Panic in Detroit
video of handmade book, book: 12" x 17" x 1", 71 pages, video: 04:11, 2020
Liner notes:
I first heard Panic in Detroit the year that it came out, 1973. It is the fourth track on the sixth album by David Bowie: ‘a lighter affair than Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane is actually a stranger album than its predecessor, buoyed by bizarre lounge-jazz flourishes and winding vaguely experimental songs.’ (S. T. Erlewine)
Written the previous year, perhaps even in Detroit itself, when the Spiders from Mars were touring the States and inspired from a conversation with Iggy Pop, Panic in Detroit is Bowie’s instant view of America at that time, a validation in his paranoid imagination that the dystopic worlds (post-riot and maybe even post-pandemic) he had been describing for years actually existed. He found a real place full of glamor, decay and casual death: he had seen the sniper on the roof.
I return to it in 2020 as it still has so much to say. The conditions are, if anything, worse:
With snorting head he gazes to the shore
Once had raised a sea that raged no more
Like the video films we saw
(Drive In Saturday)
New York City
May 2020 (Time of the Plague)