Lessons Learned from the Thin White Duke
A few years back, I was staying with my girlfriend at an apartment in Paris. On arrival, we noticed that the owners had graciously left some CDs to listen to during our visit. Nice touch, we thought.
As we started sifting through them, though, we saw that the music wasn’t exactly up our alley. The best of the bunch was probably a French knock-off of the Three Tenors. Oh, mon dieu.
At the bottom of the stack — literally our last chance at musical redemption — I found a disc I not only liked, but loved: Hunky Dory by David Bowie. We put it on immediately and played it wire to wire. When it was over, we did it again. Over the next week or so, we probably did this about 40 times.
And Hunky Dory, as it always had, got better with every listen.
“Changes”, the opening track from that record, was probably the first song I ever knew well, other than the national anthem and the Brady Bunch theme.
I’d go on to listen to Bowie endlessly as a kid growing up in the 80s. And now here I was, in Paris, half a lifetime later, binge listening like a teenager and realizing what an influence he’d had on me, both as a music nut and as a creative professional.
Some of those things he taught me rushed back as I learned of his death. I wrote them down because I didn’t really know what else to do.
Here’s what I came up with.
Don’t follow trends. Reinvent them. Bowie was a fearless innovator from day one, and while his music always picked up on new sounds, he never made a record that sounded like everything else out there. At the same time, he never sounded all that much like his previous record, either. He challenged himself to something different every time, but always remained 100% himself. Most creative people can’t even come close to saying that. We should all promise ourselves to try.
Start with empathy. It’s no surprise that Bowie invented so many characters (Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, Aladdin Sane) and inhabited them so thoroughly. His songs were all about trying to get at what made people tick — and especially the stuff they might not admit to readily, or might not even know themselves. As he said in a 2002 interview, quoted in the Guardian’s obituary, “My entire career, I’ve only really worked with the same subject matter. The trousers may change, but the actual words and subjects I’ve always chosen to write with are things to do with isolation, abandonment, fear and anxiety, all of the high points of one’s life.” Any creative person should read this and be inspired to think harder about real people living real lives, not cliche character types or target markets. (And also have a little laugh— it’s a pretty funny line.)
Collaborate constantly. From beginning to end, Bowie’s entire career is marked by so much collaboration — with everyone from Brian Eno to Bing Crosby — that it’s very clear he considered it central to creativity itself. That’s especially important to remember when you take into account his intense individualism and his need for privacy. Bowie made a point of demonstrating that collaboration doesn’t require giving up creative control. On the contrary, it means exercising it in new and powerful ways. Think of this next time you’re “protecting” your ideas or your agency turf.
Do some creative cross-dressing. Bowie’s non-musical output isn’t talked about a whole lot, but he clearly valued moving away from music as a way to shake things up. (He certainly didn’t do Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence because he had bills to pay.) Yes, it’s a cliche, but getting outside what you normally do can make you the right kind of uncomfortable — the kind that often leads to something better than what you would have done otherwise. Being comfortable isn’t the same as being responsible. It’s a cop-out.
Don’t fear technology, embrace it. From day one, Bowie explored the connection between art and tech. Lyrically, musically, and in his videos, he pushed the question of how humans and machines could play nicely together — or at least not wipe each other out. And long before Lady Gaga was crushing it in social media, Bowie had embraced streaming, user-generated mashups, branded video games, you name it. He even founded his own branded Internet Service Provider. At the time, many of these projects were laughed at, and by lots of smart people, too. Anybody still laughing now is either stubborn or stupid.
Turn and face the strange. To say that Bowie stood out from the crowd is an understatement. At the start of his career, it was mostly fluffy glam and meathead rock dominating the musical charts. He was different from the moment he hit the ground: proudly arty, instinctually experimental, and flat-out weird. Whether he’d succeeded or failed as a commercial artist, it seems pretty likely he’d have stayed on that path. Again, that should serve as an inspiration — and it surely has — for so many of those who decide they’re not going to define themselves by settling for the expected, the obvious, or the immediately popular.
I wish I could say any of these observations are as original as the powerhouse that inspired them, or that my creative career will ever look anything like his.
And I’m pretty sure there are people out there who have already had enough of pieces just like this one. A day after his death, people are already whinging about Bowie overkill, and with that in mind, I hesitated to even write this thing, let alone publish it.
But if there’s one thing I learned from David Bowie, it’s that trying to avoid failure and embarrassment is a guaranteed, if more prolonged, route to both.
We can’t all be as brilliant as Bowie was. But like him, we can all be as fearless in pursuing whatever it is we do, whenever and wherever we do it.
“I don’t know where I’m going from here,” he once said, “but I promise it won’t be boring.”
Can I say that every day? Can you?
Greg Bolton (@bloggerton) is Creative Director at Jam3.
