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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
As the master of self-reinvention -- from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke to Normal David -- he became the most influential rock star of the post-Beatles era.
Jan 25, 2000 | When I was a kid, my favorite record was David Bowie's greatest-hits collection "ChangesOneBowie." It wasn't just that he was English, or that he used words like "ass" and "bitch" and, well, "leper messiah," or that when I played the record loud for my best friend, Tommy, he got the same worried look on his face that my mother did. All of these things were cool enough, but they represented a deeper attraction: David Bowie embodied the threat and thrill of everything not suburban, that is, everything I aspired to from the time I realized all I had to do was grow up and get out.
In England, Bowie was a big enough star to serve this purpose for everyone. The sharpest spearhead of glam rock, he catalyzed the British punk revolution of 1976 -- legend has it that one or two future Sex Pistols made off with the P.A. system Bowie used at his last Ziggy Stardust show, in 1973, which is too useful an anecdote to doubt. On this side of the Atlantic, Bowie hardly flopped, but in '70s American culture he remained a cult figure. Unequivocal worldwide superstardom didn't come to him until the calculated-
Many rock purists wish it weren't so, because much of that influence is nonmusical. Bowie's main contribution to the rock vernacular was a disregard for the rock vernacular. He was an actor who impersonated a pop star, singing through unlikely characters and skewed narrative stances, never resorting to that generically American accent that used to define international rock, always creating an image rather than revealing himself. When Bowie is described as a chameleon -- as he invariably is -- it's a description not just of his musical style-hopping, but of his personality, for in his prime, each in his procession of public personas tended to be at odds with the last, and if the Bowie presented on an album was ever voicing the "real" Bowie's sentiments, you had to guess at where.
Bowie plucked ideas from everyone, but he was never a mere copyist. He married Jean Genet to the Yardbirds, Bertolt Brecht to Jacques Brel; he latched himself onto Lou Reed and Iggy Pop and absorbed their refusal to compromise with the mainstream. He crafted irresistible sing-alongs about despair, and mustered his most passionate love song about the Iron Curtain. In Bowie's world, nothing was safe or simple, and by refusing to stay put, standing for nothing but change, he allowed his creativity and his mystique to feed off each other and flourish.
Bowie was born David Jones in 1947 and grew up in a bleak suburb of postwar London. About his youth, the most salient fact is that a friend once punched him in the eye, permanently dilating one pupil and thereafter giving his eyes the inimitably cool appearance of being two different colors. Between 1964, when he made his first record with an R&B combo called the King Bees, and 1969, when he hit the pop charts, he made decreasingly futile stabs at mod pop, music-hall whimsy, Kinks-derived satire and Dylanesque hippie balladeering. Alarmingly, he also practiced mime on the side.
It was in his hippie guise that he emitted the watershed 1969 single "Space Oddity," which tells the story of an astronaut, Major Tom, who blasts off into space and decides not to return to Earth. As both writer and singer, the shorthand with which Bowie alternates the voices of "Ground Control" and Major Tom is masterful: "'Tell my wife I love her very much'/'She knows.'" Out of the blue, Bowie seized on the themes of alienation, distance and outer space as a metaphor for inner space that have recurred in his writing ever since. But "Space Oddity" was his only song to make the grade for another two years. His odd 1970 album of lumbering hard rock and Nietzschean pomposity, "The Man Who Sold the World," is notable mostly for its endearing cover, on which Bowie posed as a reclining odalisque in a silk dress, his extravagantly long curls nearly brushing his bony cleavage.
Bowie got married in 1970 to a flamboyant London scenester named Angela Barnet, and the couple had a son, Zowie, the next year while Bowie put together "Hunky Dory." Seemingly all at once, he developed both a sense of humor and a consistently accessible pop sense. About half the album is either obscurantist or cutesy, but there are enough gems to make it the first indispensable Bowie album. "Changes" is his theme song by default, and it's pretty brash for someone who'd had only moderate success in the past: "Oh look out, all you rock 'n' rollers!" "Oh! You Pretty Things" was a warm-up for the next and boldest step of Bowie's career, proclaiming a common bond between conquering aliens and the antsy teenagers of the world. And Bowie's Velvet Underground tribute, "Queen Bitch," sounded the first blast of the raunched-up, homoerotic bubble-gum tease that was about to change his fortunes.
