Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  Just as Bowie was debuting Ziggy Stardust, furthermore, gay men were heading in a macho direction—first with San Francisco’s Castro Street “hippie clone” look of beards, t-shirts, and tight hip-hugger jeans and later with New York’s “Christopher Street clone” uniform of thick mustaches, flannel lumberjack shirts, riveted farm jeans, and work boots. The gay stereotypes were already fixed by the 1977 debut of the Village People, a comedic novelty band that won surprising mainstream acceptance. The icon-maker of that period was Tom of Finland, whose ebullient beefcake drawings of gigantically endowed, black-leather-clad orgiasts shaped the sadomasochistic urban underground documented by Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Bowie’s first concession to this trend was the cover of Heroes (1977), where he wears a soft, chicly continental black-leather jacket, offset by the angular hand gestures of an avant-garde dancer. The pose combines Nijinsky’s stylized imitation of Greek vase-painting with the stigmata scene in Un Chien Andalou.

  After his half-dozen years of uneven success on the London music scene, Bowie’s artistic persona suddenly coalesced in the early 1970s at the climax of the sexual revolution. The idealism of the ’60s, stoked by peaceable, communal, giddy-making marijuana, had drifted and stalled. Now dawned the cynical disillusion of the ’70s, symbolized by nervous, ego-inflating, jealously secreted cocaine. Spontaneous romantic romps in the sunny or soggy meadows at Woodstock would yield to predatory stalking and anonymous pickups in murky, mobbed, deafening disco clubs or barricaded elite venues like Studio 54. Bowie’s archly knowing and seductively manipulative Ziggy Stardust sprang into being at the invisible transition into this exciting but mechanically hedonistic sexual landscape.

  Although himself a hyperactive athlete of the new libertinism, Bowie never viewed sex as salvation. In his classic work, identity is a series of gestures or poses. Sex is represented as a theatrical entry into another dimension, parallel to but not coexistent with social reality. Like Wilde, Bowie made sex a medium for a sharpening of self-consciousness rather than its Dionysian obliteration. The megalomania and delusionalism of Ziggy Stardust marked the start of the long and confused period of gender relations that we still inhabit. The fall of the old taboos has not enhanced eroticism but perhaps done the opposite. Women have gained widespread career status, and homophobia has receded, but divorce has soared, and the sexes still collide in bitter public recriminations. The evident progress in sexual freedom and tolerance in the secular West—given that it is hemmed in by populous conservative cultures that consider it decadent—might be just as evanescent as it was during the Roman Empire.

  Bowie’s darker intimations about the sexual and cultural revolution were signaled in his background vocal for Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” (1972), which he wrote for the group when they seemed to be disbanding. The song, with its spunky androgynous misfits (“he dresses like a queen but he can kick like a mule”), was widely interpreted as a celebration of the glam rock insurgency, but Bowie warned that it was “no hymn to the youth” but “completely the opposite,” a prelude to “the end of the earth.”25 That storm clouds were already gathering over the defiant new dandies can be sensed in the song’s dirge-like foreboding, nowhere clearer than in the unforgettable refrain, “All the young dudes carry the news”: the smoothly harmonizing Bowie breaks “news” into two syllables, a rupture that sounds like a sob (boo-hoo). It was oracular prescience: the apocalypse came a decade later as the plague of AIDS, which decimated an entire generation of gifted young writers, artists, musicians, and fashion stylists.

  The Aeolian lyre, a harp hanging in the wind, was a cardinal metaphor for the Romantic poet, passively played upon by the forces of nature. During his supreme decade of the 1970s, David Bowie too was an Aeolian lyre, with the totality of the fine and popular arts of the time playing through him. Even when Bowie at his most alienated sings in a dissonant, jagged, splintered, or wandering way (partly drawing from his early history as a saxophone player), there is always a high emotional charge to his work. Here is his salient distinction from the postmodernist artists and theorists of the 1980s with their ironic “appropriations” and derivative pastiches. Bowie’s emotional expressiveness, heard at its height in songs like “Look Back in Anger” (whose artist’s garret video adapts Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray), would help trigger the foppish New Romantic movement in British music of the late 1970s and ’80s that produced Duran Duran, Boy George of Culture Club, and eventually Depeche Mode.

  Bowie’s empathic virtuosity is on magnificent display in the gospel-inflected “Fascination,” which he wrote with Luther Vandross in Philadelphia for Young Americans. It is a song so passionate, powerful, and grand that it can be understood as Bowie’s artistic manifesto, addressed to no one but himself. “I’ve got to use her”: if she is a drug, then it is merely a coin of passage to his inner realm. The song describes his violent seizure by and enamored fascination with his own aspiring, gender-conflating mind. He is his own Muse. “Can a heartbeat / Live in the fever / Raging inside of me?” Is there room for personal love or even life itself for the artist driven by uncontrollable flashes of inspiration? Bowie’s mesmerizing theater of costume, music, and dance is animated by mercurial yet profound emotion—the universal language that transcends gender.

  1. TopPop TV program, The Netherlands, October 1977.

  2. Interview with Jools Holland on The Tube, Channel 4, March 1987. Bowie: “If I’m writing and recording, I find I don’t need to paint. But if I’m not doing very well, and I can’t write, and there’s a kind of block or a blank there, then I revert to painting, and it opens up like a watershed of ideas and associations and things.” In an interview recorded on May 16, 1978, in Cologne, Germany, for the BBC2 documentary series Arena, Bowie told Alan Yentob that when he returned to Europe after living in Los Angeles, painting helped him “get back into music.” He described his painting style as “a form of Expressionistic Realism.”

  3. Bowie said he had “a Pre-Raphaelite kind of look” on Hunky Dory. Interview with Ian “Molly” Meldrum for Countdown, a weekly Australian music television program, taped in October 1980 in a Japanese restaurant in New York during Bowie’s run in The Elephant Man on Broadway.

  4. “I was so lost in Ziggy, it was all a schizophrenia.” Cracked Actor, BBC documentary filmed in 1974 and first aired on January 26, 1975.

  5. Bowie about Ziggy Stardust: “I wanted to define the archetype ‘messiah/rock star’—that’s all I wanted to do.” Interviewed by musicians Flo and Eddie of the Turtles and Mothers of Invention for 90 Minutes Live, CBC, November 25, 1977. In the 1978 Yentob interview for BBC2, Bowie said about his stage characters, “They’re all messiah figures.” Bowie about Yamamoto in an interview for NBC’s The Today Show, April 1987: “I wanted the best of the contemporary fields working with me, kind of like Diaghilev did when he was doing ballets.”

  6. Craig Copetas, “Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman,” Rolling Stone, February 28, 1974. Conversation between Bowie and author William S. Burroughs the prior November at Bowie’s London home. Bowie reveals he had taken the name of American frontiersman Jim Bowie, inventor of the massive Bowie knife, because “I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies.” In a 1996 interview with Avi Lewis for the Canadian television program The New Music, Bowie said that “however many critics were saying how important the Beatles were” at the time, “the artists” were talking instead about the Velvet Underground: “Tomorrow’s culture is always dictated by the artists….The artists make culture, not the critics.”

  7. Bowie about Major Tom: “He was my own ideal of what I wanted to do, somebody totally in his own world….He was a hero to me but an antihero—he didn’t have any social contacts [laughs].” (Interview in 1980 with Ian “Molly” Meldrum for Countdown.) In a 1979 interview with Mavis Nicholson, Bowie recalled putting himself in “dangerous situations,” specifically “areas where I have to be in social contact wi
th people, which I’m not very good at doing.” (Afternoon Plus, Thames Television, recorded February 12, 1979.)

  8. Dinah!, CBS TV talk show, April 15, 1977. Iggy Pop sat on the couch between Bowie and Dinah Shore, the motherly blonde host. Bowie’s pelvic thrust punctuating his analysis of Iggy’s method drew a faux-naïf response of “I wonder what he means by that! Gee whiz!” (producing audience laughter) from the other guest, Rosemary Clooney, a veteran big-band singer like Shore. Despite his gentlemanly British manner, Bowie had managed to break the code of American television, then very strict on daytime programs directed to homemakers.

  9. The Dick Cavett Show, ABC, recorded in New York, December 2, 1974; aired December 5. Cavett asked Bowie about his mother, “Does she have any trouble explaining you to the neighbors?” Bowie replies, “I think she pretends I’m not hers [laughs]….We were never that close particularly. We have an understanding.” In a remote-camera interview from London, Russell Harty condescendingly probed Bowie (in Burbank, California) about his mother. Bowie coldly replied, “That’s really my own business.” (The Russell Harty Show, BBC, recorded November 28, 1975.) Cavett asked Bowie what he was reading: “What would we find on your coffee table in your apartment?” Bowie responded, “At the moment, mainly pictures. I bought Diane Arbus’s book of photographs, a photographer I like very much.”

  10. Bowie on the making of the “Ashes to Ashes” video: “We went down to the beach, and I took a woman there who looked like my mother. That’s the surrealistic part of making movies.” (David Bowie Weekend on MTV, April 4 and 5, 1993.) The actress was Wyn Mac, wife of comedian Jimmy Mac, who played Warwick on the BBC sitcom Are You Being Served?

  11. David Bowie and Mick Rock, Moonage Daydream: The Life and Times of Ziggy Stardust (New York, 2005), p. 140.

  12. Charles Shaar Murray, “David Bowie: Gay Guerrillas & Private Movies,” New Musical Express, February 24, 1973.

  13. Aretha Franklin can be heard singing a smash hit from Lady Soul, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” in the limousine crossing the desert in the 1975 BBC documentary Cracked Actor, where Bowie drinks milk from a large carton and is questioned by Alan Yentob. (Aired January 26, 1975.) It was this sequence which convinced director Nicolas Roeg to cast Bowie as the alien star of The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).

  14. Introducing his version of “Wild Is the Wind,” Bowie said, “During the mid-1970s, I got to know Nina Simone, whom I’ve got incredible respect for as an artist and a composer and a singer.” Even though she had not written this song, her “tremendous” performance of it had “affected” him greatly: “I recorded it as an hommage to Nina” (David Bowie Weekend on MTV, April 4 and 5, 1993).

  15. Dinah!, CBS TV talk show recorded in Los Angeles, February 24, 1976. Dinah Shore’s other guests were Nancy Walker and Henry Winkler. Earlier Bowie says about his continual openness to and influence by other performers and styles, “I’m usually saturated.”

  16. Interview with Alan Yentob, recorded May 16, 1978, in Cologne for the BBC2 documentary series Arena.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Parkinson, BBC1 talk show, recorded November 27, 2003. Parkinson asks, “What was Ziggy about?” Bowie replies, “It was about pushing together all the pieces and all the things that fascinated me culturally—everything from kabuki theater to Jacques Brel to Little Richard to drag acts. Everything about it was sort of a hybrid of everything I liked.”

  19. Interview at Stadthalle, Vienna, 1996. Bowie says, “I was trying to pinpoint a tradition of ritualizing of the body.” He cites as a “semi-nihilistic equation” André Breton’s definition of the ultimate Surrealist act as shooting a pistol randomly into a crowd (from the Second Surrealist Manifesto of 1930). Bowie calls it “as potent an image” as Duchamp’s urinal in presenting the body as “a ritualistic way of articulating twentieth-century experience.” (In the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, Breton compared “the modern mannequin” to “romantic ruins” in exemplifying the “marvelous,” a central Surrealist principle.) Bowie mentions as an antecedent the Romantic writer Thomas De Quincey’s 1827 essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” In the same interview, he says that he liked Expressionism since he was “a kid” and that he had especially admired Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and the Blaue Reiter group.

  20. In a 1987 interview, Bowie said, “I was always very seriously affected by my dreams….I found the dream state magnetic. It just captured everything for me.” When he saw the films of Dalí and Buñuel and the paintings of de Chirico, he thought, “Yes, that’s exactly how I want to write. How do you work like that?” (Day In, Day Out, MTV special during Bowie’s Glass Spider tour.)

  21. Cracked Actor.

  22. In an Australian interview, Bowie said of Little Richard, “He was my idol” (November 28, 1978). Elsewhere Bowie said, “I wanted to be a white Little Richard at eight—or at least his sax player” (David Bowie: Sound and Vision, A&E network’s Biography series, October 6, 2002). In 1980, Bowie told ABC’s 20/20, “I fell in love with the Little Richard band. I had never heard anything that lived in such bright colors in the air. It really just painted the whole room for me” (November 13, 1980).

  23. Art Talk: Conversations with 15 Women Artists, ed. Cindy Nemser (1975; rev. ed. 1995), p. 252.

  24. “Watch That Man,” BUST magazine, Fall 2000.

  25. Copetas, “Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman.” Bowie tells Burroughs that “All the Young Dudes” refers to the “terrible news” collected by Ziggy Stardust, who is torn to pieces on stage by the “black hole” of the “infinites.” This news, Bowie says, appears in “Five Years,” his first song on the Ziggy Stardust album: “News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in….Five years, that’s all we’ve got.”

  * [Catalog essay for “David Bowie Is,” retrospective exhibit of Bowie costumes, The Victoria & Albert Museum, London, March 23–August 11, 2013.]

  6

  PUNK ROCK*

  The Sex Pistols, the British band that is often given credit for starting the punk movement, burst on the rock scene with “Anarchy in the UK” (1976) and “God Save the Queen” (1977). They were never able to reproduce their success in the United States, since their ferocious anti-establishment stance was so geared to the ossified class system that has weakened but that remains an overt feature of British life.

  The Sex Pistols’ 1977–78 tour fell flat partly because they were out of sync with the inner dynamic of American music. London may have needed a retro kick in the ass to restore primal, masculine rock energy after the dissolving androgyny of the glam and glitter period, but we Americans had already been ravished by the punk artistry of Patti Smith, whose 1975 album, Horses, remains one of the greatest products of the rock genre. Television, whom I saw in 1977 at CBGB’s in downtown New York, and early Talking Heads (though not the Ramones) were the punk avatars for me and my circle.

  The Sex Pistols undoubtedly struck many young listeners as highly original, but in the late 1970s, I was already 30 and had gotten my punk zap from the Velvet Underground, whose mesmerizing first album was released in 1967, when I was in college. In their first phase (the early- to mid-1960s), the Rolling Stones and the Who had also been aggressively punk in assumptions and attitude. Furthermore, by the time the Sex Pistols arrived in the U.S., disco was in full swing—a much-derided style that I took seriously and had been closely following since James Brown begat funk.

  Although their manic influence can be traced in rhythmic terms to thrash rock and in performance terms to brash boy personae as far afield as Billy Idol and Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Sex Pistols self-destructed too soon to leave much of a musical legacy. Nothing they composed remotely approaches the enduring brilliance of David Bowie albums like Aladdin Sane (1973) and Diamond Dogs (1974). (Bowie’s baroque art-rock was a primary punk target, and he briefly took refuge in Berlin, wher
e he revamped his style.)

  Punk anarchism may be an adolescent phase of simplistic rebellion against authority. The Rolling Stones’ canonical late-1960s songs, “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Street Fighting Man,” and “Gimme Shelter,” are far more comprehensive statements about life and its inevitable conflicts between individualism and order. The Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious, who died of a drug overdose in 1979 several months after he was charged with murdering his girlfriend, didn’t live long enough to work through his early punk positions.

  I would cite the Who’s magnificent, rumbling “Eminence Front” (from the 1982 It’s Hard album), with its penetrating insights into psychology and politics, as an example of what an evolved punk can and should achieve. Anarchism is glorified thumb-sucking. Off with the diapers, and on to business! Construction, not destruction, is the name of the human game.

  * [Response to a reader question about the failure of the Sex Pistols in the U.S., Salon.com column, January 20, 1999.]

  7

  LIVING WITH MUSIC:

  A PLAYLIST*

  1)Train Kept A-Rollin’, The Yardbirds (1965). An addictive London Mod rave-up epitomizing the accelerating mania of the 1960s, which finally self-destructed. Based on a 1951 song by an African-American musician, Tiny Bradshaw.

  2)Ballad of a Thin Man, Bob Dylan (1965). Sinister atmospherics of the garish sexual underground in the repressive pre-Stonewall world. A naïve voyeur reporter steps through the looking-glass and may or may not escape.

  3)Season of the Witch, Donovan (1966). Nature and society in turmoil, as identity dissolves in the psychedelic ’60s. The witch marks the return of the occult, a pagan subversion of organized religion.

  4)8 Miles High, The Byrds (1966). Shimmering Hindu sitar riffs with jet flight as a metaphor for mental expansion. The song’s ultimate theme isn’t drugs but cosmic consciousness, a now forgotten ’60s goal.