The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  None of this activity threatened to harm his reputation, or widen his horizons. His most adventurous work during this strange interlude was also, in financial terms, the least rewarding. In September 1981, he transferred the skills he had acquired during The Elephant Man to British television, delivering a strikingly low-key performance as the star of the BBC’s staging of Bertolt Brecht’s musical drama Baal. The four Brecht/Weill songs from the drama were released as a single; like “Alabama Song” [218], they suggested that the post-“Heroes” Bowie was never more himself than when articulating other people’s themes. His performances displayed staggering vocal control and extravagant theatricality, an almost arrogant self-confidence and sure-footedness, and total artistic certainty. These qualities would prove elusive in the decade ahead.

  II

  In March 1960, the performance artist Gustav Metzger issued a manifesto proclaiming the necessity of creating “Auto-Destructive Art.” It was, he declared, the only valid response to a world in which the superpowers stockpiled nuclear weapons, the population of the West wallowed in consumerism, the Third World starved, and society exerted a “disintegrative effect” on its citizens. Metzger defined auto-destruction as “art which contains in itself an agent which automatically leads to its destruction within a period of time not to exceed twenty years.”

  Auto-destruction entered the world of rock music via Pete Townshend of the Who, who studied under Metzger at Ealing College of Art and borrowed his teacher’s rhetoric to justify destroying his guitar as the climax to the band’s performances. By the late seventies, however, rock appeared to be enacting its own process of auto-destruction, true to Metzger’s twenty-year deadline. The apparently seamless tradition of what would later be called “classic rock” was splintering under the pressure of cocaine-fueled decadence and the incursion of new musical genres (notably punk, disco, and the first stirrings of hip-hop). In truth, there had been disruptive and transgressive elements at work throughout the history of rock: what had fragmented was rock culture’s sense of certainty and identity, the “great man” theory of its history that imagined the music progressing endlessly from Elvis Presley through Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones to (in one common reading of the rock narrative) Bruce Springsteen and perhaps Bob Marley.

  The eternal outsider of the seventies, David Bowie escaped inclusion in this tradition, not least because his continual shifts of style and sound evaded easy categorization. In the aftermath of punk, when nothing was less fashionable than to admit a debt to the monoliths of the previous era, Bowie was one of the few veterans who could be acknowledged without loss of face. His mark was unmistakable on the gloomy art rock of Siouxsie & the Banshees, Joy Division, and the Cure; on the synthetic landscapes of the New Romantics; on the continual reinvention and sexual ambiguity that fueled the stardom of Madonna and Prince. So prevalent, indeed, was his influence in the music of the early eighties that his own creative absence was barely noticeable.

  He would soon reappear in spectacular style, not as an innovator but as an institution. Bowie celebrated the expiration of his contractual obligations in late 1982 by beginning work on his first new album in three years. His choice of producer was significant: Tony Visconti, his collaborator on a series of sonically challenging records, was sidelined in favor of Nile Rodgers, writer/guitarist for the New York band Chic. Rodgers’s trademarks were a sparse, slippery disco groove and a dazzling surface sheen. Both qualities were in evidence on Let’s Dance, an impeccably crafted and effortlessly commercial record that duly became the best-selling album of Bowie’s career. Throughout, his vocals were subtle and transparent, seeming to be devoid of artifice. So too was the epic world tour that followed, in which the once deathly cocaine addict of the mid-seventies was miraculously transformed into a paragon of vitality and well-being, the gleam of his refashioned teeth rivaled only by the bleached glow of his hair. Though his repertoire mixed new hits with old, and was ecstatically received, there was no hint in this revamped Bowie of the tortured, ambivalent artist of old. It was as if he had exiled his questing, experimental spirit as an uncomfortable relic of an age that he preferred to forget. The Bowie of Let’s Dance (and the clumsily titled Serious Moonlight Tour) questioned nothing, risked nothing, stood for nothing. He had finally become the all-round entertainer of Kenneth Pitt’s dreams, his cabaret aspirations of 1968 expanded to fill the stadia of 1983.

  Once again, Bowie was in perfect tune with the times: the mid-eighties was the era of Armani rock, when the mavericks of yesteryear refashioned themselves as show ponies for the world’s most celebrated designers, and the rhetoric of rock rebellion became the sanitized language of mass entertainment. If Bowie retained enough dignity to sidestep the constant round of Prince’s Trust concerts inhabited by the likes of Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, and Mark Knopfler, he was still offering merely the palest shadow of his former iconoclasm. More worryingly, he had shed any sense of artistic integrity. As the decade unfolded, each creative misfire seemed to corrode his former glory. In 1969, some Beatles fans had chosen to believe that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash in 1966, and an imposter had been substituted in his place. Albums as bereft of inspiration as Tonight (except for “Loving the Alien,” perhaps) and Never Let Me Down suggested that the real Bowie had been stuffed into a closet after the completion of Baal and supplanted by a stray replicant from the 1982 movie Blade Runner. The faux Bowie fumbled with the familiar symbolism of the genuine model, thereby concocting the preposterous Glass Spider Tour (a triumph of effects over effectiveness) instead of the Spiders from Mars, and a succession of haircuts and costumes that alluded to the uncanny strangeness of the seventies Bowie without any of its mystery.

  In commercial terms, Bowie had never been more successful or, arguably, more influential, as critic Nicholas Pegg noted: “The cutting-edge ensemble choreography which soon became de rigeur among stadium superstars like Prince, Madonna and Jacksons Michael and Janet (not to mention the relentless parade of synchro-dancing boy bands), owes a tremendous debt to Glass Spider.” But having deposited his checks, and basked in the knowledge that he was finally achieving the monetary security that had evaded him throughout the seventies, Bowie was left curiously unsatisfied. The result was Tin Machine, a much-maligned attempt to sublimate his identity within a four-piece hard rock band, and rekindle a sense of personal connection with his music. Tin Machine’s two studio records inspired some of the most effective vocal performances of his career, but his commitment to them was undermined when they were overshadowed by another blatant exercise in milking nostalgia for money: the 1990 Sound + Vision Tour. Explained at the time as a last opportunity to hear Bowie performing his greatest hits (a promise that predictably was not kept), this mammoth venture in stadium rock seemed to denote that he would no longer pretend to be an innovator or an explorer: like the Rolling Stones, he would sell the memory of his rebellious youth until he or his audience ceased to care or breathe.

  III

  Tin Machine stopped working in February 1992. Two months later, Bowie appeared alongside Mick Ronson at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in London, closing his performance not with “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” as Ziggy Stardust would have done, but with an impromptu recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Religion had been absent from Bowie’s work since “Word on a Wing” [128]: orthodox Christianity did not form part of his public image. So his recitation was perhaps the single most shocking moment of his career: utterly sincere, totally in keeping with the ethos of the occasion, completely at odds with the totemic clichés of the classic rock tradition. Sadly, none of that defiant individualism was apparent on the album that followed: Black Tie/White Noise reunited Bowie with Nile Rodgers, with predictably slick and unfulfilling results.

  After ten years that had brought him unimaginable wealth but little artistic satisfaction, he was offered the glimmer of inspiration from an unlikely source. Hanif Kureishi invited Bowie to provide the soundtrack for a BBC-TV adaptation of his nov
el The Buddha of Suburbia, which was rooted in the South London culture from which Bowie had emerged and the mercurial London milieu he had helped to create. Bowie duly delivered an assortment of incidental music and a title song that brilliantly combined his own past with Kureishi’s themes, evoking the full span of his seventies work. His commitment to the TV series ended there, but Bowie returned to the studio three months later to rework and extend several of his incidental pieces, emerging after less than a week with a completed album. Erroneously packaged as a soundtrack record for The Buddha of Suburbia, it mixed cut-up “sound poetry” with explorations of ambient sound reminiscent of his late-seventies work, as if the mere sight of a rough cut of Kureishi’s film had been sufficient* to remind Bowie of why he had once been a creative icon.

  That flash of insight shocked Bowie out of the torpor that had surrounded him for a decade. In spring 1994, he embarked on a complex and deliberately uncommercial recording project intended to fuel a series of albums. His choice of collaborator was Brian Eno, with whom he had last worked on Lodger. Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards guided the creation of many hours of music, and Bowie employed a cut-up computer program for lyrical inspiration, ensuring that the methodology that had shaped their seventies liaisons was suitably revised for a new era of technology. Bowie emerged with 1.Outside: The Diary of Nathan Adler, the first (and last) installment of what he described as “a non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle.”

  Issued after Low and “Heroes,” in some fantasy late-seventies landscape that enabled access to mid-nineties computers and samplers, 1.Outside would have consolidated Bowie’s reputation as rock’s most fearless exponent of the avant-garde as a means of mass communication. Instead, like his four subsequent albums, 1.Outside entranced his (remarkably large) core of followers without touching or influencing anyone beyond the faithful. So it was that some of his most adventurous (1.Outside and the 1997 rock/dance crossover Earthling) and proficient (“hours . . . ,” Heathen, and Reality, issued between 1999 and 2003) records remain unheard by all but a small fraction of the global audience who had relished his seventies and early-eighties output. Ironically, Bowie did complete an album that might have reached out to that wider audience, but his record company refused to release it. Toy was scheduled to appear in 2001, but Virgin/EMI entangled Bowie in what he described as “unbelievably complicated scheduling negotiations,” and the record was lost. Several songs dripped onto the market as B-sides and bonus tracks, but it was only in spring 2011 that the entire record leaked onto Internet fan forums. Eleven of its fourteen tracks had been written or (in the case of “Liza Jane,” [A1]) first recorded by Bowie between 1964 and 1971. He approached them now in the guise of a kindly uncle left in control of an unruly pack of children. He deliberately adopted a low, husky delivery for the entire record, not because his upper register had vanished (as the subsequent Heathen and Reality proved) but perhaps to designate both his distance from the past and also his mature acceptance of his bewildering array of youthful incarnations. It was a dignified, elegantly constructed album, from a man who had survived the process of selling himself to the world, and lived to tell the tale.

  In October 2003, the fifty-six-year-old Bowie embarked on what was intended to be a solid year of touring, performing an anything but predictable mixture of material old and new. It was a punishing schedule, which took its toll on his voice, and then his health. A concert in Oslo during June 2004 was interrupted when a fan threw a lollipop at the stage and hit Bowie in the eye. Five days later, in Prague, Bowie was forced to leave the stage after suffering what was described officially as a trapped nerve. He completed one more show, in Germany, before being hospitalized for emergency heart surgery. Since then, his live appearances have been restricted to cameos, and even they dried up after he introduced comedian Ricky Gervais onstage at a New York festival in May 2007. His most recent appearance on record came the following year, as fleeting guest vocalist on Scarlett Johansson’s debut album. He chivalrously described her as “mystical and twice cool,” and then stepped into an elegant, unannounced retirement.

  IV

  In vanishing from the stage, Bowie was only repeating his effective disengagement from society in the late seventies. He exited the culture and history of that decade when he left Berlin for the closeted life of an exile, protected by wealth and fame from the vicissitudes of politics, economics, and social instability. He would continue to comment on the world around him, but necessarily as an outsider—concerned or even outraged, perhaps, but not actually affected. He inhabited a world of his own making, and made no attempt to sell that world to his audience. Indeed, his world was constructed precisely to keep the outside at bay. Instead, like every entertainer of his stature, he sold his own celebrity, and never more successfully than when he was repeating the past, rather than trying to create a future. Meanwhile, the world continued to turn, unmoved by Bowie’s inconsistent musical output, but still caught in the idealized shadow of his golden decade.

  There was no shame in that fate: few if any of his peers, especially those who enjoyed his degree of success, have maintained any sense of vitality in their careers beyond ten or at most twenty years of creative innovation. (The possible exception to this rule is Bob Dylan, for whom innovation consists of willfully defying expectations while retaining a gloriously enigmatic mystique.) In any case, innovation is hard to sustain when one’s audience clearly prefers familiar pleasures. Albums such as 1.Outside and Earthling stand up alongside the peaks of Bowie’s seventies catalogue as exercises in inventiveness and daring; what they lack is meaning, any sense that they are shaping the culture around them or engaging in a dialogue with other artists. When the world refuses to let you change, and your body tells you to stop, it is more dignified to remain silent than to fight against the inevitable.

  Bowie could be forgiven for feeling disappointed in a culture that celebrated him as a mercurial figure in a constant state of reinventing himself, and then refused to let him continue that process beyond 1980. Yet he had already achieved more in the previous decade than anyone around him, and the wider world is still assimilating the bewildering twists and curves of his trajectory through that decade. The echoes of his pioneering musical experiments have reverberated through the last thirty years—leaving their mark on the Gothic gloom of the tradition that extended from the post-punk exploits of the Cure through the industrial metal of Nine Inch Nails to the grunge rock of Nirvana and beyond. His daring synthesis of black and white genres—the rock/funk/soul hybrid that fired his classic mid-seventies albums—was assimilated so successfully into the mainstream that it was sometimes hard to remember exactly how shocking Bowie’s original innovation had been. Artists as important, yet as profoundly different, as Madonna, Kurt Cobain, U2, Radiohead, and Prince were proud to admit how indebted they were. So pervasive was the influence of Bowie’s seventies work, in fact, like that of the Beatles before him, that it has become part of the fabric of contemporary music, just as his unique sense of style, and the sexual playfulness at its heart, have helped to form our contemporary notions of fashion, art, and design.

  Yet his career has left another equally significant mark on those who followed him. Nearly forty years after he invented Ziggy Stardust, his subversive attitude toward the creation of fame still provides the likes of Lady Gaga with a template to follow. There is a valid case, in fact, for awarding Bowie the dubious credit of being the inventor of modern celebrity culture, in which a nonentity can be thrust into the maelstrom of media attention by virtue of a single appearance on a reality TV series or a talent show. But there is a profound difference between Bowie’s self-manufacturing as a superstar in the early seventies and the culture of The X Factor and Big Brother. Bowie was using stardom as a vehicle to explore deeper personal and social issues, from the apocalyptic decline of Western society to his own perilous sense of fragmentation; artifice and irony were his weapons. In the twenty-first century, celebrity is its own reward, and today’s instant superstars
are selling nothing more momentous than their own fame. Artifice has become reality; irony has lost its purpose. Communication is instant and ceaseless, but nothing is being said. No wonder that David Bowie, who always had something to communicate, has chosen to follow Major Tom into isolated silence, a private painter now rather than a public performer, a distant observer of a world that he had once illuminated and enriched.

  APPENDIX: THE SONGS OF DAVID BOWIE: 1963–1968

  [A1] I NEVER DREAMED

  (Jones/Dodds)

  Recorded by the Kon-Rads, August 1963; unreleased

  * * *

  Not content with performing pop hits such as “Let’s Dance,” “Do You Wanna Dance,” “Sheila,” and “Ginny Come Lately” for local audiences in South London, Bowie encouraged his colleagues in the Kon-Rads to seek out a recording contract. The Beatles’ stunning success with self-composed material, bypassing the need for songs from professionals in London’s “Tin Pan Alley,” suggested that the Kon-Rads should pursue a similar route. Bowie was eager to prove himself the creative fulcrum of the band, without the expertise to back up his naïve self-confidence.

  In advance of what proved to be an ill-fated audition for Decca Records, the Kon-Rads recorded several versions of the song they had chosen as their most commercial asset. The tape survived in the archive of the band’s drummer, David Hadfield. “I Never Dreamed” was probably composed by Bowie with the assistance of guitarist Alan Dodds; Hadfield remembered that Bowie would present the Kon-Rads with fragmentary ideas for songs, which the more proficient Dodds would shape into acceptable form. “There was one about a plane crash,” Hadfield recalled. But no such drama infiltrated the mundane teenage narrative of “I Never Dreamed,” which was indistinguishable from other beat groups eager to emulate the success of the Beatles. Only the cocky charm of Bowie’s vocal, and a Cockney swagger in his vowels, hinted at what was to come.