I feel I pegged something in S+A when I noted the relative dearth of "humanly useful" songs in the Bowie uuurv. You can dance and you can singalong, and you can be fascinated by him and his journey - but how many can you actually relate to your own life? It's a very self-involved body o' work really, much of its effectiveness dependent on how invested you are in David Bowie in the first place.
An editor I once had claimed to have minimal time for popular music but averred that DB was self-evidently the most interesting man in pop. But what if you simply don't share that feeling? What songs are there that are like "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" or "Jump" or "More Than A Feeling" or "Jack and Diane" - tunes that touch on something that everyone has felt at some point in their lives?
There's "Heroes", for a coat of grandeur to drape around whatever you're doing (that's why it's big in weddings)
"Life On Mars?", if you're feeling crushed by mundanity.
"Rebel Rebel," if you fancy yourself a bit.
But an awful lot of it is about being David Bowie, about where David Bowie was in his life at that point. And few of us indeed are in the same boat as David Bowie.
There's also a lot of songs that relate not to Bowie being the most interesting man in pop, but the most interested man in pop - songs that reflect his cultural interests and tastes and obsessions. "Joe the Lion", etc. That's one place where I do identify with Bowie, at least in the abstract - in so far as having loads and loads of interests, mostly in a fairly scatterbrain way, with things that are nothing to do with me, really, beyond that rather distanced intrigue and fascination.
But again, unless you happen to share Bowie's specific interests, what are you supposed to do with a song like "Joe the Lion"?
People who go on about the greatness of "Station to Station" as a song - I always wonder what is it actually saying to them? What do they feel when they listen to it? It's a particularly chronic example of DB as "man interested in lots of things" - here exacerbated by vast amounts of cocaine and the unmoored, unhealthy, borderline-insane lifestyle he was living in LA. He happened to be perusing books on magic and the occult, but when you're on coke, a piece of lint can be enthralling.
Another category is the garbled or condensed mini-screenplay song or spooky / sci-fi short story with a beat ("Drive-In Saturday", "The Man Who Sold the World", etc). These are fine as far as they go, I suppose.
But in terms of stuff that actually affects me, it's the really abjectly depressed or paranoid, broken-up stuff - "Fame" and Low and "Ashes to Ashes". Here something achingly real cuts through the biographic specifics.
Don't get me wrong, so much of it sounds simply glorious - "Suffragette City", "Golden Years', "Up the Hill Backwards", scores more - but yes, I rarely come away with a feeling as such.
Kristian Hoffman, of the Mumps and Lance Loud fame, once had a long list of his influences on his MySpace page, and it was headed with (paraphrasing) 'BOWIE - not a single human feeling, but you can't argue with that back catalog'.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little more forgiving towards him, but it's not wrong to see him as , in effect, a musical dramatist who exposes his actual emotions obliquely if at all. Even 'David Bowie' himself is a feint, a mask to hide the suburban jazz/science fiction fan and weekend Buddhist Jones.(which meant that 'personas' like Ziggy or the Thin White Duke were, in fact, masks over masks)
I think the only pop singer/songwriter who spent as much time explicitly singing 'as' other people is Randy Newman - the key differences being that Newman didn't extend it to a stage persona, and his intent was generally (though not always) satirical, which more sharply differentiated the distance between singer and songwriter. You can't confuse the first-person perspective of 'Rednecks' with Newman's actual feelings, but it's slipperier determining how sincere Bowie is at any given time (a big reason Station to Station is how it is is because Bowie himself, driven into psychosis by coke, starvation, and isolation, lost the ability to differentiate)
Deletehaha, I'm glad this is not a completely aberrant feeling about DB!
ReplyDelete(Kristian did a very nice interview with me for S+A and showed me this amazing scrapbook of his glam fandom during the era, in particular his Dolls obsession) (He's also of Klaus Nomi musical-director fame so glam for life).
I think Greil Marcus has a similar sort of feeling about Bowie - in a colloquy we once did for a mag, I mentioned what my publisher/editor had said about B as most interesting man in pop (it might actually have been the most interesting man in the world, now I think of it), and GM said something like "that's his problem, he tries so hard to be the most interesting man in pop". Like, that's all there is to it.
I have derived so much pleasure from Bowie's music and I do find him fascinating / interesting - but this is something I have noticed when you compare to similar-level Rock Greats. Partly it's because he rarely does a love song, as such. But if you think about the Stones, there's nothing in Bowie equivalent to "Gimme Shelter" or "You Can't Always Get What You Want" . Or Springsteen with "Dancing in the Dark". Bowie doesn't do universality, hardly ever, and if it comes about, it's almost an accidental by-product of a song that is really very specific in what it's about, as with "'Heroes'".
It's not a prerequisite for an artist by any means, there's lots of self-involved, self-reflexive, wrapped-up-in-own-private-world cult figures. But usually when a singer gets to be that huge, it's because there's a common touch aspect to the work.
It's a wonder that Bowie (pre-Let's Dance, anyway) got even moderate cult success somewhere like the US, because, yeah, he doesn't really let you in on a straightforward level. I think the key is that how he does let you in is through shared enthusiasm - he's the quintessential gateway artist, bringing kids into queer culture or modern art or weird books or whatever through a gap in the mainstream. That can have less appeal the older you are though, which partially explains why artsy alienated teenagers were and are his most devoted audience, and why he tends to go down a few points in esteem as one ages (I do see where Greil is coming from)
DeleteThat is a great observation. And yet... Bowie's fans obviously did and do have a passionate attachment to him. Look at the crowd in the famous last show of the Ziggy Stardust tour. It's not just an intellectual interest in this fascinating character.
ReplyDeleteThere is obviously something about him that people respond to very deeply, even if it's not "he's just like me" or "he understands how sad I was that time". I don't quite feel it myself - I would count myself as an intrigued fan, not a heartfelt one - but it is definitely there.
Who else has that same quality? Surprisingly few successful bands, now I come to think of it. Siouxsie and the Banshees would be one. Unlike the Cure, interestingly, whose repertoire is nothing but little emotional vignettes.
DeleteI honestly think a huge part of it is his looks. He's beautiful but it's a slightly gaunt and unsettling beauty. The vampiric teeth. He's not your typical pin up - there's a suggestion of enigmatic qualities. And it's something that cuts across sexuality - like with Morrissey, where a lot of his core fans were straight boys but there's no doubt there's an element of crush to the fandom. The young Morrissey has this luminous quality. Bowie likewise brings something out in hetero boys - it's not just simple identification or aspiration, it's a genuine aesthetic awe for the singer as a physical being. But it's equally appealing, with slightly different inflections, to hetero women and queer people of every conceivable denomination.
DeletePlus, tunes. His melodies are unique - not being a musician I can't put my finger on it, but tunes that no one else has (although the Bowie-seque is a certainly phenomenon). Combined with the voice, which he often pushes into quite overwraught, verging on unpleasant zones. Perhaps it appeals to the dramatic side of people - rather like Kate Bush. Inside, I am - or could be - this tempestuous and soaring. (As I've grown older and more stolid, I sometimes respond to this kind of thing with a "oh, give over, will you!". I have more time and taste for an Alan Bennett-ish reserve and restraint, the prosaic).
ReplyDeleteSo in pop terms that would be... Pete Shelley perhaps.
DeleteI would think Bowie chiefly appeals as An Example To Aim Towards. Can't think of many other pop stars who are like this, maybe Prince or Jimi Hendrix.
ReplyDeleteI can think of a few examples in other realms, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger or Muhammed Ali. Quite a few in the political and religious spheres I think.
The point of these people is that you can't be them or even match them, but they can show you that you can possibly reach somewhere beyond what you could otherwise conceive. So for example, a lot of the Bowie clones were really pretty good, if not on the same plane as Dave.
So the Bowies of this world aren't relatable in a personal experience sense, but they are relatable in that they might ignite something dormant in your soul.
Yes, someone suffering from his own superhero complex, but who actually - externally - appears to become one.
DeleteI'm not sure it's just that. I've seen a number of people mention how Bowie triggered something in them that they didn't even know existed. I think Holly Johnson said that about the famous TOTP performance of Starman - that it changed the way he thought about the world, about his own possibilities. I suspect that it might have been the case that Bowie birthed superhero complexes in people who hitherto considered themselves perfectly ordinary.
DeleteNo, I meant that Bowie himself had this desperation to be more-than-human - he's talked about feeling puny and insignificant - and then, as far as his fans were concerned, he actually became something supramundane. So yeah, to your point, that would ignite a sense of the possibilities within those watching an impressionable age. A benchmark to aim for. Much in the same way that watching a great athlete or boxer might ignite that drive to attain the summit of the world.
DeleteIt's all very Ayn Rand really. And also relates to Thomas Carlyle's book on Heroes and the Heroic, which I read for S+A, found quite stirring and then discovered that he's considered as somehow who prepared the intellectual ground for fascism.
Carlyle talks about hero-archy - it's a Great Men view of history.
I suppose you could say given these impulses exist, on the part of both would-be heroes and would-be idolizers, the healthiest place for them to be vented is in sports and in entertainment.
One of the most poignant phases of Bowie's career - although the music is wretched - is Tin Machine, where he tries to subsume himself as just one member of a band. The album covers feature all four, unlike his solo records where it's always his face and body. And in the interview he would make a big thing of everyone in the group speaking - frustrating the journalists, who as Bowie fanboys had hoped for a tete a tete with their hero.
DeleteI think he also started to take on this "I am just an English bloke" persona. Almost like one of those Peter Cook and Dudley Moore characters.
It reminds me of a thing World of Twist told me about recording at Peter Gabriel's studio, how he would potter in and make them cups of tea and strenuously do this "hi, I'm Pete" kind of strained normalcy routine.
Regarding the fascism thing, of course The Residents and Laibach made great play of the fascistic undertones within popular music.
DeleteBut I think there's a huge (and justified) paranoia about fascism and nazism - loads of things tend to get falsely labelled as proto-fascist or neo-fascist etc. which don't deserve to be, but the principle has to be "you can't be too careful".
This leads to the disturbing thought that maybe you need a slight fascist streak to be capable of achieving anything.
The tunes are easier to explain - it's the 'jazz fan' element I mentioned above. The last recordings are where it fully came out, but it was a lifelong passion (Nile Rodgers, who grew up with a percussionist father and counted Thelonious Monk as a family friend, was mildly impressed by the obscurity of his knowledge) and it emerged in an attraction to very offbeat modulations and chord progressions. Once you get past the 'iconic' nature of it, the riff to something like 'Ziggy Stardust' is incredibly odd - start-stop, jagged, chromatic beyond what you would expect a hard rock guitar riff to be.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you're right. Yet weirdly I don't recall much in the DB songbook that seems overtly jazzy, in the vocal delivery or the instrumentation. Okay. there's quite a bit of sax in the mid-70s but I think of that kind of sax playing as Saturday Night Live theme music. Well, David Sanborn invented that style, didn't he? It's become the default sound of late night chat shows in America.
DeleteBut what am I forgetting in DB's work? I can't think of anything that is overtly "jazz" in the way that, say, Siouxsie's "Cocoon" on Kiss in the Dreamhouse is jazz? Or even what's his name on the Stooges Funhouse blowing freeform....
It does come out overtly in Blackstar, the jazz-love, admittedly.
I was listening to Goldie's Saturn Returnz and the Bowie cameo on "Truth" is a premonition of the ghostly wavering voice on "Blackstar" the title track..
It's less about using jazz instrumentation and more about the chords he uses. His harmonic choices can be a bit unusual for rock musician (chord extensions, dims, augs, odd voicings). He's not trying to copy Charlie Parker but he is obviously attracted to the dissonance and "spice" they add to what are otherwise conventional rick songs. They crank up the weirdness.
DeleteRight - it's not a full crossover so much as jazz language in a rock context, which also helped when he started working in soul and funk in the mid 70s.
DeleteDoesn't the empathisable utility of a song depend on who is doing the interpreting? People will necessarily make associations and connections with songs that the artist in no way intended, and will have experiences that will colour how they view songs, so Bowie's work may have been rather solipsistic, but other people just hearing them would bestow human uses to them. Compare it to Steve Harley's Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me): an exceptionally bitter song where plenty just listen to the chorus and consider it cheeky and saucy. And so what?
ReplyDeleteDoesn't the explicitly commercial nature of the Let's Dance album make it a counterexample to your contention? I'd say there are quite a few songs on it that fulfil that category of being employable by ordinary folk as a emphasiser of their emotions. Also, from what I understand about its making, the presence of Nile Rodgers meant that there was a significant jazz undercurrent to the album e.g., the horns on Modern Love. And I might be putting my neck on the block here, but I'd actually say Let's Dance is the most undervalued of Bowie's albums, and the actual last album of Bowie's classic album streak (and not its predecessor, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps). At the very least, it's firmly a Bowie album, an album only Bowie could have made.
I guess so but that just emphasizes that the human relatibility aspect is not of Bowie's doing, and conceivably it's not any kind of concern to him.
DeletePeople do all kinds of things to and with songs. But then if the argument is that anyone can make anything at all out of any song, that would lead to a consumer-based solipsism just as empty as an artist-driven solipsism. Each punter locked in their own little bubble of mishearings, mis-construings, wholly individual interpretations. Whereas one of the ways popular culture works is that people share in the same meanings and understandings of what song is. So for instance all kinds of people from many different backgrounds and political worldviews would be able to get what "Jack and Diane" is saying ("life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone" etc) or what "More Than Feeling" addresses (the succour provided by music in anyone's life). The whole point of a common culture is communication, a feeling or idea transmitted and picked up by a receiver - a community of receivers. The community might be transitory and the only thing it coheres around is a hit song, but it's still a shared understanding of the song.
I don't get anything at all off "Modern Love" - it's just bouncy inanity to me.
Delete"Let's Dance" is a very odd song. Bowie sings what appears to be an attempt some kind of timeless romantic scenario, almost harking back to the 1930s - but his delivery is wooden, stilted, more dead than alive. And in the latter part of the song he sounds haggard, overwraught almost to the point of agony. It's as though the cliches of this ye olde romance are huge boulders he's forced to lug around. "Put on your red shoes and dance the blues" sounds like doggerel. You could almost imagine him feeling "gotta do this, gotta get a monster hit". I mean, I like the song but it's very far from a straightforward emotional communication. And as if to underline his disconnection from all this hearts-and-flowers type language, the video is about something completely different - basically a miniature version of Nic Roeg's Walkabout, indigenous Australians rejecting the corruptions of Western civilisation. The red shoes get stamped on at the end! Which again suggests a distanced feeling about the lingo and lore of love.
The best line is "serious moonlight" - I always took that as Bowie picking on what ABC had done with Lexicon of Love. Playing with romantic cliches: an exhausted language of love versus "the reason it's a cliche is because it's true" idea. Martin Fry was writing about the damage caused by these ideas of romance, as a wounded lover.
I can't remember anything else about Let's Dance the album. "China Girl" is nice enough - that was written by Iggy Pop, though. He can speak in the common tongue well enough.
Those are all from side 1. Are you sure you remembered to flip it over to side 2? No wonder you couldn't recall the rest of it.
DeleteThey are also the three singles off the album, which could mean that I didn't even play Side 1!
DeleteBut no, I have at some point listened to the album all the way through but it left so little impression on me that I don't remember which tunes are on which side or what the other tunes are. Which would you argue are worth reconsideration?
I did love "Let's Dance" the song at the time and thought the video was brilliant. It's only recently when hearing it on the radio as an oldie that it struck me as a strange song - he doesn't sound like he's having fun, it's at odds with the rest of the music. The vocal seems to pick up from some of the pushed-to-the-edge-of-unpleasant-sounding thing he does with the voice on Scary Monsters, especially the screechy first track.
I think a fair few from the late-70s jump out...first side of Low has plenty of relatable bits of isolated/depressed poetry ("Sound and Vision" has that neurasthenic-aesthete thing going, "Must have been touching close to 94 [round the hotel garage]" always gets me as evocative of a particular desperate-numb-manic state, even some of the instrumentals—"Subterraneans" feels like a meditation on life and death itself). "Fantastic Voyage" from Lodger feels quite human ("learning to live with somebody's depression", "but I'm still getting educated", nuclear anxiety, that anthemic "HOW CAN I??") but it's also a bit of an outlier on that LP.
ReplyDeleteFurther back, "Word on a Wing" from Station has (for me) a very convincing undercurrent of melodramatic-existential despair that Bowie scrambles to stave off w his Nietzschian uber-romance, feels like the moment the Thin White Duke mask comes off and reveals the horrifying void underneath. "Stay" maybe has some of that energy too. Even the Young Americans LP often seems surprisingly genuine in its simulations of basic human emotion imo, even through the white soul caricature.
Maybe those last examples are indeed bound up in concern for his persona, masks etc, but perhaps also just with the performance of whiteness in general—the soulless vampiric quality he exemplified itself feels like a direct insight into the existential condition of the White Dilettante as such, which is probably why his persona has (for many, at least) felt like more than mere cerebral rock-star-as-concept performance art
Ah, realize now you already mentioned Low in the OP
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