I have just discovered a rather brilliant blog, called Pushing Ahead ofthe Dame, a song-by-song dissertation about the life and times of David Bowie . It is a fascinating subject, apt as well. Bowie hasn’t sung on stage for six years and hasn’t released a new album in nine. At sixty-five years young Bowie’s public life may well be over, a shame in one sense because he did make good albums during the 90s and 00s, but let him rest and enjoy life if he wants.
It’s not like there isn’t plenty of music to enjoy, and the blog (to become a two-volume book) goes through it in fine detail. Typically we’ve arrived at our subject late, after the 70s peak. The blog is currently marking the fag-end of the Tin Machine era, so there’s still 1.Outside,Earthling and Heathen to go.
I’ve waxed occasionally coherent about Bowie before, but here are some observations:
Bowie, art and reality
Bowie’s art shows up the tricky dialectic of the particular and the universal, closely allied with notions of personal versus impersonal, realist versus imaginative. Pop music in one sense is a dialogue between ideas of authenticity and artifice. At one point Bowie was recording Bruce Springsteen songs and borrowing members of his band. You could not get more immediately disparate characters, two more disparate albums than Greetings from Ashbury Park and Diamond Dogs.
I would say authenticity is generally held in higher regard. The 90s, for example, were all about playing it straight, keeping it real, representing this or that area etc. It stems probably from pop’s origins in the blues. We’re used to the fact that reality TV is anything but realistic. But we’re liable to forget that straight-talking narrative blues songs were often folk compositions performed by outlandish characters. Bruce Springsteen lived his songs, which were constructs, projections of reality. Reality is equally a construct (though no less real for it). No one lives a truly ‘normal’ life. We get to the universal though the particular, and there’s little as particular in mass culture as particular as David Bowie and his strange fascinations.
Bowie and politics
Any kind of discussion of David Bowie and politics must include fascism. Of course there is the rider that even at his most ‘fascist’ Bowie was not the kind of fascist we know and loathe. Even his strongest endorsement of fascism “Britain could benefit from a fascist leader”, rank though it was, was qualified and hedged during the interview it was taken from, not to mention probably a provocation as well.
His undoubted obsession with fascist imagery and manipulation, came out of two very sixties pursuits, Nietzsche and Gnosticism.
Nietzsche made a comeback in the second half of the last century, after being strongly associated with the Third Reich, particularly in the theory of ubermensch. There are three theories of history. Firstly that it is the manifestation of god’s will, second the accumulated effect of class struggle and finally the result of will to power (and a fourth theory, that history is just one thing after another).
Post World War Two the first theory was discredited by centuries of scientific discovery. The second theory suffered under the effect of the Soviet Union and/or the powerful sense that western workers had been bought off. It was natural that many young people would interrogate the final theory, that of Friedrich Nietzsche. His ideas are really the end point of trying to square liberal theory, based on the unbound, atomised individual, with reality. His post-war heirs were the existentialists, the beat generation and the hippies, in struggle with the suffocating hypocrisy of the Cold War.
Gnosticism is less obvious (and was less popular) but a logical of the above fascination. In Hunky Dory the coming hippie arcadia became the rise of Homo Superior. Gnosticism, broadly speaking, is a branch of Judeo-Christian thought that suggests the fall of man was a fall from true consciousness. Human beings recover enlightenment, achieve liberation and so on through ritual and esoteric practice. This not only chimed with the hippie movement, a privileged group within straight society, built around the ritual and sacrament of LS; it was also the founding idea of the Thule Society, which was the meeting point of many senior nazi cadre, instead of benign hippies you had conquering Aryans.
If all this wasn’t well known the story of Bowie’s mid-70s flirtation with fascism, a time when many people were developing dangerous sympathies, is well known. It took the Victoria incident to break the spell. Bowie swung sharply left, making a point of stating, whenever asked, that he was not a fascist. He also abandoned the accompanying glamour and theatrics, living quietly in Europe, making minimalist albums.
Bowie and Benjamin
Go back to Walter Benjamin and his definitive statement on art:
Outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled… application… lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense.
Though the music industry is a capitalist industry, therefore dedicated to the mass reproduction of art, a number of values and rituals not to mention cults still linger. The cult worship of rock stars is in itself a reaction to the music industry.
The notion of pop music as a force for change still pervades, despite being based on... not much really. There is left-wing music, but there is also more than plenty of reactionary music made, politically and artistically reactionary.
The notion of pop music as a force for change still pervades, despite being based on... not much really. There is left-wing music, but there is also more than plenty of reactionary music made, politically and artistically reactionary.
David Bowie’s enduring popularity lies in his realism. It’s the kind of realism that looks at strange fascinations people have, the imaginative world that is often just as unhealthy and polluted as the real one. If the boundary between fantasy and reality was lost, well, that does happen sometimes. This is where democratic intervention happens. The British music scene veered down dark avenues in the 70s. The advent of Rock Against Racism (some of the earliest leaflets were a response to Bowie's ramblings) changed history for the better.
Postscript
Now, for SOME raisin, here's Dave from 1974: