The most common context of the word “smear” is visual, usually when describing or noticing when something has been rubbed; for example, when a signature on a document is smeared because someone rubbed it when the ink was wet. “Smear” is not often used as an auditory descriptor since it is less tangible. How can one hear a smear? It’s possible during a moment in David Bowie’s song “Blackout,” not only as a smear in Bowie’s vocals, but in the sound of the music itself. LCD Soundsystem and Cate Le Bon also have similar sonic smears at specific moments in their songs: “Other Voices” and “Magnificent Gestures,” respectively. These two songs may or may not be deliberate allusions to Bowie, but nevertheless establish an aesthetic connection between the three songs. 

“Blackout” was recorded and released on Bowie’s 1977 album Heroes:

The song begins with loud drums kicking off a dirty, industrial groove led by Carlos Alomar playing the main guitar riff. He is augmented by Brian Eno’s electronic lizard synthesizers and Robert Fripp on lead guitar, who is playing like an evil genius attempting to destroy the world from his secret layer. This is an ideal musical backdrop for the introduction of Bowie’s vocals as he sings, “Oh you, you walk on past / Your lips cut a smile on your face.” Background vocals immediately cut in to add “Your scalding face.” No one else in music is better at creating a character for a song with simply the sound of his voice than Bowie. This narrator is passionate, paranoid, obsessive for details, and possibly a monster, singing, “She was a beauty in a cage.” 

Suddenly, the groove stops, and Bowie’s character begins to rant with only the drums behind him. The band provides occasional blasts of emphasis as if they are The J.B.’s backing James Brown. The character barely sings, instead, he is screeching about a certain someone being “back in town.” Is this the same person who is walking past with the lips cutting a smile on their “scalding face?” There’s no answer to the question as the narrator cites a blackout and admits his desperate state of mind.   

Bowie was asked in a later interview if the song’s titular blackout was a reference to the infamous 1977 blackout in New York City, in which residents were terrified of the “Son of Sam” killer and engaged in a substantial amount of looting and criminal activity. Bowie responded, “It did indeed refer to power cuts. I can’t in all honesty say that it was the New York one, though it is entirely likely that that image locked itself in my head.” 

It’s at the 1:26 mark in “Blackout” that we reach the smear. The band resumes the song’s main groove, but Bowie’s character is altered. Either the previously established narrator has been replaced entirely or a new character has entered the song. Regardless, Bowie’s vocals are blurred. He sings out of time with the groove playing behind him, further emphasizing the loose and disjointed feeling of this man. He’s calmer and less frenzied than the previous narrator, but not exactly placid. It’s as if he’s been drinking or been drugged by his own hand or another’s. Furthermore, this smeared character has a new accent that was previously undetected, like one that emerges after inebriation. He sings:

If you don’t stay tonight

I will take that plane tonight

I’ve nothing to lose, nothing to gain. 

Bowie doubles the first two lines with a harmony part that further emphasizes the smear. Yet with the third line, he drops the harmony, perhaps as a way to affirm the nihilistic sentiments of feeling “nothing to lose, nothing to gain.” What is he trying to do during the smear? Proposition a potential sexual partner. He suggests, “I’ll kiss you in the rain.” It’s a seemingly romantic image, the kiss in the rain during a charged movie moment. During the smear of “Blackout,” it instead comes across as clumsy and pathetic with the narrator slurring his words. He repeats the phrase a few times as the backup singers mockingly echo him.

In composing “Blackout,” Bowie utilized a technique known as the cut-up. Developed by Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists in the 1920s and popularized by William S. Burroughs, the method entails taking a completed written statement, newspaper article, or poem on paper, cutting out individual phrases, and then re-arranging them in a random order. The resulting new work keeps some of the same sentiments as the original work, but transforms it into a new, uncanny, and surreal piece.

Bowie learned the cut-up technique from Burroughs himself and used it to compose many songs. The 2013 career-spanning retrospective Bowie exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum included an image of the cut-out lyrics from “Blackout”:

The disjointed feeling of “Blackout” as a result of the cut-up technique is significant when considering the next song featuring the smear: “Other Voices” by LCD Soundsystem:

“Other Voices” is the second track of 2017’s American Dream, 40 years after the appearance of “Blackout.” This was the fourth album of LCD Soundsystem and the first after the band’s return from their much-debated breakup. James Murphy, LCD’s leader, said that Bowie himself was an instigator in Murphy’s move to un-retire the band, saying:

“I spent a good amount of time with David Bowie, and I was talking about getting the band back together. He said, ‘Does it make you uncomfortable?’ I said ‘Yeah’, and he said ‘Good, it should, you should be uncomfortable.’”

Murphy is known for making musical allusions to his favorite artists, including Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, Bowie, among others. “All I Want,” a 2010 LCD song, is essentially a rewrite of Bowie’s anthem “Heroes.” In addition to allusions, Murphy was supposed to play on Blackstar, Bowie’s last album right before his death in 2016, but the magnitude of such a thing was too much for Murphy and he left the studio, writing about the experience on “Black Screen,” the final song on American Dream. So, it’s no surprise that the smear from “Blackout” makes an appearance on an LCD Soundsystem song. 

“Other Voices” begins with processed beats paired with live drumming – a classic Murphy trick. The bass thunders in and is soon joined by a guitar and weird, Eno-esque noises to create a monstrous, motorik groove. A chicken scratch guitar enters as Murphy begins to sing, perhaps about writer’s block or the lack of inspiration:

Yeah your head like a block

Stuffed with unwritten letters to some far away friends

Oh you’d write on your hand to remember

If someone would just pass you a pen

Murphy contends that with the creative process, discarding shit — or in his words, “morning ablutions” — are all “part of the dance.” He has to learn how to block out negative thoughts and resist “other voices.” Other members of the band accompany Murphy to sing the title phrase. 

That chanting is what kicks off LCD Soundsystem’s take on the smear. Murphy doubles his own voices for the smear, like Bowie in “Blackout.” Both of Murphy’s voices are out of time with the beat, blurry with the same staggering feel as “Blackout.” Adding to the sensation, the second voice is slightly off-rhythm with the main voice. Moreover, the lead guitar plays the same melody sung by the voices, but it too doesn’t match the meter of the voices for the entire phrase, providing further layers to the smear. The guitar sounds remarkably like Robert Fripp’s guitar in “Blackout.” The words that Murphy sings for the smear are:

Please, if you’re coming home

Take me to the side

I know that time changes

To run away

From you

Like the smear narrator in “Blackout,” the smeared voices in “Other Voices” also seem to be addressing someone else, but it’s less of a proposition to a stranger as they are talking to someone familiar instead, probably a loved one. The words are about the changes that time brings, not only to relationships but to the creative process itself. 

The last line that Murphy sings in the song is, “You should be uncomfortable, think I could be now.” It’s a direct reference to Bowie’s advice to Murphy about discomfort being the ideal state for creating art. This demonstrates that the memory and influence of Bowie haunts Murphy in this song. Murphy yells “Other voices!” before the song shifts into the smear, serving as a kind of announcement that LCD refers back to, not only Bowie, but also the other musical voices that influence their music. 

Another reading of the phrase “other voices” could be that it is Murphy’s attempt to recognize the multiple voices within the song “Blackout.” Furthermore, the phrase could be a description of the cut-up technique utilized by Bowie for “Blackout,” addressing how the jumble of different phrases constitute a conversation of multiple voices and characters. No matter what the intention, it is clear that there is a sonic and lyrical connection between “Blackout” and “Other Voices.”

The last appearance of a musical smear similar to “Blackout” is the song “Magnificent Gestures” by Cate Le Bon from her brilliant 2019 album Reward:

The song opens with an instrumental passage that shows that it’s neither a rock or dance track like “Blackout” or “Other Voices,” but it presents an angular, yet compelling groove. Le Bon begins the first verse in a high register, singing “Truly I like to dream,” before dropping into a lower register to finish the verse with “Puts my head in a car park.” It could be interpreted that, like Murphy, Le Bon is reflecting on the space within which an artist creates, but she doesn’t feel the same angst as Murphy does. In the next verse, she sings:

Hold a hand, talk to me

Assume the weight of family

Sell the billboard gallery

She was born with no lips, drip, drip, drips

The narrator needs assistance to serve in this artistic capacity because she needs to be out of step with her family, unable to communicate as seen in the last line in the verse. Le Bon returns to a lower register, both spoken word and straight-face. The moment is off-kilter and devastatingly funny. 

With that, “Magnificent Gestures” moves into the smear. Le Bon’s take on the smear works as the chorus of the song rather than a musical shift as in “Blackout” or a musical interlude as in “Other Voices.” Calling it a chorus seems inaccurate because it isn’t the type of uplifting hook that is usually associated with a typical chorus. As established in the aesthetic pattern of the smear, Le Bon’s version drags against the rhythm. As with the other smears, she layers multiple voices on top of one another. A male voice is included within this stack belonging to singer/songwriter/guitar player Kurt Vile. 

The titular “magnificent gestures” hold power for the narrator as they have the potential to “hold my love” and “open windows.” Yet at the same time, her attention slips: “the room escapes me.” She regrets her inability to fully connect, saying “It’s such a shame.” She assures us that she’s writing it down as a way to remember, perhaps as a performative act. She says, “we have to talk,” knowing how meaningful these magnificent gestures are to the other person and insists again, “but I’m writing it down” to try and reassure. The smear ends with Le Bon singing, “forever be on guard.” 

With the conclusion of the smear, the guitar comes to the forefront, playing a strange, akimbo motif that could be a Robert Fripp variation on stereotypical carnival music. While the guitar plays, Le Bon softly chants a repetition of the final line of the smear: “forever be on guard.” She seems to be saying that she has learned her lesson from being on the receiving end of too many magnificent gestures in her past. Whether they were communicated by a lover or a friend, these exhortations were an attempt to overwhelm her and sway her to some point of view. Now she knows she has to remain steady and “forever be on guard.”

There’s a possibility that Le Bon’s use of the phrase “magnificent gestures” refers to the power of musical influences. She has to guard herself from being too beholden to these heroes, like Bowie, and create her own singular music. If this reading is correct and Le Bon’s own smear is an allusion to Bowie, then it is a clever and ironic nod to Bowie, while also attempting to distance herself from him. She knows that she can make a “magnificent gesture” towards Bowie — like Murphy does in “Other Voices” — but that doesn’t interest her. She must cut her own path. As she sings later in the song, “I can’t repeat it / I was born with no lips, drip, drip, drips.” 

Regardless of any of these lyrical interpretations, Bowie established a musical characterization within “Blackout,” depicting a smear, or the sound of someone staggering, that connects to moments within LCD Soundsystem’s “Other Voices” and Cate Le Bon’s “Magnificent Gestures.” Murphy’s definitely included his own smear as a direct reference to the influence of Bowie, Le Bon perhaps. Still, both “Other Voices” and “Magnificent Gestures” are songs about musical inspiration and the creative process, depicting two artists wrestling with their own work in the wake of the power of an influence of someone like David Bowie. 

Scott Bunn is a writer and critic based outside of Asheville, NC, who has written for Aquarium Drunkard and Asheville Stages as well as his own blog, Recliner Notes.