"The aspects of America that are really magical to us are the things it seems to reject, like black music or the Beat poets": The story of the multi-version David Bowie song that captured his revulsion of American corporate dominance

It’s shocking to consider now, but David Bowie had ended the 80s seemingly out of creative puff. His response was to embark on a series of bold, daring decisions that confused fans at the time but now appear to be a masterclass in course correction.

First, he formed a hard-rock band in Tin Machine, releasing two albums, their 1989 self-titled debut and 1992’s II, a project that he later declared had “charged him up” at a point when he was in dire need of artistic refuelling.

Returning to solo work with 1993’s Black Tie White Noise, he had the bit between his teeth. If that was a sturdy effort where it felt like he was testing the waters, then it unleashed something in Bowie for his next two records.

Teaming up with his old sparring partner Brian Eno for the first time since the Berlin Trilogy, Bowie had reignited his sense of adventurous experimentalism on 1995’s Outside, a record that pinballed from avant-garde art-rock to jazzy diversions and drum’n’bass bangers. It was in this fertile, anything-goes frame of mind that Bowie threw himself into the album that would become his 21st studio effort, 1997’s Earthling.

Building on the industrial, techno propulsion originally explored on Outside, Earthling spawned one of the biggest hits of Bowie’s later-years career in I’m Afraid Of Americans. Really, though, the song belongs to both of those albums, originally worked on during the Outside sessions in Switzerland.

David Bowie - I'm Afraid of Americans (Official Video) [4K] - YouTube

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It was halfway around the world that the idea for the song came to Bowie, though. He was visiting Java in 1991 and happened to be there as the island’s first McDonald’s sprung up. Needless to say, he wasn’t one of those in line for a Big Mac.

“It was like, ‘For fuck’s sake’,” he recalled in a press release around the time of I’m Afraid Of Americans. “The invasion by any homogenised culture is depressing, the erection of another Disneyworld in, say, Umbria, Italy, more so. It strangles the indigenous culture and narrows expression of life.”

Throughout his life, Bowie held a deep fascination for America, claiming in Alan Yentob’s 1975 Cracked Actor documentary that it “became a myth land for me”, and he had spells living in Los Angeles and New York before eventually settling with wife Iman in the latter in the 90s. But that didn’t stop him being outspoken in his revulsion for what he saw as the country’s overbearing corporate dominance around the world.

“The face of America we have to put up with is the McDonald’s/Disney/Coke face,” he complained to Mojo in 1997, “this bland cultural invasion that sweeps over us – which is unfortunate, because the aspects of America that are really magical to us are the things it seems to reject, like black music or the Beat poets. There’s an incredibly strong individuality about America that gets glossed over by the corporate invasion.”

“The song’s not terribly hostile,” he offered. “Actually, it’s just a bit whingey, I suppose. I have to be a bit careful, ‘cos all my band are Yanks!"

The version of the song that Bowie worked on during the Outside sessions with Eno was originally entitled Dummy and meant for inclusion on the soundtrack to the Keanu Reeves sci-fi film Johnny Mnemonic. In that take, the Johnny of the eventual rendition is called “dummy” and the chorus goes “I’m afraid of the animals” rather than the Americans. Weirdly, instead it was released as part of the soundtrack to the panned erotic thriller Showgirls.

It very much resembles a work-in-progress demo next to what the song would become during the Earthling sessions. Sensing that there was a special song somewhere in there and curious as to what his newly-tweaked crack backing band could do with it (as well as, you imagine, asking himself why the hell he just gave it away on the Showgirls soundtrack), Bowie and musicians including Carlos Alomar, Reeves Gabrels, Mike Garson, Gail Ann Dorsey, Mark Plati and Zack Alford worked up a more streamlined and menacing version. Drenched in industrial snarl, jittery beats and swathes of distorted guitar, it now sounded like an imposing, imperious electronic-rock anthem.

And yet, the song still hadn’t reached its definitive form. That would emerge as part of a remix project overseen by Nine Inch Nails ringleader Trent Reznor and released in the US in October 1997. The two parties were already firm friends, having hit the road together on the Dissonance tour in 1995, with Reznor also remixing Bowie’s The Hearts Filthy Lesson single the same year.

Ahead of those dates, Bowie said their dynamic was “a totally cool yin and yang thing, it’s a situation of opposites. Even though we’re working somewhere in the same area, we’re actually very opposite about the things we do. Trent is a minimalist in the way he structures his material; my stuff tends to be overlaid and conceptually more of a texture of things, so it almost becomes musically like a two-act play. I don’t know of any tour like it, and I don’t know if you’ll see another one either.”

I'm Afraid of Americans - David Bowie - YouTube

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The I’m Afraid Of Americans maxi-single went even further, offering up six new versions of the song that pulled it in a myriad of directions, a shapeshifting triumph that saw Ice Cube guest on V3 and more drum’n’bass dynamo Photek reinvent V5. But the take that has truly stood the test of time is V1, a thrilling collision of NiN – at the time, the line-up alongside Reznor featured Danny Lohner, Charlie Clouser, Dave Ogilvie and Keith Hillebrandt – and a newly reinvigorated Bowie.

The Starman was thrilled at the results. “It’s not just a remix,” he marvelled of the six new takes. “It almost becomes an album in itself. I was absolutely knocked out when I heard what he’d done. It was great.”

I’m Afraid Of Americans V1 was immortalised in a classic video that saw Reznor, dressed to resemble Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, stalk his idol through the streets of New York, filmed in the city in 1997 in between Bowie’s touring commitments for Earthling. It was directed by British pair Dom & Nic, who had impressed Bowie with their clips for Supergrass and the Chemical Brothers. “They’re making interesting, quite hard-edged British videos at the moment,” he said. “I felt it was important it retained that outsider’s perspective of America.”

The 90s were a period in which Bowie immersed himself in an alt-rock scene he’d helped to inspire, something that would reach a peak with his star-studded 50th birthday gig at the end of 1997. That night, he’d perform I’m Afraid Of Americans with Sonic Youth instead. Really though, the collaboration with Reznor is the moment that sums up where his head was really at in the mid-90s. David Bowie had pulled himself out of the slumber of the previous decade. As I’m Afraid Of Americans showed, he had no fear again.