S6. Episode 1. Leon Takes Us Outside / Outside

It's 1999. Art is murder. Murder is art. And David Bowie has some explaining to do.Welcome to Season Six of the Regarding…Series, where Chaz Charles and Greg "Wolfie" Wolfe welcome new co-host Mikey Pastore for a journey into one of the strangest, most ambitious, and most thoroughly bewildering works in David Bowie's catalog: 1995's 1. Outside — The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper-cycle.

And this time, it's personal.

After all, it was Bowie's extraordinary declaration that Lou Reed's Lulu was a masterpiece that helped launch this entire podcasting enterprise. Five seasons later, the gang has finally come around to examining one of Bowie's own great artistic provocations.

What follows is less an album review than an orientation session for a world in which the year is 1999, a young girl has been murdered and transformed into an art installation, and a detective from the Art Crimes division is trying to make sense of it all.

Sound like a good time?

Mikey arrives armed with an original CD and its accompanying Nathan Adler diary. Chaz brings the historical context, the big questions, and a deeply inappropriate Ricky Gervais musical interlude. Wolfie brings skepticism, curiosity, and the occasional need to Google something.

Together, they begin unraveling Bowie's nonlinear narrative, his reunion with Brian Eno, the industrial-rock influences of the mid-1990s, and the unsettling question at the center of the entire project:

When does art stop being art and become murder?

Along the way:

Bowie, Laurie Anderson, and the Lulu comment that started it allThe strange inhabitants of Oxford Town, New JerseyDetective Nathan Adler, Leon Blank, Ramona A. Stone, and the mysterious Baby GraceThe CD booklet as required reading for a musical murder mysteryThe internet in its infancy and Bowie's invitation to explore a story without a conventional beginning, middle, or endA debate over what constitutes the album's actual opening trackThree podcasters attempting to establish a coherent methodology for studying a deliberately incoherent workAnd somewhere in all of this, the gang actually starts listening to the record.

THIS WEEK'S MUSIC:

"Leon Takes Us Outside" and "Outside" — David Bowie