Starman and Blackstar, Heathen and Hero: David Bowie’s Greatest legacy is the Idea of David Bowie
(13th January 2016 )
Remembering the unforgettable.
“I wanted to be thought of as someone who was very much a trendy person, rather than a trend. I didn’t want to be a trend, I wanted to be the instigator of new ideas. I wanted to turn people on to new ideas and new perspectives. And so I had to govern everything around that. So I pulled myself in, and decided to use the easiest medium to start off with — which was rock and roll — and to add bits and pieces to it over the years, so that by the end of it, I was my own medium.” — David Bowie
David Bowie was a Starman that fell to earth, a lad that was insane, a scary monster and a super creep. More importantly, he was an an act of representation that continually buried its own phantasms. David Bowie, the handsome cipher, was an Idea.
As the tributes for David Bowie continue, it’s important to decipher which David Bowie we are paying tribute to. For every fan there is a favourite Bowie. For some, he had bleached blonde hair in an outback Australian pub (‘Let’s Dance’ Bowie), slick back hair and a crisp white shirt (‘Thin White Duke’ Bowie). For others, a lightening bolt across his face (‘Aladdin Sane’ Bowie) or a bright red mullet teamed with platform shoes (‘Ziggy Stardust’ Bowie).
For me, David Bowie wears a yellow turtleneck knit whilst singing “Im Afraid of Americans” with Nine Inch Nails.
The answer, however, as to which Bowie the tributes are arriving for, is none of them, and all of them. The intent on framing Bowie through the lens of his characters is misplaced. He was all of those Bowie’s whilst still firmly being David Bowie; the Idea. Until the very end he was committed to reinvention, eventually incorporating it as a sincere form of resolution.
Across his 25 albums David Bowie presented himself as both heterogenous and homogeneous. The characters he inhabited would become silhouettes for new creative processes to occupy. Bowie pioneered this creative process — originally designed to overcome shyness — as a transitional ontology, which, whilst traumatic for the mainstream, became exhilaratingly transformative for the audience. Ziggy became so radical that he even escaped Bowie’s own control, and thus, had to be killed off one fateful night in London’s Hammersmith Odeon Theatre.
Language was also of critical importance in the creation of David Bowie the Idea. It produced cultural indigeneity; allowing it to be used in the mapping of the psycho-geographies associated with his characters. Major Tom sings alone in a Spaceship “For here / Am I sitting in a tin can/ Far above the world”. Pierrot, the New Romantic Clown in ‘Ashes to Ashes’, wanders along a bleached out beach followed by a tractor as he echoes “And I ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hair / But I’m hoping to kick but the planet is going”. The Thin White Duke of ‘Station to Station’ occupies a Mercedes Benz in post-war Britain proclaiming “The European cannon is here”. Outsider Bowie — all red hair and goatee — belongs in a underground rave in New York. In the video game ‘Omikron: The Nomad’s Soul’ (1999) Digital Bowie inhabits the futuristic cyberpunk city of Omikron, contributing original music as ‘Boz’, an anti-government renegade A.I. that wishes to overthrow the city’s authoritarian supercomputer — and then appears as another character, the nameless lead-singer of the fictional musical group, ‘The Dreamers’ who perform illegal concerts in virtual Omikron.
In Bowie’s famous Berlin trilogy we find the strongest use of language as a tool to map psycho-geographies. His creative lodestone takes the listener on a tour of West Berlin; “I, I can remember (I remember) / Standing, by the wall (by the wall) / And the guns shot above our heads” as he grafts a journey which would later be revisited in ‘Where Are We Now’, from his second to last album ‘The Next Day’; “Sitting in the Dschungel / On Nürnberger Strasse/ A man lost in time / Near KaDeWe / Just walking the dead”.
Alongside this trilogy were more esoteric ventures. He visited Lenin’s grave in Moscow, went ‘bush’ for weeks at a time when touring Australia and eventually found a home in Soho, New York. Its influence is revealed in his last album, ‘Blackstar’, which adopts the presence of a Jazz quartet.
Bowie understood that in cities, memory is to history as history is to place. Songs became transmissions for Bowie and his characters to mirror as he travelled.
This command encouraged association to the process of its implementations. Think the new language invented for ‘Low’, and how his voice could deftly switch between decades; from Soul in Young Americans (1975), to family friendly baritone with Bing Crosby in ‘Little Drummer Boy’ (1982), to rap duet wth Al. B. Sure! in ‘Black Tie White Noise’ (1993). In ‘Life on Mars’ (1971), arguably Bowie’s most lyrically diverse song, Bowie’s universal control of language is visible in every line “It’s on Amerika’s tortured brow/ That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow / Now the workers have struck for fame / ’Cause Lennon’s on sale again”. In ‘Everybody says Hi’ (2002) he adopts full command of working class poetry, “If the money is lousy / You can always come home/ We can do the old things / We can do all the bad things / If the food gets you leery / You can always phone”.
All these iterations indicate a push for the new. Bowie would shed Bowie after Bowie in the pursuit of artistic frontiers. Eventually, this desire for reinvention would surface alongside his music, where he was an internet service provider (BowieNet), banker (BowieBanc), and share market player (Bowie Bonds). He released the first full downloadable song by a mainstream artist (ironically titled ‘telling lies’), conducted the first email interview, asked fans to contribute lyrics to songs via the internet, and was the first to simultaneously broadcast a concert in Movie theatres around the world. Critically, 90’s Bowie — the Bowie most often overlooked — predicted how both the internet and the music industry would evolve. The real Idea of David Bowie was formed as a symbol for the possibilities of the new.
“I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within ten years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in ten years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again.
“I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we are actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.
“The actual context and the state of content is going to be so different than anything we can envisage at the moment, where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in sympatico it is going to crush out ideas of what mediums are all about.
“The idea that the piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it and add their own interpretation, and what the piece of art is about is the grey space in the middle. That grey space in the middle is what the twenty first century is about.”
Of course, in the play between the permanent and the fleeting, Sunday futurist David Bowie became the grey space.
His second to last album ‘The Next Day’ (2013) demonstrated a deep understanding of this relationship. Released after a ten year hiatus, it appeared with no promotion, publicity or press. People simply awoke one morning greeted to an album from David Bowie to decipher, who was presumed retired, sick and/or missing. He gave no interviews and no interpretations. The cover art was a play on his iconic ‘Heroes’ image, except it was obscured with a blank white square. The album was simply uploaded by the artist, and listened to by the audience. Fans had to assemble its meaning: the very definition of asking for relational grey space.
The Blackstar album, his fateful swan song released two days before his death, goes further. It is titled and stylised only as ★. With Blackstar, there is no more David Bowie playing the character, rather, what remains is a symbol of the Idea: we are left with the relationship between artist and audience.
In fact, Bowie’s last two albums are the only ones not to feature his face on the cover.
The various transformations of David Bowie highlight a rejection in the necessity of confronting the totality of social relations in his work. Hinted at, consumed and recorded, the Idea of David Bowie instead insisted that the solution for the problems confronting artistic mediums lies within the art itself.
David Bowie’s greatest legacy is the Idea of David Bowie.
