The Man Who Stayed in His Lane
David Bowie and His Relationship to Blackness
Let’s get this out of the way: My name is Sarah Sheppeck, I’m a queer Black millennial, and I fucking love David Bowie.
So deep is my admiration for the extraterrestrially beautiful man with heterochromatic eyes and a theremin-like vibrato that I bear a tattoo of his likeness–a stylized interpretation of the iconic cover for Aladdin Sane. My lifelong love affair with his art predates his death, predates my need to think critically about my permanent, or at least nearly so, decision to set aside space on my own body in homage to a white man.
Some of this can be attributed to my early indoctrination–several hundred repeat viewings of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Much of it comes from my mother: “A lot of people thought he was too strange,” she’d say, bopping along to “Fame” on the car radio, “but he never was to me.”
Nor was he too strange to me, though he was to my white father, a man who reliably mused each Christmas about the bizarreness of Bing Crosby dueting a young Bowie for a televised mashup of “Peace on Earth” and “The Little Drummer Boy.”
In the years since his passing, a loss that impacted me so profoundly I received messages of consolation from friends who hadn’t reached out in years, I’ve found myself reflecting more and more on the influence of Black artists on Bowie’s own work, as well as the ways that he may have influenced the next generation of Black musicians.
This isn’t new territory. Bowie’s mutual inspiration by and for Black artists has been addressed by Black writers in The Root, The Daily Beast, and Greg Tate’s exceptional editorial, “Brother From Another Planet,” to name a few. Dozens of articles have generated renewed posthumous interest in the now oft-cited 1983 MTV interview in which he calls out the network for not featuring more Black artists, prompting Ice-T to refer to Bowie as “a real one.”
“I’m just floored by the fact that there’s so few Black artists featured on [MTV],” Bowie says to VJ Mark Goodman. “Why is that?”
Bowie’s lifetime saw him form personal and professional friendships with Black icons including Tina Turner, Rick James, and Luther Vandross. Vandross, in particular, found his career fast-tracked after a chance meeting with Bowie in a studio led to him doing the vocal arrangements for the 1975 album “Young Americans.” Vandross received writing credit for the project and accompanied Bowie on the subsequent tour.
Ava Cherry, another Bowie backup singer and rumored former girlfriend, says that she frequently brought the artist to 1970s Harlem. “I tried to do my own version of that kind of music,” Bowie said, referring to his interpretation of R&B and disco as “plastic soul.”
And true, the impact of Blackness in his work is undeniable–the irresistible funkiness of the bassline for “Fame,” the clear response to disco that became “Let’s Dance.” Even the Labyrinth soundtrack itself features a recording of “Underground” backed by a full gospel choir. Listen to it cranked at max volume, and you can hear Bowie’s distinctive timbre among the background vocalists.
When it comes to radical allyship, it’s all too common to give white artists too much credit for doing the bare minimum. Bowie, however, successfully toed the line, using his immense stardom to elevate Black art without speaking for or over the artists themselves.
It is this adept navigation of his own privilege that I believe to have spawned Black art inspired by Bowie’s own: Saul Williams’s “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust”; samples of “Fame” by Public Enemy, Jay-Z, and Ice Cube; “Heroes,” covered by both Janelle Monae and Prince–the former for a Pepsi campaign, the latter, hauntingly, in a live performance weeks before his death.
Bowie met Black art not just with admiration, but respect. His work was influenced by Black musicianship without appropriating it, borrowed from the best and made it well and truly his own. So, without an ounce of shame, his image remains forever on my skin, soon to be joined by equally gender- and genre-bending Grace Jones, who just happens to have covered a Bowie tune herself.
Freak out, far out.
