Bowie had cut short his Reality Tour in 2004 after suffering a heart attack. Although he continued to perform at one-off events until 2006 and did guest vocals on other people's records until 2008, he had failed to record any new solo material for such a long time that fans and critics alike had begun to assume that he had retired. Indeed there was even a rumour in 2011 that David Bowie was at death's door and did not have long to live.
David Bowie has done almost no promotion for this album. And yet there has been more speculation, more articles written, more retrospective 'looks-back' over his career, more reviews for this album than probably for any other except perhaps 'The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars' in 1972. Apparently coincedentally, the Victoria and Albert Museum currently has an exhibition of Bowie's clothes, lyric sheets and other artefacts from his career. The whole world, it seems, is interested in David Bowie.I have always been interested in David Bowie, ever since I first heard the 'Ziggy Stardust' album when I was about 16 around 1990. I then explored his back catalogue and have bought every album since. But it is only now that I feel moved to look back over David Bowie's life as a whole, which I intend to do over the next few weeks with the help of 'Starman - David Bowie: The Definitive Biography' by Paul Trynka; Pushing Ahead of the Dame, a website dedicated to understanding the meaning of Bowie's songs and, of course, David Bowie's own website.
I am not an artist, but David Bowie is, in my opinion. He approaches writing songs, and particularly lyrics, in some ways like an author, in others like a painter. His songs are plays in which Bowie writes, directs and stars. He creates characters, the ones we are all familiar with like Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, The Thin White Duke and so on, but also others. Almost every song is written from the perspective of another character. Some people see this as false and accuse him of being a charlatan, but I don't see it like that. Why do we expect authors, playwrights and film directors to tell stories from the perspective of fictional characters they have created, whilst insisting songwriters always write from their own perspective, with stories directly from their own lives? Why do we insist singer/songwriters reveal personal details about their own lives or be considered fraudulent? For me, David Bowie is an excellent writer of stories.
Having said that, he doesn't often write in a linear fashion. He uses 'cut-up' techniques pioneered by William Burroughs and others where he writes lyrics and then literally cuts them up to see if he can create new meaning in a different order. More recently he has used the 'Verbasiser', a computer version of the cut-up technique. As he says himself, he is trying to create an impression of a situation or a feeling or an idea. In that sense he seems to me to be a great artist. He says people can take their own meanings from his work. This could be considered pretentious but it is only what most artists say. It doesn't mean his work is without meaning or without social comment, far from it.Finally, David Bowie is great at discovering music, artists, authors, ideas and so on that are underground and taking something from each and fusing them to make something that is new and wonderful. In the process he helps to bring these underground trends into the mainstream. Bowie rarely seeks to hide his influences but shares them freely: buddhism, japanese kibuki theatre, the songs of Syd Barrett and Anthony Newley, American soul music, the writings of George Orwell, the art of Egon Schiele, the plays of Bertolt Brecht, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Lindsay Kemp, Marc Bolan, Mick Jagger, Neu!, The Young Gods, Nine Inch Nails, the Prodigy, Scott Walker and so on.
Next time: The story of David Bowie from the beginning to about 1963.
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