drum fill kicks the song into a semblance of life, and Iggy Pop appears, sounding like a man holding a hostage. The first thing you hear on “Mass Production,” the eight-minute industrial horror movie that finishes off The Idiot, is a synthesizer fading in, like a machine drawing breath it’s suddenly confined to the right channel, where it now drones a single note, like a foghorn, and it’s answered by four piping notes in the left channel, a mechanical birdsong that repeats through much of the track (though often drowned in the mix). Iggy Pop, quoted in Jim Ambrose’s Gimme Danger. Like the beautiful smokestacks and factories-whole cities devoted to factories. I would always talk to about how much I admired the beauty of the American industrial culture that was rotting away where I grew up.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |