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"      Tuesday was the 66th birthday of David Robert Jones, better known to the world as David Bowie. Never one to pass up an opportunity to make a statement or surprise his fans, Bowie decided to mark the occasion by releasing a new single titled &amp;quot;Where Are We Now?&amp;quot; and by announcing a new album, The Next Day, to be released in March. Unlike many of his classic rock contemporaries, who&amp;#039;ve kept up steady touring and recording schedules for the purpose of holding onto their relevancy and/or earning power, Bowie&amp;#039;s spent the past decade in semi-retirement, seemingly willing to let his formidable back catalog \u2014 including late-career standouts like 2002&amp;#039;s Heathen and his last album, 2003&amp;#039;s Reality \u2014 stand on its own.  So the fact that Bowie&amp;#039;s recording again must mean something. Then again, pretty much everything that Bowie&amp;#039;s ever done, from wearing a dress on an album cover to covering the Pixies, has meant something. That&amp;#039;s one of the big reasons why people have been worshipping the man as a god for decades now \u2014 he&amp;#039;s just one big walking mythology. In fact, ever since his late-&amp;#039;90s experiments with contemporary electronic music, he&amp;#039;s spurned his prodigious talents for absorbing and reproducing musical trends of the time, and has turned inward, revisiting sounds from his past and producing albums that are basically meditations on his own Bowie-ness. If you&amp;#039;re looking for clues in &amp;quot;Where Are We Now?&amp;quot; \u2014 and if you&amp;#039;re a legit Bowie fan, you&amp;#039;re always looking for clues in his work \u2014 we might start by breaking down the ratio of different Bowie qualities in it. 3 Parts Berlin Bowie      Considering the importance of Bowie&amp;#039;s Berlin period \u2014 spanning three albums recorded between 1976 and 1979 \u2014 to his overall mythos, could it be a coincidence that so much of the lyrics to &amp;quot;Where Are We Now?&amp;quot; revolve around that city&amp;#039;s geography? Almost certainly not. Berlin is where Bowie completed his transformation from campy glam rock star to serious aesthete, unveiling a cerebral streak he&amp;#039;d previously kept buried under piles of cocaine in the process. And the city is deeply encoded in the music he recorded there. Returning there was probably no accident. 2 Parts Let&amp;#039;s Dance Bowie      The clean guitars run through chorus effects are the most obvious nod to Bowie&amp;#039;s terribly successful \u2014 and occasionally just terrible \u2014 post-Berlin phase, but there are deeper similarities, like the faint air of dissipation that &amp;quot;Where Are We Now?&amp;quot; carries with it. Bowie&amp;#039;s early-&amp;#039;80s material often sounds like electro-funk songs whose organic, hedonistic qualities have all evaporated away. &amp;quot;Where Are We Now?&amp;quot; has the same sort of absence at its center, which may be what led my friend J.R. to ask Twitter, &amp;quot;Why does the new Bowie sound nothing like &amp;#039;Loving the Alien&amp;#039; yet remind me of &amp;#039;Loving the Alien&amp;#039;?&amp;quot; 4 Parts Existential Bowie      Ever since his earliest days, Bowie&amp;#039;s had an existential streak a mile wide, and pretty much every one of his dozens of albums contains at least one song given over to the big questions of why we are here, what we&amp;#039;re supposed to do, and how strange and sad existence can be. Given his lifelong fascination with the subject, it only makes sense that he&amp;#039;d celebrate his second official birthday as a senior citizen by asking those questions, again. 1 Part Mundane Bowie      Every once in a while, Bowie likes to duck out from underneath his own mythology and talk about some real, everyday type of shit. Sometimes it&amp;#039;s a list of everywhere he went over the course of a day. Sometimes it&amp;#039;s about painting a crib. 5 Parts Bowie Bowie      Bowie contains multitudes, and among them is always another Bowie containing multitudes. Looking back at the grand total of his work includes looking at records like Reality, where he took a look in the mirror with songs like &amp;quot;Never Get Old&amp;quot; that pastiched together bits of his old material like the plastic funk of his Thin White Duke phase, and the countdown from &amp;quot;Space Oddity.&amp;quot; So now he&amp;#039;s looking in a mirror of himself looking in a mirror and... it&amp;#039;s complicated. -- Miles Raymer is a music writer based in New York City who has contributed to the Chicago Reader, Vice, Pitchfork, and others. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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