From Hanif Kureishi to David Bowie: Voice, emotion, translation and experimentalism in Bowie’s soundtrack for The Buddha of Suburbia

In 1992 British pop icon David Bowie composed the soundtrack for Roger Michell's BBC's version of Hanif Kureishi's cult novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), which represents one of his best and most experimental efforts of the 1990s and which is quite remarkable for its capacity of translating in aural and in particular vocal terms the many complexities and the multiple emotional shades inhabiting Kureishi's work. The novel tells the story of a mixed heritage young Londoner, Karim Amir, who finds in pop a precious resource to cross all barriers (sexual, racial, social) and to give sense and vitality to his life. The Buddha of Suburbia has an highly episodic structure which recalls, as Kaleta (1997) observes, the concepts album, as a collection of songs. In this sense, Karim’s many adventures represent a polyphonic collection of little narrations or songs which resound in the readers’ ears even after the very experience of reading; similarly, we can consider Bowie's albums as sonic novels, as literary experiments written in sound-waves. Bowie's soundtrack for Michell's film embodies this very episodic dimension; the title-track stands as a long narrative ballad in which he rewrites his adolescence spent in London's suburbia shaping some of the most memorable verses of his career such as: "Elvis is English and climbs the hills", which are sung with an extraordinary intensity and which convey the idea of a dream come true. Another memorable song from the soundtrack is entitled 'Strangers When we Meet', featuring intriguing lyrics which seem to mix a sense of loneliness and personal regrets (including such lines as "I'm resentful", "forget my name") and which seem to be addressed to Bowie's ex-wife Angela Bowie (who in that period had published a memoir in which she seemed to attack her ex-husband). Interestingly, in 1999 Kureishi will publish a short-story named after this song, in which he seems to elaborate on some of the song's images and themes. In a recent article Kureishi himself has focused on Bowie's relevance in contemporary popular culture, stressing again how "he constructed himself and his many aliases from a wide range of sources" (Kureishi 2017) and refers to his obvious precursor, Wilde, who wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde 2003b: 107): “Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature”. Bowie indeed is best described by ideas such as multiplicity and plurality; his was a philosophy based on the vital coexistence and simultaneity of opposite, irreconcilables stances. In this sense as Kureishi observes, his finest work, was that incredibly difficult thing – both experimental and popular. Bowie was as Critchley (2016) puts it, a ventriloquist, a man of many voices, emotions and languages.