Wiki
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Release Date
8 June 1995
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Length
20 tracks
Outside (sometimes referred to as 1.Outside) is a concept album by David Bowie, and is Bowie's nineteenth studio album. The album was Bowie's reunion with Brian Eno, whom Bowie had worked with most famously on his Berlin Trilogy in the 1970s. Subtitled "the Ritual Art-Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-Linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle," Outside centers on the characters of a dystopian world on the eve of the 21st century.
The liner notes feature a short story by Bowie, the Diary of Nathan Adler, which outlines a somewhat dystopian version of the year 1999 in which the government, through its arts commission, had created a new bureau to investigate the phenomenon of Art Crime. In this future, murder and mutilation of bodies had become a new underground art craze. The main character, Nathan Adler, was in the business of deciding what of this was legally acceptable as art and what was, in a word, trash. The album is filled with references to characters and their lives as he investigates the complicated events leading up to the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl. One is meant to assume that Bowie's character, Nathan Adler, works for the British government due to several references to the cities of London and Oxford, but in the liner notes these are revealed to be, at least in some cases, London, Ontario and Oxford, New Jersey, indicating that the entire story may take place in North America—or, indeed, that the distinction between the two places has become blurred and indistinguishable.
Bowie had considered writing an album every year or so through the end of the millennium to tell the story of how the end of the millennium felt. He said, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, by a narrative device, to chronicle the final five years of the millennium. The over-ambitious intention is to carry this through to the year 2000." He felt he had recorded enough material during the Outside sessions that he voiced his intention to continue the narrative of Outside through a 3-album set. He intended to call the second follow-up album "Contamination," and had sketched out the characters for the album (including some "17th century people") and had expected the album to be released in the spring of '97. Despite this, no direct follow-up to the album was ever produced, and Bowie's next album was his jungle and drum and bass-influenced work Earthling.
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