Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  With his smooth, lithe, hairless body, Aladdin Sane’s rouged androgyne has evolved past gender, as blatantly dramatized by the full-length picture in the inside gatefold, where Ziggy’s long legs and sleek, sexless torso are turning silver robotic. His proudly aristocratic stance with its streamlined waist grip is another quotation from Katharine Hepburn’s unique publicity pose for The Philadelphia Story, combined with a salute to Veruschka von Lehndorff, the great supermodel (seen in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up) who had posed nude in spectacular body paint in a 1966 photo shoot in Kenya with Peter Beard and Salvador Dalí. In a 1977 interview on American TV, Bowie compared his friend Iggy Pop’s method of working to his own: Iggy’s ideas, said Bowie, blocking off space with both hands, came from the viscera and crotch, while his own ideas came from the chest and head: “I’m a cyborg,” he declared.8 The bust-like cover of Aladdin Sane shows the artist in creative process, having jettisoned the mundane appetites of belly and genitals. This dreaming head is lifting off into a shamanistic zone of vision purged of people and matter itself.

  For the cover of his next album, Pinups (1973), a vigorous collection of cover versions of hard-rock classics, Bowie used a photograph of himself with Twiggy taken in Paris by Justin de Villeneuve for Vogue. The two look lost and stricken, like Adam and Eve after the Fall. Who are these waifs? They appear to be wearing masks—actually cleverly drawn on with makeup. The striking color contrast on Twiggy (she was tanned from a Bermuda holiday) sparks a frisson of uncertainty about both race and gender: it might very well be a black man in a female mask leaning his head so confidingly on the tensely alert Bowie. As a pop idol now bruised by fame, Bowie had arrived in the purgatorial territory of Twiggy’s declining star—she who as a coltish girl-boy had been a supreme symbol of the 1960s youthquake.

  Bowie returned to Weimar sensibility for the cover of Diamond Dogs (1974), a lurid drawing by Guy Peellaert in a German Expressionist style complementing the album’s dystopian narrative, which had been inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1925 film, Metropolis. The opening howl, recitation about “rotting corpses,” and graphic bestiality—Bowie and two crouching, ghoulish women are depicted in half-dog form—was the closest he ever came to the Grand Guignol horror-movie gambits of Alice Cooper, whose 1971 European tour had been attended by both Bowie and Elton John. The setting of the Diamond Dogs cover is a sideshow (“The Strangest Living Curiosities”) drawn from Tod Browning’s disturbing 1932 film, Freaks, which is glossed in the title song. Bowie’s canine loins (presumably alluding to Iggy Pop’s breakthrough song, “I Wanna Be Your Dog”) may have been glaringly male—the genitalia were soon airbrushed away to head off rising controversy—but the rest of him is a bitch. He wears a large loop earring, a lushly enhanced silhouette of red lipstick, and a lavishly teased bouffant variation of his Ziggy haircut. Despite his sinewy arms, the effect is sensuously female—an alluring prone pose propped up on elbows that was commonly used for publicity shots of bosomy studio-era stars like Lana Turner and even the mature Gloria Swanson. Peellaert worked from two sketches drawn by Bowie of his variation on an Egyptian sphinx. Precedents for the picture can be found in Symbolist paintings of femmes fatales, specifically Fernand Khnopff’s Sphinx (1896), where a reclining leopard with a woman’s face smugly caresses a girlish Oedipus. The songs on Diamond Dogs portray a decadent world of fast sex in city doorways (“Sweet Thing”) and trampy boys in torn dresses and smudged makeup (“Rebel Rebel”).

  Young Americans (1975) was the last album cover that Bowie used as a gender canvas. Once again he meets the viewer’s eyes but no longer with the hard edge of urban prostitution seen on Diamond Dogs. It is another Hollywood glamour portrait, his short but flowing hair softly backlit to form a halo. The startlingly feminine silver bangle bracelets, jarringly juxtaposed with a subtly Art Deco man’s plaid shirt, gleam like a starburst. The impression of wavering gender is accentuated by his discreet pink lipstick and longish manicured fingernails. (Russet nail polish, missing from the U.S. album, was restored to the picture for the 1999 remastered CD release.) A ghostly spiral of cigarette smoke, airbrushed in, is another vintage Hollywood touch. This wistful, cloistered figure might be a kept boy or a neurasthenic aesthete, like the artist Aubrey Beardsley or the poet Lord Alfred Douglas, who brought down Oscar Wilde. A similar pensive brand of guarded androgynous male beauty was captured by Peter O’Toole in his multifaceted portrayal of the cultivated, tormented Lawrence of Arabia in David Lean’s 1962 film.

  What must be observed about Bowie’s gender fantasia is how rarely he ever did straight drag. The significant exception was a video directed by David Mallet for “Boys Keep Swinging,” a song on Lodger (1979), the final album in Bowie and Brian Eno’s “Berlin Trilogy.” The song was not released in the U.S. because of record company fears about the video’s unpalatable transvestism. It begins with Bowie as a Cliff Richard–style early 1960’s rock ’n’ roll singer clad in a generic dark suit and rollicking away with standard kinetic moves at a standing microphone. Attention then shifts to his trio of hilariously bored female back-up singers, each one played by Bowie in drag. There is a blowsy, blasé, gum-cracking Elizabeth Taylor in a tendrilous bun wig and a big crinoline skirt topped with a violet cinch belt—Taylor’s signature color. Bowie had met John Lennon five years earlier at a party at Taylor’s Los Angeles house. Photos of the zaftig Taylor bear-hugging the alarmingly frail Bowie—she was wearing his fedora—made it seem as if she could crush him like an eggshell.

  Next in the video is an icy Valkyrie in a svelte metallic-gold sheath dress with fetishistically deformed sleeves—boxy Joan Crawford shoulder pads sprouting lateral wings like shark fins. Her full, dark hair resembles that of the enigmatic Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not as well as the stormy Bette Davis in All About Eve. The dress itself recalls the clinging metallic moth costume worn by Katharine Hepburn (playing an aviatrix modeled on Amelia Earhart) in Christopher Strong and also the spectacular, skin-tight “nude dress” of beaded silk soufflé designed in 1953 by Jean Louis for Marlene Dietrich’s cabaret concerts. (For the second half of those shows, which toured the world, Dietrich changed into the top hat and tails of her 1930 film, Morocco.) There is also a suggestion of the fashion model Jerry Hall’s disruptive, sashaying entrance in a black-slashed gold tiger gown in Bryan Ferry’s 1976 video for “Let’s Stick Together.” At the end of the sequence, Bowie breaks role by aggressively whipping off his wig and smearing his lipstick with the back of his hand, staring down the viewer with a frightening sneer of rage—a reversal of the usual hilarity and applause-inviting bonhomie accompanying the gender revelation at the end of drag acts. This golden androgyne is truly Bowie’s “Queen Bitch” (the tenth song on Hunky Dory).

  The third drag impersonation is of Dietrich herself, with whom Bowie had recently starred in Just a Gigolo (1978), directed by David Hemmings. Bizarrely, they never met: Bowie’s dialogue with Dietrich was spliced together in post-production. In “Boys Keep Swinging,” he got his revenge: the aged Dietrich, dressed in an understated knit Chanel suit, walks haltingly with a cane down the fashion catwalk, from which old women are normally banned. Pausing at the edge, she feebly yet contemptuously blows a kiss at the viewer with her cigarette, the fading superstar still hungry for dominance. In this video, Bowie penetrated to the cold masculine soul and monstrous lust for power of the great female stars, which drag queens had always sensed and turned into rambunctious comedy.

  The video for “Boys Keep Swinging” had camp wit but shabby production values. That all changed the following year with “Ashes to Ashes,” from the Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) album. Directed by Bowie and David Mallett (working from Bowie’s own storyboards), it was at the time the most expensive music video ever made. This mini-movie, with its dreamlike collage, profoundly influenced the direction of music videos, which exploded with the spread of cable TV and the introduction of a round-the-clock music channel, MTV, in 1981. Bowie called the song “Ashes
to Ashes” “an ode to childhood,” but its video became a portrait of the isolated, suffering artist, with motifs and techniques drawn from the entire history of European art films—from Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou to Jean Cocteau’s Orphée and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. The song’s self-referential nature was signaled by the return of Bowie’s debut character, Major Tom, now a notorious “junkie” in a crisis of addiction.

  In “Ashes to Ashes” (a phrase from the Anglican funeral service), Bowie assumes the role of Pierrot, a figure of seventeenth-century Commedia dell’arte who became prominent in French pantomime. Many painters, such as Watteau, saw themselves in the melancholy Pierrot, with his tenderness and naïveté and his humbling enforced straddling of the line between art and entertainment. Bowie’s Pierrot, wearing a tufted white clown costume and dunce cap, has a gangly awkwardness and a timid, pre-sexual innocence. In other scenes, however, an elegantly handsome Major Tom sits caged in a padded cell and an exploding kitchen or, haggard and stony, hangs moribund in a watery grotto that is half wrecked spaceship and half nightmare womb.

  Bowie has rarely spoken publicly of his mother and, in the 1970s, curtly rebuffed prominent British and American TV interviewers when they presumptuously prodded him about it.9 The finale of “Ashes to Ashes” addresses the matter in dramatic symbolism, like the depressed film director Guido’s dream encounter with his parents in a cemetery in Federico Fellini’s 8½. Hectored by a small, gesticulating older woman, who Bowie said (when introducing this video for a 1993 MTV retrospective) resembled his mother, Pierrot strolls with abashed attentiveness and dutiful resignation along the edge of an infernal underground sea.10 A moment before, he stands flinching and paralyzed from the camera flash of a merciless paparazzo: the shooting of a picture (the video’s third photo portrait) becomes a real bullet shot. Is Pierrot now dead and his mother come to reclaim his body—like Mary for a pietà? Bowie’s ending evokes that of The Tramp, where another childlike, genderless clown, Charlie Chaplin in a fake mustache, rambles away down a dirt road. There are also striking visual parallels to a mordant moment in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita where a fierce matriarch of the old Italian nobility materializes at dawn with a priest and imperiously summons her carousing adult children to Mass. The other decadent partygoers stand stupefied as they watch their recently priapic but now cowed playfellows fall in line and obediently troop away.

  In the finale of “Ashes to Ashes,” Bowie was questioning his identity as an artist and a man. Despite his wandering, he evidently still felt the stubborn tug of his origins, a regulated suburban conformity from which he had escaped to a vivid universe of omnisexual fantasy that had bewitched an entire generation. In the video, his mother is both peripheral and central, a voice he can’t get out of his head. The poignant refrain, echoing a traditional British children’s song, identifies the mother with pressing practical reality: “My mother said to get things done / You’d better not mess with Major Tom.” Tom is Bowie the daydreamer who spaces out. His mother is like the poet Wallace Stevens’ contrary Mrs. Alfred Uruguay, who boasts, “I have wiped away moonlight like mud.”

  The video’s bleak, solarized color suggests that, at this moment, the mother is winning. Pierrot sinks slowly in the sea, while the landscape seems to be losing its fictive energy, like the anemic, fading characters in Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film, Céline and Julie Go Boating. Bowie’s scathingly self-critical dual perspective would soon take comic form in “Jazzin’ for Blue Jean,” where Screaming Lord Byron’s excess and vanity are satirized by Bowie himself playing a dual role as a maladroit nerd who shouts at Byron, “You conniving, randy, bogus Oriental old queen! Your record sleeves are better than your songs!” In “Ashes to Ashes,” the limited personal mother is only an instrument of or proxy for larger processes of fate. The mammoth bulldozer, for example, which menacingly follows Pierrot and his troupe of female priests is a modernization of “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near” (from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”)—a fascist force pushing all of humanity into a mass grave.

  The subterranean disturbances in Bowie’s oeuvre around the issue of women and their ungovernable power can be detected in “Suffragette City” (from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust), with its heady refrain, “Don’t lean on me, man, because you can’t afford the ticket back from Suffragette City!” Gender relations were changing fast after the rebirth of feminism in the late 1960s. This line shows men unprepared for the shift and running around in circles like antic squirrels. It says in effect, “Don’t ask me for advice, because I sure can’t help!” It implies that castration, metaphorical or otherwise, is the toll exacted by women whose quest for equality may sometimes conceal a drive for dominance. The song’s other blazing refrain, “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!”—a common old American catchphrase probably about prostitution—tauntingly suggests that loveless hit-and-run sex is one foolproof way to avoid swampy entrapment by women.

  Few if any songs in Bowie’s great period contain a fully developed portrait of a woman, positive or negative, comparable to Bob Dylan’s sympathetic “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” or the toweringly furious “Like a Rolling Stone.” Bowie’s exhilarating “China Girl” (1983), with its wonderfully expansive video directed by David Mallet, substitutes political for psychological issues and was in any case co-written by Iggy Pop about an Asian woman he was courting in Switzerland. Bowie’s most concentrated meditation on sexual identity and gender relations is contained in the staggered finale of Aladdin Sane—a matched set of songs, one inspired by an American man and the other by an American woman. They are pointedly introduced by a cover version of the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” which in this context posits not just sexual intercourse but dialogue and détente—which may prove impossible between the entrenched positions of the new gender wars.

  The first song, “The Jean Genie,” is an anthem to boy power partly inspired by Iggy Pop, one of Bowie’s closest friends in the 1970s and his flatmate during his low-profile exile in Berlin after the burn-out of Ziggy Stardust. Bowie said that in this song he wanted “to locate Ziggy as a kind of Hollywood street rat”—in other words, one of the homeless, rootless kids who flocked to the Sunset Strip in the late 1960s and ’70s, a colorful scene rife with drugs and prostitution that was also a matrix of new music and style.11 (A male “trick” from Sunset and Vine forces a closeted star to his knees earlier on the album in “Cracked Actor.”) The jean genie is a “reptile,” a “rattlesnake,” a scrappy sprite and male hustler slithering outside the system who, like Peter Pan, retains his freedom by never growing up. If there is a reference to Jean Genet in his name (as Bowie later admitted was possible), then he is Genet’s ideal of the thief and outcast, representing the association of homosexuality with heroic Romantic criminality that Genet got from André Gide and that Gide got from Wilde.12 Denim (preceding the designer jeans trend of the late ’70s) still had an outlaw connotation, as shown in Warhol’s snapshot of the crotch of a jeans-clad male hustler for the zippered cover of the Rolling Stones’ 1971 album, Sticky Fingers.

  Bowie’s jean genie is a vagabond and derelict who savors squalor and filth as a defiance of female order and control and who even asserts the right to slash, maim, and violate his own mother-made flesh. (“Ate all your razors” is a splendid Beat-style line vividly referencing the stage-diving Iggy’s notorious self-cutting on broken glass.) The genie’s delirious manic motion is caught by the buzz and fuzz of the aggressive guitars, which evoke the unleashed boy energy of the rave-up Yardbirds in their covers of Bo Diddley’s braggart “I’m a Man” and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning,” which pictures sex and its betrayals as a constantly hurtling train. (The genie “loves chimney stacks”—belching, sparking phallic totems as well as soft entry points for home burglary.) Bowie, who daringly talks rather than sings this song, can be heard doing the legen
dary bluesman’s eerie “whoo-hoo” (the train’s receding siren) as a chorus.

  But woman gets the last word on Aladdin Sane. “Lady Grinning Soul” was reportedly inspired by Claudia Lennear, an African-American soul singer who had been one of Ike and Tina Turner’s back-up Ikettes. (Despite widespread claims, it remains unclear whether it was Lennear or another American, Marsha Hunt, mother of Mick Jagger’s first child, who was the model for the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”) “Lady Grinning Soul” becomes a great archetypal sexual vision that transcends its origins—much as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Epipsychidion” left Emilia Viviani behind. From the first entrance of Bowie’s voice, apprehensively a capella and distorted by echoes, we know we are in perilous territory.

  The title alludes to Aretha Franklin’s 1968 album, Lady Soul, but that phrase is now split by a death’s head.13 “Grinning” almost certainly comes from “Pirate Jenny” in The Threepenny Opera, a song premiered by Lotte Lenya in Berlin in 1928 and volcanically performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1964 by Nina Simone, who fused it with black radical politics. (Bowie deeply admired Simone and met her in Los Angeles in 1975; he recorded “Wild Is the Wind,” from her 1966 album of that name, as the finale of Station to Station.)14 Jenny is a hotel chambermaid who harbors secret thoughts of class revenge and pitiless massacre: “I’m kind of grinning while I’m scrubbing. And you say, ‘What’s she got to grin?’ ” Her chilling refrain forecasts the arrival of a black freighter with a skull on its masthead as well as the privileged choice now handed to her: “Kill them now or later?”