I've never done bad things

I've never done anything out of the blue

I want an axe to break the ice

I want to come down right now

His voice rings out over an expanse of synthesized whooshing, as a ghostly chorus of deep Bowie-voices echoes every word and moan. A song like this suggests Bowie is not at all rootless, but almost pathological in his self-inspection, picking through the bones of his past work in a frantic attempt to piece together his own skeleton.

Wherever it travels--and it wanders far--Scary Monsters seems to carry an ominous touch of fire and brimstone. Even the one cover track on the album, Tom Verlaine's "Kingdom Come," though more upbeat than Bowie's compositions, also has the touch of the prophet. It's as though, after the technical experiments of his recent albums. Bowie has let his personal obsessions re-enter his music, and he's now better equipped to animate them. Those obsessions appear with a clarity here that far exceeds any of Bowie's past work, obsessions with violence, with anger, with decay and with death--not with drag, make-up or the trappings of the facile entertainer. With thoughts like those, and with music like this, Bowie fashions a decadence that tears and scratches at a decadent world.