As for Prince remaining in Minnesota instead of moving to New York or Los Angeles, I think that was a terrific decision on his part. His creative imagination was rich enough—and he had the resources to explore every aspect of the arts on his own. Because of stratospherically rising property costs, New York was no longer the mecca for daring and impoverished young artists that it had been up to the early 1970s. And as for Los Angeles, it has always been about show and status, a cosmos of perpetual anxiety. It was hardly the place for a sensitive soul like the reticent Prince, who preferred enigmatic silence to conversation with strangers. If Prince’s idea stream began to run thin toward the end, it was not due to Minnesota, with its exhilaratingly clear Canadian air, but to a waning in his own confidence and ambition.
* [Response to a reader question about Prince, Salon.com column, May 5, 2016.]
5
THEATER OF GENDER:
DAVID BOWIE AT THE CLIMAX OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION*
David Bowie burst onto the international scene at a pivotal point in modern sexual history. The heady utopian dreams of the 1960s, which saw free love as an agent of radical political change, were evaporating. Generational solidarity was proving illusory, while experimentation with psychedelic drugs had expanded identity but sometimes at a cost of disorientation and paranoia. By the early 1970s, hints of decadence and apocalypse were trailing into popular culture. Bowie’s prophetic attunement to this major shift was registered in his breakthrough song, “Space Oddity” (1969), whose wistful astronaut Major Tom secedes from Earth itself. Recorded several months before the Woodstock Music Festival, “Space Oddity,” with its haunting isolation and asexual purity and passivity, forecast the end of the carnival of the Dionysian 1960s.
In its rebellious liberalism, nature worship, and celebration of sex and emotion, the 1960s can be seen as a Romantic revival. Folk and rock music, emerging from both black and white working-class traditions, were the vernacular analogue to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epochal Lyrical Ballads (1798), which used rural popular forms against an ossified literary establishment. But events, mirrored and magnified by mass media, had such force and velocity in the ’60s that Romanticism soon flipped over into its decadent late phase. Bowie was the herald and leading symbol of that rapid transformation—as if Oscar Wilde had appeared less than a decade after Wordsworth. Bowie has in fact described himself as an artist “who tries to capture the rate of change”—the theme of one of his signature songs, “Changes.”1
Bowie assumed the persona of a Romantic precursor, Lord Byron, in the video for “Blue Jean” (1984), excerpted from a 20-minute narrative, “Jazzin’ for Blue Jean,” directed by Julien Temple. Like Bowie, Byron was a charismatic, bisexual exile of enormous and at that time unprecedented scandalous fame. Now reduced to a footloose, effeminate nightclub entertainer, Screaming Lord Byron, he is mounting his over-the-top act at the Bosphorus Rooms (“only London appearance,” blares a poster), attended by enthusiastic but depthless dating couples. His fancy Aladdin outfit of turban, Turkish trousers, and gold slippers with turned-up toes recalls the 1813 portrait of Byron in the opulent crimson and gold Albanian dress of a Greek patriot. Bowie’s ingeniously shadowed trompe l’oeil makeup also evokes two other of his sexually ambiguous antecedents, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in Ballets Russes productions of Scheherazade and Afternoon of a Faun, and Rudolph Valentino, silent-film star of The Sheik, who was excoriated by the press for his face powder, mascara, “floppy pants,” and platinum slave bracelet.
But Bowie is closer in spirit to the late Romantic Wilde, a provocative man of the theater and a lover of masks. Like Wilde, who satirized Wordsworth’s cult of nature, Bowie has always been urban in sensibility: the city is his wilderness and his stage. Artifice is his watchword; indeed, except for cartoonish predators like interplanetary spiders or hybrid dog-men, nature appears in Bowie mainly as the blank void of outer space. Like Wilde, who free-lanced as a fashion journalist, Bowie is a dandy for whom costume is an art form. But his lineage descends not direct from Beau Brummell but refracted through the English dandyism imported by French decadents such as the poet Charles Baudelaire, who portrayed the dandy as an arbiter of distinction, elegance, and cold apartness—exactly like the Thin White Duke persona of Bowie’s 1975–76 tours. Barbey D’Aurevilly, Baudelaire’s friend and ally, called dandies “the Androgynes of History.”
Music was not the only or even the primary mode through which Bowie first conveyed his vision to the world: he was an iconoclast who was also an image-maker. Bowie’s command of the visual was displayed in his acute instinct for the still camera, honed by his attentiveness to classic Hollywood publicity photographs, contemporary fashion magazines, and European art films. His flair for choreography and body language had been developed by his study of pantomime and stagecraft with the innovative Lindsay Kemp troupe in London in the late 1960s. Bowie’s earliest ambition was to be a painter, and he has continued to paint throughout his life—especially, he has said, when he is having trouble writing songs.2 The multimedia approaches that were gaining ascendance over the traditional fine arts during the 1960s also helped foster his desire to fuse music with visuals onstage. While working at an advertising agency when he was 16, he learned story-boarding techniques that he later employed for his videos.
As he was searching for a voice and place in the music industry, Bowie’s look steadily changed. Beatifically singing “Let Me Sleep Beside You” for a 1969 promotional film, he appeared in standard Mod dress of open-necked floral shirt and hip-huggers and projected the harmless, wiggly charm of the bashful boy next door. By his third album the following year, however, he had embarked on a challenging new course, putting his commercial acceptance at risk through unsettling cross-dressing scenarios. The cover of The Man Who Sold the World shows him sporting heavy, winsome, shoulder-length locks and wearing a luxuriously patterned pink-and-blue velvet maxi-dress over tight knee-high boots normally associated with stylish young women. (This “man-dress” was designed by Michael Fish, who also did Mick Jagger’s short white dress for the Rolling Stones’ free Hyde Park concert in 1969.) Bowie’s languidly seductive, serpentine reclining posture is equally cheeky—a parody of Canova’s nude statue of Pauline Borghese (Napoleon’s sister) as Venus. This cover was so sexually radical at the time that it was vetoed by his record company for distribution in the U.S. A cartoon by Michael J. Weller showing the mental hospital to which Bowie’s half brother Terry had been committed was hastily substituted instead. It was replaced in 1972 by a mediocre black-and-white shot of a blurry Bowie kicking up his heels onstage.
In the close-up portrait on the cover for Hunky Dory (1971), his next album, Bowie adopted a dreamy expression of sentimental, heavenward yearning drawn from the lexicon of studio-era Hollywood for women stars. Also startlingly feminine is his gesture of frank self-touching, as he smooths his long blonde hair back with both hands. The picture cleverly combines two images from Edward Steichen’s great 1928 photo series of Greta Garbo draped in black (republished by LIFE magazine in 1955). The Hunky Dory cover was stunning at release not only for its daring gender play but for its evocation of Hollywood glamour, which was not yet taken seriously in nascent film studies. Its unnatural, metallic-yellow tinting of Bowie’s hair had a Pop Art edge but also recalled airbrushing conventions of 1920s fan magazines, while its soft focus replicated the flattering aura of ageless mystery produced in Hollywood by applying Vaseline to the camera lens.
On the back of Hunky Dory, a long-haired Bowie somberly stands in blousy, flowing trousers, tailored in what was then a highly unusual retro 1930s cut (preceding Halston’s contemporary variation on it). The picture resembles a canonical 1939 photo of Katharine Hepburn fiercely standing with shoulder-length hair and in similar tan slacks before a fireplace on the New York stage set of The Philadelphia Story (a year before it was filmed). Although Bowie cited Pre-Raphaelite precedents, the oblique inwardness
and intriguingly half-concealing Veronica Lake hair were partly influenced, as was his beret photo on the back of The Man Who Sold the World, by Rachel Harlow (born Richard Finocchio), a Philadelphia drag queen.3 Harlow had gained passing attention as the star of The Queen, a 1968 documentary chronicling a New York drag beauty pageant the prior year where the panel of judges (Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and journalist George Plimpton) awarded her the crown. The film, which Bowie saw and which created a press stir at the Cannes Film Festival, showed the furious backlash by disappointed fellow contestants: Harlow’s soft, feminine look was a marked departure from drag queens’ traditional “hard glamour,” modeled on Hollywood stars like Marlene Dietrich. Harlow, who became a transsexual in 1972, was later linked to a rumored scandal involving Grace Kelly’s brother Jack, who dropped out of the Philadelphia mayoral race because of it.
The cover art for Bowie’s fifth album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), enacted a brisk gender reversal from the prior two albums: a now short-haired, Nordically blonde Bowie is posted in macho mode, leg up on a rubbish bin on a London night street, his guitar slung like a rifle at his side while he warily scans the distance like a soldier on patrol. But the garish colors (superimposed afterward) of his turquoise jumpsuit and purple wrestler’s boots, inspired by the army boots of the marauding “droogs” of Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange (1971), betray another subtext. That sexual contrary is revealed by the sensational photograph on the back of the album: Bowie piercingly meeting the viewer’s eyes from within a lighted telephone box, where he loiters with the graceful hands and hip-shot stance of a woman but the bare chest and bulging crotch of a male hustler (recalling Renaissance codpieces as well as the oversized jockstraps of A Clockwork Orange). Bowie’s eccentric posture here was his first public use of drag queen mannerisms, which have been highly stylized since the Victorian era and probably long before. The exhibitionistic brazenness of the scenario—a rent boy waiting at a telephone—markedly departed from the relaxed domestic transvestism of the cover of The Man Who Sold the World, where Bowie could be mistaken for a rumpled eighteenth-century lord at his glossy leisure, like Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. There was also a disconnect in the gay persona of the telephone box: in that period, male hustlers (“rough trade”) would normally affect a stereotypical masculine look, such as that of a sailor, laborer, motorcyclist, or cowboy. Bowie created something entirely new in this taunting yet fey street tough, based on his own observation of the rent boys who lingered around London’s hot spots and who paralleled the hunky male hustlers whom Andy Warhol filmed gamboling with the gamine Edie Sedgwick in his grainy early short films in New York.
Ziggy Stardust, Bowie’s most famous invented character, did not appear on the cover of the album that bears his name but was theatrically developed on the unusually long world tour (January 1972–July 1973). Ziggy became so potent an entity that he virtually annihilated his creator and spun Bowie, by his own admission, into a fragile psychological state, exacerbated by cocaine, that was near “schizophrenia.”4 Ziggy’s flamboyant makeup, rooster comb of spiky, razor-cut red hair, and futuristic costumes designed by Kansai Yamamoto turned him into an alien rock “messiah” (Bowie’s term), leader of a band of space invaders come to redeem errant earthlings.5 Bowie said Ziggy was modeled on Vince Taylor, a British-born pop singer who had lived in the U.S. and achieved second-tier prominence in England and France until he began to suffer drug-related religious hallucinations on stage. However, there was little sexual ambiguity in Taylor’s self-presentation, which surviving TV clips show to have been a straight rockabilly knockoff of Gene Vincent, a hyperactive, black-leather-clad peer of the hip-swiveling Elvis Presley.
Bowie pushed Ziggy’s gender into another dimension of space-time, where sexual personae of both East and West met and melded. Then very intrigued by Asian culture, he made Ziggy a strange amalgam of samurai warrior and kabuki onnagata—the male actor who played female roles in traditional Japanese theater. (On tour in Japan in April 1973, Bowie received instruction in kabuki makeup from Tamasaburo Bando, Japan’s foremost living onnagata.) But Bowie’s cynically suggestive stage manner (most overt in “Time,” with its sinister honky-tonk piano) was drawn from German cabaret. The Broadway musical Cabaret had had a successful London run, with Judi Dench as Sally Bowles, in 1968; a revival of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, starring Hermione Baddeley and Vanessa Redgrave, opened in the West End in early 1972. Bob Fosse’s movie of Cabaret was released the same year: Joel Gray would win one of the film’s eight Academy Awards for his insinuating, repellently flirtatious performance as an epicene master of ceremonies. Bowie’s very title, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, alluded to Brecht and Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a satire of America from which came “Alabama Song,” later performed by Bowie on his 1978 world tour.
Ziggy flashes with Weimar decadence, from the insomniac blackened hollows of his eyes to his impudent feather boa, a femme accessory that once belonged to Lindsay Kemp and that descended from Marlene Dietrich’s early film roles as a cabaret singer. The love god Jimi Hendrix had often affected a pink boa, solarized to a psychedelic orange on the cover of his 1967 debut album, but it generally receded in the rainbow riot of his Portobello Road retro wear. Marc Bolan, with whom Bowie co-invented glam rock, had become known for an arch combination of lavish boa and shiny top hat that almost certainly came from Helmut Berger’s drag routine as Dietrich in The Damned, Luchino Visconti’s 1969 film about the Third Reich’s war on Weimar excess. Ziggy’s shoulder shimmies or bouts of hand-on-hip swish frankly signaled Weimar sleaze and nostalgie de la boue, which were most notoriously captured by Mick Rock’s classic photo of Bowie fallen to his knees and avidly mouthing Mick Ronson’s vamping guitar. Gay fellatio was shocking enough at the time, yet even more notable in that perverse ritual was that a major male star was unashamedly exhibiting himself in a sexually subordinate role. The Ziggy album abounds with overtly gay references, from the title song’s boast about “God-given ass” to the provocative “Put your ray gun to my head” and “The church of man love is such a holy place to be” (“Moonage Daydream”).
But beyond his besmirched decadence, Ziggy Stardust also had a dazzling visionary beauty, above all when Bowie was wearing his short-skirted white silk kimono and high buskins, which made him resemble an Amazonian huntress like Belphoebe in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. With his silver lipstick and forehead astral sphere, he evoked the radiant allegorical figures of courtly masque. At key moments in the Ziggy gender mirage, Bowie would plant his feet wide and show off his rippling, muscled thighs, a blazon of his underlying masculine athleticism. Indeed, in Ziggy Stardust’s supernormal militant energy and shuffled masks, we may have come closer than we ever will again to glimpsing how Shakespeare’s virtuoso boy actors performed the roles of Rosalind, Cleopatra, and Lady Macbeth. With his haughty architectonic cheekbones and implacable will, Ziggy at times resembled the young Katharine Hepburn, another sexually heterodox personality who chopped off her hair and called herself “Jimmy” in childhood and who made a spectacular Broadway entrance in 1932 as an Amazon warrior leaping down a flight of steps with a dead stag over her shoulders. Ziggy at his most lashing and relentless also recalled Mary Woronov’s brilliant improvisation as Hanoi Hannah in Warhol’s epic Chelsea Girls (1966), a flight of ferocity so breathtaking that some viewers mistook her for a rampaging drag queen. Woronov played a dominatrix doing a whip dance with the poet Gerard Malanga in a multimedia show, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, staged by the Velvet Underground, a group which had a heavy influence on Bowie. Indeed, Bowie prefaced the encore to his final concert performance as Ziggy, as can be seen in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary, with a heartfelt tribute to the Velvet’s Lou Reed, who was then recording in a London studio. Bowie elsewhere called Reed “the most important writer in modern rock” and lauded “the street-gut level” of his work
.6 The title of Bowie’s song, “Velvet Goldmine” (later borrowed by Todd Haynes for a 1998 movie), clearly riffs on Reed’s band.
By the time we saw him on the front of an album, Aladdin Sane (1973), Ziggy Stardust was already in eclipse. The cover photograph by Brian Duffy with its red-and-blue lightning bolt crossing Bowie’s face has become one of the most emblematic and influential art images of the past half-century, reproduced or parodied in advertising, media, and entertainment worldwide. It contains all of Romanticism, focused on the artist as mutilated victim of his own febrile imagination. Like Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, whose body was scarred by lightning in his quest for the white whale, Bowie as Ziggy is a voyager who has defied ordinary human limits and paid the price. Aladdin sane in the realm of art is a lad insane everywhere else. A jolt of artistic inspiration has stunned him into trance or catatonia. He is blind to the outer world and its “social contacts”—Bowie’s recurrent term for an area of experience that had proved troublesome for Major Tom as well as himself.7
Pierre La Roche’s ingenious zigzag makeup looks at first glance like a bloody wound—an ax blow through the skull of a Viking warrior laid out on his bier. Ziggy appears to be in hibernation or suspended animation, like the doomed astronauts in their mummiform chambers in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which had inspired Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” The background blankness is encroaching like a freezing cryogenic wave upon the figure. It’s as clinical as an autopsy, with a glob of extracted flesh lodged on the collarbone. This teardrop of phalliform jelly resembles the unidentifiable bits of protoplasm and biomorphic conglomerations that stud the sexualized landscapes of Salvador Dalí. Also Surrealist are the inflamed creases of Ziggy’s armpits, which look like fresh surgical scars as well as raw female genitalia. Like Prometheus, a rebel hero to the Romantics, he has lost his liver for stealing the fire of the gods. Like the solitary space traveler in 2001, he may be regressing to the embryonic stage to give birth to himself.
Provocations Page 4
