Get Real (David Bowie Song) - History and Development

History and Development

Unlike some of Bowie's previous albums, not a single song was written prior to the band going into the studio. Instead, Bowie wrote many songs alongside the band in improvised sessions. Bowie and Eno also continued the experimental songwriting techniques they'd started using back during the Berlin Trilogy. In 1995 while talking to the press about the album, Bowie stated that:

What Brian did, which was really useful, is he provided everybody with flash cards at the beginning of the day. On each one, a character was written, like "You are the disgruntled member of a South African rock band. Play the notes that were suppressed." ... Because that set the tone for the day, the music would take on all those obscure areas. And it would very rarely lapse into the cliche.

The "random cutups" from the Adler story that are part of the album's lyrics and liner notes were written by Bowie, who typed them into his Mac computer and then ran a custom program called the "Verbasiser," which would cut up and reassemble his words electronically, much like he had done with paper, scissors and glue back in the 1970s. He would then look at the lyrics while the band played a song and decide "whether I was going to sing, do a dialogue, or become a character. I would improvise with the band, really fast on my feet, getting from one line to another and seeing what worked." Bowie claimed that it took about three and a half hours using this method to create "virtually the entire genesis" of the album Outside.

In interviews, Bowie remarked that the album was meant to reflect the anxiety of the last five years of the millennium:

Overall, a long-term ambition is to make it a series of albums extending to 1999—to try to capture, using this device, what the last five years of this millennium feel like. It's a diary within the diary. The narrative and the stories are not the content—the content is the spaces in between the linear bits. The queasy, strange, textures.... Oh, I've got the fondest hopes for the fin de siecle. I see it as a symbolic sacrificial rite. I see it as a deviance, a pagan wish to appease gods, so we can move on. There's a real spiritual starvation out there being filled by these mutations of what are barely remembered rites and rituals. To take the place of the void left by a non-authoritative church. We have this panic button telling us it's gonna be a colossal madness at the end of this century.

In 1999, Bowie also said about his motivations and inspirations for the album:

Perhaps the one through-line between some of the stuff in Outside and the coming millennium is this new Pagan worship, this whole search for a new spiritual life that's going on. Because of the way we've demolished the idea of God with that triumverate at the beginning of the century, Nietzsche, Einstein, and Freud. They really demolished everything we believed. 'Time bends, God is dead, the inner-self is made of many personalities'... wow, where the fuck are we? I wonder if we have realized that the only thing we could create as 'God' was the hydrogen bomb and that the fall-out from the realization that as gods we can only seem to produce disaster is people trying to find some spiritual bonding and universality with a real nurtured inner-life. But there is also this positivism that you find now which really wasn't there at the end of the last century. Then, the general catch phrase among the artistic and literary community was that it was the end of the world. They really felt that in 1899 there was nothing else, that only complete disaster could follow. It isn't like that now. We may be a little wary or jittery about what's around the corner, but there's no feeling of everything's going to end in the year 2000. Instead, there's almost a celebratory feeling of 'right, at least we can get cracking and really pull it all together.'"