David Bowie, Beat Poetry and Human Evolution
The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.
- Arthur Rimbaud, 1871
David Bowie, né Jones, was a unique artistic and cultural force who defied “normal” bounds of sexuality, identity and recreational substances. Reading through the flood of eulogies and tributes, the world is just beginning to grasp his monumental contributions to art and culture. Several major aspects of his work (particularly sexuality, gender and addiction) still give mainstream outlets pause, as if “normal” folks have not yet heard or seen the deeply personal messages Bowie infused into his work. This short essay attempts a whirlwind tour of the cultural impact generated by these controversial topics.
Though he later sobered up (at least from cocaine) after moving from LA to Berlin, Bowie regularly consumed different drugs over his lifetime. During the mid to late 1970s, it was primarily cocaine and psychedelics, (supposedly) supplemented by whole milk and red peppers for bodily sustenance.
According to playwright Alan Franks, writing later in The Times, “he was indeed ‘deranged’. He had some very bad experiences with hard drugs.”[72]
It isn’t for nothing that during this period, he was known as the Thin White Duke. He was the Thin White Duke at the time, because he used a potent cocktail of mind-altering substances to self-induce a functional psychosis during which he was unable to distinguish between the character’s personality and his own. To top it off, Bowie was having lots and lots of sex with just about everyone. Though these flamboyant jabs at conventional mores drew the most attention, Bowie was deeply engaged in the contemporary arts, and his derangement reflected the young creative genius of the previous century, Arthur Rimbaud.
Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, in conjunction with Andy Warhol’s Factory, influenced Bowie to come to New York, and he later produced Lou Reed’s 2nd album, Transformer. Bowie’s “drug years” in the 70s drove him from LA to Berlin with Iggy Pop in tow. There he entered a relatively impoverished though creatively productive phase. In fact, Iggy Pop credits David Bowie for saving his life:
Iggy Pop Says David Bowie Saved His Life | MTV News YOUTUBE.COM
While in Berlin, Bowie also worked with Brian Eno to produce Low, one of Trent Reznor’s favorite Bowie albums. No more can be said about Bowie’s music than has already been written, and his film roles offer a very different view of his personal evolution. For example, Bowie’s first leading role in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth does not feature the clean, focused Berlin Bowie that matured into the creative dynamo who produced music and art right up to his death this year.
Quite the contrary, when this film was made, Bowie was bopping around LA consuming gratuitous narcotics of many varieties and “[…] gettin’ me leg over a lot.”
Though better known for his glam-dancy, avuncular Goblin King role in “Labyrinth,” Bowie as the stark white fallen alien working desperately to save his dying planet and doomed loved ones with Earth’s water gives us a parallel to Baudelaire’s own artistic self-portrait as “The Albatross.”
The Albatross, By Charles Baudelaire
Translation by Eli SiegelOften, to amuse themselves the men of the crew
Lay hold of the albatross, vast birds of the seas-
Who follow, sluggish companions of the voyage,
The ship gliding on the bitter gulfs.Hardly have they placed them on the planks,
Than these kings of the azure, clumsy and shameful,
Let, piteously, their great wings in white,
Like oars, drag at their sides.This winged traveler, how he is awkward and weak!
He, lately so handsome, how comic he is and uncomely!
Someone bothers his beak with a short pipe,
Another imitates, limping, the ill thing that flew!The poet resembles the prince of the clouds
Who is friendly to the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
Banished to ground in the midst of hootings,
His wings, those of a giant, hinder him from walking.
And yet some commentators still obscure or misinterpret experiences that Bowie had already explained clearly, in his own words. When “aliens” or people outside of the “normal” range of experience express themselves, this erasure remains all too common, despite its cringe-worthy and shameful ignorance.
From the Daily Mail, who lamented “Addicted to excess: From reverence for the Nazis to an insatiable appetite for drugs and sex, a new biography of David Bowie portrays a man even more outrageous than his reputation” and proclaimed that “there was one person who invented provocative sexual ambiguity long before the rest of the world caught up.”
The titillating highlight:
Sexual adventures are at the heart of a fascinating new biography of the gender-bending Bowie, which lays bare his prodigious appetite for coupling of all sorts, as well as the gargantuan quantities of drugs he consumed during the Seventies.
Was he gay, straight, innovative genius or just a student of rock who recognised a good tune and a good act when he saw others performing, and plundered their ideas to make his fortune?
He was queer, bisexual, pansexual or something, though there weren’t (and still aren’t) socially acceptable terms to identify and celebrate humanity’s full range of genders and orientations. When Bowie did try explaining himself, it was under duress from a stunted interviewer with no knowledge about non-heter0sexual subcultures.
David Bowie talks about his sexual orientation
Interestingly, many aspects of Bowie’s ‘real’ persona, David Jones, remained ‘invisible’ like his sexual orientation, and this became a source of power and validation for him. From the NYT’s “Invisible New Yorker:”
Despite being a rock legend, the musician was an apparition in Manhattan, able to walk the city streets unrecognized.
The Man Who Fell to Earth was released in 1976 and was shot in New Mexico, not far from LA. Bowie had moved to LA from NY in 1974, and the year before, he had already broadcast his more or less universal sexual advances (Live recording in UK, 1973, just before he left England for the US):
David Bowie — Lets Spend the Night Together
Golden Years, indeed!
Watching Bowie talk about his own drug and sexual explorations is much more reasonable than most of the bi-erasing, sensationalist fascists that run the news. To their credit, Bowie’s life does echo William S. Burroughs’ relationship to the Beat Poets. Burroughs also consumed fantastic amounts of very dangerous narcotics and still ended up outliving pretty much everybody. Yep, the Burroughs who literally shot the most promising female beat poet, Jean Vollmer, to death. Accidently. In the head. During a ‘game’ of “William Tell” with a loaded revolver (Yes, both gun control and mental health reform ARE overdue, America!).
Bowie’s actual encounter with Burroughs was “catalytic.”
Yep. This Burroughs:
William S. Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy (All scenes)
Bowie possibly only read Alan Watts; however, Burroughs was a close advisor to Allen Ginsberg and interacted regularly with him, Aldous Huxley and Watts well before his encounter with Bowie, thus preserving a great countercultural chain of influence. There is a direct link between Bowie, psychedelics, the Beat movement and its ensuing chaos through the 50s, 60s and beyond.
Burroughs (Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, pg 387 ):
“We — and I refer here to mainly Allen [Ginsberg] and me, with counsel from Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, etc. — are concerned about the politics of the stuff […] I’ve got approval for a seminar next semester in which graduate students regularly take mescaline and psilocybin […]”
Here’s the original 1974 Rolling Stone interview featuring Bowie and Burroughs in London:
Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman William Burroughs, say hello to David Bowie ROLLINGSTONE.COM
Bowie’s death has deeply affected those who looked to him as a source of personal inspiration, because he offered an alternative that hadn’t existed previously for so many people trying, failing and suffering to “fit in” with the limited social, gender and professional roles open to non-white, non-hetersexual, non-males of the time. As we are still experiencing huge social trauma around these issues, Bowie’s message about accepting oneself to move ahead with cataclysmic changes in identity and values will only resonate stronger with time. Those of us left on Earth can only sparkle as much as possible, in the hopes the Starman will indeed land one day and blow our collective minds into more accepting and open perspectives.
