On Bowie

by Simon Critchley

  This wasn’t a strategy that died with Ziggy onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973. It persisted right through to Bowie’s final two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar.

  On The Next Day many of the songs are written from an other’s identity, whether the menacing and dumb perpetrator of a mass shooting, as on “Valentine’s Day”, or the enigmatic persona on the final track, “Heat”. The latter has perhaps the strongest and most oblique lyric on the album, which concerns a son’s loathing for a father who either ran a prison or turned their home into a prison. There is an apparent allusion to Mishima’s Spring Snow and the following arresting image:

  Then we saw Mishima’s dog

  Trapped between the rocks

  Blocking the waterfall.

  Bowie sings repeatedly, “And I tell myself, I don’t know who I am.” The song ends with the line, “I am a seer, I am a liar.” To which we might add, Bowie is a seer because he is a liar. The truth content of Bowie’s art is not compromised by its fakery. It is enabled by it.

  Otherwise said, Bowie evokes truth through “Oblique Strategies”, which was the name given to a series of more than a hundred cards that Brian Eno created with artist Peter Schmidt in 1975. For example, during the recording of “V-2 Schneider” (the title is both a pun on the V-2 rocket that decimated parts of London in 1944 and the two core members of Kraftwerk – we two = Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider), Bowie accidentally began playing the sax on the offbeat. Just prior to the recording, he had read one of the “Oblique Strategies” cards, which read, “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” Thus the track was born. I would insist that Bowie’s lyrics demand to be understood in relation to a similar discipline of the oblique.

  In my humble opinion, authenticity is the curse of music from which we need to cure ourselves. Bowie has helped. His art is a radically contrived and reflexively aware confection of illusion whose fakery is not false, but at the service of a felt, corporeal truth. As he sings in “Quicksand”,

  Don’t believe in yourself

  Don’t deceive with belief.

  To push this a little further, perhaps music at its most theatrical, extravagant and absurd is also the truest music. It is what can save us from ourselves, from the banal fact of being in the world. Such music, Bowie’s music, can allow us to escape from being riveted to the fact of who we are, to escape from being us. For a moment, we can be lifted up, elevated and turned around. At their very highest level, songs can, with words, rhythm and often simple, nursery-rhyme melodies, begin to connect up the dots of what we think of as a life. Episodic blips. They can also allow us to think of another life.

  As fragile and inauthentic as our identities are, Bowie let us (and still lets us) believe that we can reinvent ourselves. In fact, we can reinvent ourselves because our identities are so fragile and inauthentic. Just as Bowie seemingly reinvented himself without limits, he allowed us to believe that our own capacity for changes was limitless. Of course, there are limits – profound limits, mortal limits – in reshaping who we are. But somehow, in listening to his songs – even now – one hears an extraordinary hope that we are not alone and this place can be escaped, just for a day.

  BACK THEN, WHEN I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD, although I couldn’t have put any of it into words (I didn’t have many words; my family rarely talked about anything apart from football, TV and the contents of the emergently hegemonic Sun newspaper and the evergreen-until-it-was-killed News of the World), Bowie showed us another way of being a boy or a girl or something else entirely. Bowie-as-Ziggy recalibrated sexuality in a way that was debauched but distilled, decidedly racy but also refined. It was a kind of degenerate asceticism. Whatever sexuality was on display, it was not the kind of hairy 1960s variety that our parents were becoming accustomed to through grainy, badly lit sex scenes in the movies or the terrifyingly hirsute illustrations in Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex. This was a kind of alien sex, literally like the sex scene in The Man Who Fell to Earth where Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton removes his eyelids, nipples and genitals before showing his true, alien form to his girlfriend Mary-Lou. She is completely horrified. They both decide to get drunk.

  Alienation was confronted through a confrontation with the alien. For me, it was learning how to come into an already alienated sexuality by loving the alien. When we eventually worked our way back through Bowie’s pre-Ziggy catalogue, we learned to call such states “ch-ch-ch-ch-changes”, where “we turn and face the strange”. What can I say? It made sense like nothing else I’d experienced. True, this whole trope of androgyny and floating boy/girl identities became completely vulgarised in the horrors of British glam rock, with bands like the Sweet, Gary Glitter and the execrable Mud. By the time Bowie’s “Rebel, Rebel” was released early in 1974 with the line, “You’ve got your mother in a whirl / Coz she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl”, it was clear that the game was up. Todd Haynes’s lovingly evocative film Velvet Goldmine (1998) gets the mood of these years absolutely right.

  Bowie’s bold act of creative/destructive genius was very simple: having got millions of kids like me to believe in the illusion of Ziggy as some Nietzschean Übermensch figure, he destroyed him. He killed Ziggy onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon on July 3 1973, three days short of the anniversary of his 1972 appearance on Top of the Pops. Ziggy had lasted barely a year. Having created the illusion of the superman, he then popped it like a balloon.

  Of course, had we not been kids or if we’d been as clever as Bowie at the time, we could have seen this coming. The Man Who Sold the World – an important and misunderstood album in my view – ends with a track called “The Supermen”. Bowie asks, who are the Nietzschean supermen, these creatures that have left behind the human condition? Far from paradise and way to the east of Eden, they lead

  Tragic endless lives

  Could heave nor sigh in solemn perverse serenity

  Wondrous beings chained to life.

  The more-than-human, infinite life of the superman is a cruel torture. All he craves is a chance to die.

  Here we begin to see a productive tension in Bowie’s work. On the one hand, the fantasy of the superman is a tragic disaster that craves only what he can’t have: death. Therefore, Ziggy’s suicide is a kind of release from that fantasy after having traversed it experientially. On the other hand, as Bowie writes in “After All”, also from The Man Who Sold the World, “Man is an obstacle, sad as the clown (oh by jingo).”

  The overcoming of the human condition is a disaster, yet man is still an obstacle. We’re human, all-too-human, and yet long to overcome that condition. Much of Bowie’s work circles obsessively around this dilemma.

  How does one live with and within this tension and the restlessness and disquiet that it induces? The next line of “After All” is revealing: “So hold on to nothing, and he won’t let you down (oh by jingo).” I want to hold on to this figure of nothing as I think it gives us a clue for understanding a persistent feature of Bowie’s work. The word nothing keeps recurring in his words and the affects that those words seek to mark. For example, in “‘Heroes’”, Bowie sings, “We’re nothing and nothing can help us.”

  At the core of Bowie’s music is the exhilaration of an experience of nothing and the attempt to hold on to it. This doesn’t mean that Bowie is a nihilist. Au contraire.

  CONSIDER BOWIE’S UNDERRATED, FIRST 1969 hit, “Space Oddity” (or odd ditty: it is a fascinating conjecture, following Nicholas Pegg, that Major Tom was Tom Major, the father of former British Prime Minister John Major, whose name would have appeared on various variety bills in Brixton, where young David Jones, later Bowie, was born). Major Tom goes into space and becomes a media commodity. (“The papers want to know whose shirts you wear.”) But rather than being overjoyed at having exceeded the terrestrial limit of the human condition, Major Tom withdraws into melancholic inaction.

  The epic political comedy of the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969 becomes a one-act tragic farce called Hamlet in Space. Ye
t, unlike the melancholy Dane, Major Tom’s suicidal desire is not underwritten by an appeal to any transcendent deity. Hamlet’s first lines onstage are “That the Everlasting had not fixed his canon ’gainst self-slaughter” (Bowie assumed the persona of Hamlet to great effect, holding Yorick’s skull when he sang “Cracked Actor” during the David Live tour in 1974). Against this, Major Tom passively intones,

  I’m feeling very still

  And I think my spaceship knows which way to go

  Tell my wife I love her very much

  She knows.

  Going into space leads to a successful suicide attempt, which leaves Major Tom finally inert, holding on to nothing.

  Planet Earth is blue

  And there’s nothing I can do.

  In a beautifully reflexive gesture, “Ashes to Ashes” from 1980 provides a perspicuous commentary on this moment in “Space Oddity”:

  Ashes to ashes, funk to funky

  We know Major Tom’s a junky

  Strung out in heavens high

  Hitting an all-time low.

  Of course, these words are self-referential, where the “all-time low” is both the title of Bowie’s 1977 album, Low, and the experience that album tries to evoke and escape: depression caused by drug addiction. It would appear that Major Tom had been popping more than protein pills.

  The flipside of the blissful inaction of “Space Oddity” is the messianic promise of “Starman”, waiting in the sky. Although “he’d like to come and meet us,” the song continues, the Starman thinks “he’d blow our minds”. So, we don’t have direct contact with the Starman. We just hear about him from his prophet, Ziggy. The point is that the Messiah doesn’t come and anything that has the redemptive patina of a God-man, whether Ziggy or Major Tom or indeed Bowie himself, has to die.

  ONE OF THE STRANGEST MOMENTS IN THE history of British popular music is Peter Noone’s cover version of “Oh! You Pretty Things”, which did pretty well on the UK charts in 1971. Noone (whose name wonderfully splits open into “no one” – a little like Odysseus’s reply to the Cyclops Polyphemus) had been the frontman of the oddly named but hugely successful Herman’s Hermits. Noone displayed a truly bravura lack of understanding of Bowie’s lyrics, which are replete with references to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. More precisely, the song asserts the uselessness of homo sapiens and the need to make way for the homo superior. Admittedly, this is all framed in a rather cheap, British, BBC, Doctor Who version of the future. But the point is clear enough: the extraterrestrial strangers have come to take our children toward a non-human future. For us, the nightmare has begun and “We’ve finished our news.”

  Funniest of all, fearful of radio censorship, Noone replaced Bowie’s “the earth is a bitch” with the apparently more upbeat “the earth is a beast” (but a bitch is a beast, you might quip). The basis, the constant, the ground of Bowie’s most important work is that the world is screwed, used up, old and done. The earth is a dying dog that awaits its beating from a new master. Bowie’s vision is continually dystopian. One can hear this in the pre-apocalyptic melancholy of “Five Years”, or indeed in post-apocalyptic visions like “Drive-In Saturday”. In the latter, the survivors of a nuclear catastrophe live in vast domes in the western desert of the USA using old movies in order to reenact what they imagine ordinary life was like before the war, “Like the video films we saw.” But, of course, what is created in this reenactment is not the past, but the clichéd schlock of 1950s romantic movies, where “His name was always Buddy.”

  But the most profound and extended dystopian vision comes after the introduction of Gysin’s cut-up method in Diamond Dogs in April 1974, what Peter Doggett calls Bowie’s “dark study in cultural disintegration.” Whatever judgments we might make about Bowie’s musical development, Diamond Dogs is a courageous conceptual step into new territory. To my mind, it is the album where Bowie finally rids himself of the ghost of Ziggy and begins the rich and speedy series of aesthetic transformations that will carry through until Scary Monsters in 1980. Despite its obvious, repeated acts of homage to the Rolling Stones, particularly through Bowie’s wonderfully scratchy and slightly twisted Keith Richards guitar imitations, the album pushes past whatever rock ’n’ roll had been, slashing and mutilating it before carting it off to the graveyard: “This ain’t rock ’n’ roll. This is genocide.”

  I remember looking at the cover of the album, where Bowie is stretched out, half-Great Dane, half-human, for what seemed like hours in the window of our local record store. Then, inside the listening booth (such places still existed at the time), I heard the opening track, “Future Legend”, where the howls of wolves ran alongside the tune from “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”, which I knew from one of my mother’s Sinatra albums.

  Inspired by Burroughs’s Wild Boys, with marauding gangs carrying eighteen-inch bowie knives that cut two ways, a premonition of the suburban boys and girls who would hit the streets of sundry decaying British cities in the riotous days of punk, Diamond Dogs begins with the prophecy of “Future Legend”. Bowie’s words also cut two ways:

  Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats

  the size of cats

  And ten thousand peoploids split

  into small tribes

  Coveting the highest of the sterile skyscrapers

  Like packs of dogs assaulting the glass

  fronts of Love-Me Avenue

  Ripping and rewrapping mink and shiny

  silver fox, now legwarmers

  Family badge of sapphire and cracked emerald

  Any day now the year of the diamond dogs.

  Bowie has a vision of the world as ruined: complete civilisational collapse. Here is a picture of urban space prior to gentrification (bliss it was to be alive in that twilight), a space of crime and inverted consumerism. Tramps wear diamonds, silver fox fur becomes legwarmers, heraldic emblems of jewels become rich trash to be draped around freakish peoploids.

  BOWIE’S ALBUMS OFTEN HAVE TRACES OF MUSICAL styles that are being abandoned, like outworn skins, alongside the premonition of something new that would find voice in future work. In Diamond Dogs, the songs “Rebel, Rebel” and “Rock ’n’ Roll With Me” belong to that past, and arguably the soulful, Isaac Hayes-influenced wah-wah guitar of “1984” points forward toward Young Americans. But the real innovations are the nine-minute sequence of “Sweet Thing,” “Candidate” and “Sweet Thing (Reprise)” and the nightmarishly brilliant “We Are the Dead” (and we could also make a good case for “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family”; on the original vinyl version of Diamond Dogs that I owned in the 1970s, the needle would get stuck at the end of the track, emitting an endless and increasingly disturbing “bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro”).

  In the dead diamond dog world of Halloween Jack (one of the personae on the album), sex is no longer some transgressive excitement. It is “putting pain in a stranger”. Its image, like a Bacon painting, is “a portrait in flesh, who trails on a leash.” If this is a world of flesh, then that flesh is dying. We find here an almost paranoid-schizophrenic picture of the world as extinct, rotting and in need of redemption. This is the kind of world that we find in President Schreber’s deliciously strange delusions in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, or the inhabitants of R. D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall free asylum in London in the late 1960s: “Can’t you tell I’m dead? I can smell the flesh rotting.”

  Perhaps there is also some memory of the world of Bowie’s schizophrenic half-brother, Terry Burns, from whom he learned so much so early (about jazz, about Jack Kerouac, about wandering around seedy Soho in London), and who, after he had been institutionalised in a mental hospital for many years, somehow thought that David could save him. Terry Burns killed himself in January 1985 at Coulsdon South railway station, south of London, by putting his head on the rails and waiting for the train to approach. Bowie set off a family feud and media storm by not attending the funeral. He didn’t want to turn it into a circus. The note on Bowie’
s bouquet was extremely poignant: “You’ve seen more things than we can imagine, but all these moments will be lost – like tears washed away by the rain.”

  It has often been said that there is something of the psychotic in Bowie, which I rather doubt. Bowie was not a lad insane. If such psychotic tendencies exist, then – as with Joyce in Finnegans Wake or as with Artaud in his Theatre of Cruelty – they are sublimated into art. Thanks to his art, maybe he’s not crazy, or so crazy. The constant references to madness, paranoia and delusion, particularly in the early tracks on The Man Who Sold the World, are a musical transformation of its terrors, even the crazy, closing, canine chant to “All the Madmen”: “Zane, zane, zane. Ouvrez le chien.”

  That said, a mad, dead half-brother is a kind of shadow figure, and a history of madness in a family, as seems to have been the case with Bowie’s mother, Margaret Mary Burns, is a terrifying thing. We are the dead. The air is full of their cries.

  “Is it nice in your snow storm, freezing your brain?” Bowie asks. It’s the exhilarating bleakness of Bowie’s vision in Diamond Dogs that pulls me in with its dirty claws. As the protagonist in the track “Candidate” walks through his film set that “even smells like a street”, he boasts,

  Someone scrawled on the wall,

  “I smell the blood of les tricoteuses”

  Who wrote up scandals in other bars.

  The tricoteuses were the insurrectionary, working-class Parisian women who cheered on executions during the Terror of 1793 to 1794 while watching the surgically precise work of Madame Guillotine. “Candidate” builds with a terrifying lyrical force, painting the picture of a world of exploitation, decay and rape: