EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J., Sept. 27 -- David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails are not just touring together but collaborating as well. They shared the stage for a half hour during their show at the Brendan Byrne Arena on Wednesday night; while their two bands meshed, Mr. Bowie and Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor traded verses on each other's songs.
For the 29-year-old Mr. Reznor, it was a public homage: Mr. Bowie's albums from the 1970s showed him ways to create edgy songs that blend pop melody, apocalyptic drama and strange noise. And for the 48-year-old Mr. Bowie, it was a canny tactic, a way to fill arenas again and reach younger listeners after a decade of commercial misfires. But instead of using the current tour to remind listeners of his golden years, Mr. Bowie is introducing a large portion of brand-new material, a quixotic step for his first arena tour in five years.
While Mr. Bowie and Mr. Reznor are kindred performers in some ways, they are polar opposites in others. Mr. Reznor is an explosive introvert, ranting and agonizing over his private torments while Nine Inch Nails hammers blunt, primal riffs. It's clear what's on his mind. Mr. Bowie, by contrast, is a detached observer, parceling out disconnected hints and images, moving in and out of the stories he suggests. His songs are more abstract, even at their most impassioned.
And where Nine Inch Nails is in its ascendance -- perfectly in sync with a mood of angry, self-obsessed victimization -- Mr. Bowie had his fling with mass appeal in the 1980s, and he has decided to go off on his own tangents. Mr. Bowie has just released Outside (Virgin), working again with the producer and songwriter Brian Eno for the first time since the two made Mr. Bowie's eerie late-1970s trilogy of albums, Low, Heroes and Lodger. Outside begins a new trilogy, an oblique mystery tale about an art-world murder, which is scheduled for completion around 2000. Released one day before the tour arrived at the Meadowlands, the songs on Outside were probably unfamiliar to most of the audience; many Nine Inch Nails fans left during Mr. Bowie's set.
In 1990, Mr. Bowie vowed never to perform his older songs again in concert. Now he has partially reneged, singing not major hits but 1970s songs -- "Scary Monsters," "Look Back in Anger," "Andy Warhol," "Joe the Lion," "Breaking Glass" -- that are compatible with Outside.
He deconstructed them to match his new material, setting old melodies over new riffs and keeping just enough of their hooks to make them recognizable. Mr. Bowie sang "The Man Who Sold the World," lately revived by Nirvana, in a bleakly jaded tone over pattering cymbals and a tense bass line.
His new songs are oddly made, as if designed to envelop the listener rather than to leave catchy memories. Over brisk, undulating vamps, Mr. Bowie sang shards of melody, sometimes an isolated line or two, sometimes an old-fashioned rock chorus, floating in the music like a buoy in a bay.
Stray phrases drifted out of the songs: "He never knew what hit him," I think I've lost my way," "The music is outside, it's happening outside." The vamps also held wailing, squealing guitar solos from Reeves Gabrels, who was in Mr. Bowie's early-1990s band Tin Machine, and splashy, dissonant, jazzy piano solos by Mike Garson, who played on Mr. Bowie's 1973 album Aladdin Sane.
While Mr. Bowie has staged elaborate productions on past tours, Outside was modest: some banners, some mannequins. Mr. Bowie worked to put the songs across, advancing to the edge of the stage, making imperious gestures and crooning with a sometimes melodramatic vibrato. But he was trying to hold together songs that seemed to dissolve before they ended.
Where Mr. Bowie was diffuse, Nine Inch Nails was forceful. Mr. Reznor captures adolescent terror and confusion with terse clarity. Sex is feared and destroyed; authority is reviled; loneliness, distrust, pent-up rage, self-hatred and self-aggrandizement all churn together. His songs have percussive brute force -- many started with drumbeats alone -- and muscular finesse, shifting from a metallic guitar attack to the swooping, cutting keyboards of dance music. Mr. Reznor's avenging misery was an easier concept to grasp than Mr. Bowie's millennial malaise, and he had Nine Inch Nails's power to back it up.
-- transcribed by kate mccormack