THE SACRED TRIANGLE, 1986

Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie and the Fluorescent Afterlife of the Seventies

By Kit Mercy

Everybody likes the sacred triangle when everybody is beautiful.

Lou Reed.

Iggy Pop.

David Bowie.

Put them in the early seventies and the photograph develops itself.

Leather.

Powder.

Berlin.

New York.

Hotel rooms.

Bad decisions made glamorous by black-and-white film stock.

Three men passing electricity between one another while popular music is still young enough to believe electricity might kill it.

We know this version.

We have sanctified it.

There are books.

There are documentaries.

There are deluxe editions thick enough to stop bullets.

There are men in expensive denim explaining Raw Power to you.

Fine.

I love that triangle too.

But I would like to direct your attention to 1986.

Not because 1986 was cleaner.

Not because it was better.

Because it was stranger.

By 1986 the sacred triangle has survived long enough to become inconvenient.

The beautiful doomed young men have failed to die.

The revolution has become catalog.

The underground has become influence.

The future they helped invent has become fluorescent.

And all three are still working.

That changes everything.

---

I. THE TRIANGLE ENTERS THE SHOPPING MALL

1986 is not a sympathetic environment for old gods.

Everything shines.

Drums have become architecture.

Synthesizers arrive carrying briefcases.

Guitars are polished until fingerprints become impossible.

MTV has converted music into weather.

The underground can now be purchased at Sam Goody.

The machine does not care who invented what.

It wants singles.

Videos.

Hooks.

Surfaces.

Product.

Into this enormous fluorescent department store walk Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and David Bowie.

The people who once looked like the future have lived long enough to become the past wandering around inside a future partly built from their own debris.

That is where the real drama begins.

Not 1972.

Because revolution is easy when nobody knows your name.

Try remaining interesting after your face has become intellectual property.

---

II. LOU REED: MISTRIAL

Lou Reed arrives carrying Mistrial.

This is exactly the kind of record respectable opinion eventually learns to approach wearing protective gloves.

It sounds eighties.

This is apparently considered a crime.

There are machines.

There are electronic drums.

There are contemporary production choices.

There is a sheen that later generations have treated as though somebody spray-painted a Walkman across the Mona Lisa.

But Lou Reed has not been absorbed by the decade.

He is arguing with it from inside the machinery.

That is different.

Lou always understood that ugliness dates more interestingly than beauty.

His gift was never simply coolness.

It was discomfort.

He could take whatever musical furniture happened to be available and arrange it so somebody eventually hit their shin.

So here he is in 1986, surrounded by modern equipment, still unmistakably himself.

Dry.

Suspicious.

Funny in ways that refuse to smile afterward.

He sounds less like an aging punk than a man discovering that adulthood itself can be avant-garde.

This matters.

The younger Lou could threaten civilization.

The older Lou has to live in it.

Watch television.

Read newspapers.

Know what happened to everybody.

Become the person who remembers.

There is another kind of violence in that.

Mistrial is not the Velvet Underground transported intact into 1986.

Thank God.

That would be necrophilia with a drum machine.

It is Lou Reed discovering that the modern world is vulgar, synthetic, compromised and occasionally irresistible.

In other words:

Still New York.

Just with better electronics.

---

III. IGGY POP: BLAH-BLAH-BLAH

Then there is Iggy.

Dear God.

If Lou enters 1986 suspiciously, Iggy enters it shirtless even when technically wearing a shirt.

Blah-Blah-Blah is one of the great supposedly embarrassing objects in the Iggy Pop catalogue because it commits the unforgivable offense of sounding like somebody wanted people to hear it.

There are hooks.

There are machines.

There is polish.

David Bowie is involved.

Naturally everyone panics.

Where is the broken glass?

Where is the blood?

Where is the horrible little club?

Where is my endangered masculinity?

Calm down.

Iggy survived.

That is the scandal.

The man who once seemed engineered specifically to become a cautionary photograph has arrived in 1986 capable of making pop music.

Listen to “Real Wild Child.”

This is not surrender.

This is resurrection with a dance beat.

The title itself is almost obscene.

Real wild child?

At thirty-nine?

Precisely.

Wildness after thirty is considerably more interesting because now it requires maintenance.

The young Iggy could destroy himself because destruction was available.

The older Iggy has to negotiate with the strange fact that he remains alive.

He has muscles.

He has history.

He has invoices.

He has David Bowie nearby suggesting another take.

This is where the sacred triangle becomes beautifully mundane.

Two mythological creatures are making records together as grown men.

Not legends.

Workers.

Studio time.

Arrangements.

Production decisions.

Coffee.

Again.

Try it once more.

That interests me more than another story about somebody crawling across broken glass.

Broken glass is dramatic.

Getting up the next morning is philosophy.

---

IV. BOWIE: THE RECORD THAT HAS NOT ARRIVED YET

And Bowie?

This is where 1986 gets especially useful.

Because Bowie’s great 1986 record does not technically exist yet.

Not publicly.

Not on the shelf.

Not in the chart.

It is being made.

Never Let Me Down will be released in 1987.

But much of the album belongs spiritually and materially to 1986 because that is when Bowie is writing, shaping and recording it.

That matters.

The sacred triangle does not require synchronized release dates.

It requires current.

Electricity.

Contact.

And in 1986 the wires are still connected.

Bowie is producing and collaborating with Iggy.

He is making Labyrinth.

He is involved with Absolute Beginners.

He is writing and recording the material that will become Never Let Me Down.

He is operating simultaneously in film, pop, fantasy, production and performance.

The machine is everywhere around him.

And the great irony is that critics would later treat this period as though Bowie had somehow become less Bowie by becoming too visible.

Too commercial.

Too glossy.

Too successful.

The prophet has apparently committed the unforgivable act of enjoying room service.

But look more carefully.

In Labyrinth, Bowie is playing a glam-rock goblin monarch in a children’s fantasy film while singing songs that sound simultaneously like theatre, pop music and an exceptionally expensive nervous breakdown.

This is not Ziggy Stardust.

It is stranger.

Ziggy belongs to rock mythology.

Jareth belongs to folk memory.

Children encountered Bowie without understanding the biography.

He became archetype before explanation.

Hair.

Stare.

Voice.

Impossible clothes.

The adult world transformed into something seductive, threatening and ridiculous.

That is not creative disappearance.

That is cultural mutation.

Meanwhile, somewhere beneath all that theatrical glamour, the next album is already forming.

Not arriving until 1987.

But being born here.

In 1986.

That is why it belongs.

---

V. NEVER LET ME DOWN BEFORE IT EXISTS

This makes the sacred triangle much more interesting than a simple year-end list.

Never Let Me Down is not a 1986 release.

It is a 1986 event in progress.

A record gestating beneath the year.

The fact that it emerges the following spring almost improves the metaphor.

Because Bowie in 1986 is not merely presenting a finished statement.

He is negotiating with the future in real time.

And eventually one of the songs he chooses to record for that album will be Iggy Pop’s “Bang Bang.”

There it is again.

The wire.

The triangle refuses to stay historical.

The connection is not merely sentimental.

Not merely photographs.

Not merely anecdotes.

The music still circulates between them.

Bowie helps shape Iggy’s 1986.

Iggy enters Bowie’s next record.

Lou stands nearby on his own peculiar frequency, engaging the same bright, synthetic decade from another angle.

Three survivors.

Three responses.

One cultural machine.

---

VI. THE TRIANGLE AFTER THE EXPLOSION

This is what people miss when they fetishize the seventies.

The young sacred triangle is about possibility.

The 1986 sacred triangle is about consequence.

In the seventies:

What can we become?

In 1986:

What did becoming it do to us?

That question is harder.

Lou Reed had already been Lou Reed.

Iggy Pop had already been Iggy Pop.

David Bowie had already been several David Bowies.

They could no longer invent themselves without history objecting.

Every new record arrived with ghosts attached.

Every photograph had another photograph standing behind it.

Every contemporary production choice could be accused of betraying some earlier version.

This is the prison successful artists eventually discover.

The audience does not merely love you.

It loves a particular timestamp.

Then it asks you to live there forever.

No.

Fuck that.

1986 is the year I want because nobody in this triangle can return home.

Home has become a box set.

---

VII. THE SYNTHESIZER IS NOT YOUR ENEMY

There is another reason 1986 matters.

Technology.

The dreaded eighties surfaces.

People speak about synthesizers and gated drums in older artists’ work as though these technologies broke into the studio carrying knives.

But the sacred triangle had always depended upon contemporary machinery.

Amplification.

Tape.

Feedback.

Studio manipulation.

Electronic processing.

The seventies technology eventually became romantic because enough time passed.

That is how nostalgia launders equipment.

A distorted guitar becomes authentic.

A synthesizer becomes artificial.

For approximately twenty years.

Then the synthesizer becomes vintage and everybody spends three thousand dollars recreating it.

Human beings are magnificent.

So listen again.

The 1986 triangle is not three old rock musicians corrupted by modern technology.

It is three artists encountering another generation of tools.

Sometimes brilliantly.

Sometimes awkwardly.

Sometimes while wearing jackets large enough to shelter livestock.

Fine.

The awkwardness matters too.

An artist who never risks looking ridiculous has stopped moving.

---

VIII. SURVIVAL IS AN AESTHETIC

This is the part I care about.

Survival changes the art.

Lou Reed survived Lou Reed.

Iggy Pop survived Iggy Pop.

David Bowie survived David Bowie.

Do you understand how difficult that is?

These were identities built partly from danger.

The culture loved them because danger seemed intrinsic.

Eventually the dangerous thing becomes waking up and discovering you have a future.

Now you must decide what to do with Tuesday.

Nobody writes enough songs about Tuesday.

1986 is Tuesday.

Glorious, vulgar, synthetic Tuesday.

The revolution happened fourteen years ago.

The makeup is somewhere in a museum.

Your friends have died.

Your enemies have become executives.

Kids are copying things you invented.

Your mistakes have become genres.

And you are still here.

Make another record.

That command contains enormous dignity.

---

IX. THE SACRED TRIANGLE, REVISED

So I propose we stop depicting the sacred triangle exclusively as three beautiful young men passing forbidden substances and artistic revelation through European hotel rooms.

Give me another photograph.

Lou Reed in 1986.

Iggy Pop in 1986.

David Bowie in 1986.

Not necessarily standing in the same room.

They do not need to be.

The triangle exists in the current between them.

Mistrial is out.

Blah-Blah-Blah is out.

Labyrinth is everywhere.

Absolute Beginners is in the air.

Never Let Me Down is being made.

Bowie and Iggy are actively working together.

The songs still cross borders.

The influence is no longer theoretical.

The sacred triangle has not disappeared.

It has become infrastructure.

That is the version I want.

Not the holy trinity of doomed youth.

The working trinity of continued existence.

Lou teaches us that cynicism can age into observation.

Iggy teaches us that survival does not require becoming respectable.

Bowie teaches us that reinvention sometimes means allowing yourself to become unfashionable in retrospect.

Together they make a less photogenic gospel:

You are permitted to outlive your mythology.

You are permitted to become middle-aged.

You are permitted to use the new machine.

You are permitted to make the wrong record.

You are permitted to make next year’s record this year.

You are permitted to embarrass the people who preferred you twenty years ago.

You are permitted to keep going.

That is sacred enough for me.

The seventies triangle says:

Look what happened.

The 1986 triangle says:

We are still happening.

And somewhere in Switzerland, New York, London, wherever the tape is rolling, 1987 is already being recorded.

That is the triangle I believe in.

Not three ghosts.

Three workers.

Still passing electricity.

— Kit Mercy