Bowie: The Poet Behind the Tights
What better to inaugurate an angry young man’s saucy entry into the blogosphere, but by the shunning of ugly questions for a… well, prettier lot?
David Bowie: an artist, cliché, and vast collection of colorful pants.
Today, pop culture has happily engulfed the last two and added them to its harrowing repertoire, leaving of Mr. Jones only the first, to be used as consolation prize to denuded purists and clueless hipsters everywhere. But really, how many modern popstars have claimed, from within their made-up confines, to be inspired by Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, or any of his musically-inclined fashion statements? Unfortunately the question is rhetorical (but the answer isn’t, and it’s a lot), yet it remains a fact that any musician interested in crafting an image of some daring must pay homage to the Dame.
Conveniently enough, these – the Lady Gagas and Empires of the Sun of the world – have never actually acknowledged the man’s music as being their inspiration, but rather say as such of his many masks. While this does explain the relative worthlessness of their output (an army of self-congratulatory producers rarely makes for proper artists, let alone musicians), it also delineates the outlines of a certain societal affliction: that of the general shallowness of music tastes.
I’ll therefore try to show of Bowie at least the contrary – that he is not simply an accumulation of interesting personas, but also a fine musician and great wordsmith. The latter of the two will be expanded today, his musical ability being (I hope) obvious to anyone with functioning pressure cavities.
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Poetry, the great Romantic forehead offender (amongst other things) Paul Verlaine famously claimed, is “music before all else”. One can reasonably assume, as I do, that the Frenchman did not mean to say poetry was melody or harmony, but rather that other part of music – known to Joe Strummer as the ‘engine room’: rhythm. While beat’s importance in poetry can surely be debated, it must be taken for fact that at least in modern (post-1960’s) song lyrics it plays a dominant role. The very best lyrics are indeed both able to be recited by themselves, or sung and let dance through accompaniment, each time carried by their own exquisite rhythm. Moreover, such is their importance that their strength alone can take their song to heights its melodic and harmonic qualities perhaps could not – Tom Waits and Bob Dylan being the obvious examples here.
Bowie, blessed as he was by musical greatness, as well as a constantly reinventing and never tarnished image, was also a first-rate lyricist. Here are some examples:
“I’ll make you a deal, like any other candidate / We’ll pretend we’re walking home ‘cause you’re future’s at stake / My set is amazing, it even smells like a street / There’s a bar at the end where I can meet you and your friend”
Such are the opening lines of this 1974 masterpiece, a song off of Bowie’s first post-glam release, Diamond Dogs, itself heavily based on the famous George Orwell dystopian novel, 1984. The whole album was originally written as material for a theatrical production of that book, and there is little doubt to the post-apocalyptic imagery anchored within these lyrics. Squalor and despair are palpable throughout, even (or especially?) as they attempt to describe a certain dystopian ‘nightlife’ (“If you want it, boys, get it here, thing”). Here, Bowie is cinematic in scope, setting up a scene remarkable in detail (“There’s a shop on the corner selling papier mâché / Making bullet-proof faces, Charlie Manson, Cassius Clay”) through which the protagonist and his forbidden love must navigate. As he so often does, however, the musician reserves his best for last, when the couple sinks a little deeper into discouragement:
“I guess we could cruise down one more time / With you by my side, it should be fine / We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band / Then jump in the river holding hands.”
1976: funky Bowie is at his height. He lives in Los Angeles, stars in The Man Who Fell to Earth, and takes up a lifestyle of particular excess. Bowie lives life like his new persona, the hollowed, debonair Thin White Duke, or as he describes it: “ice masquerading as fire”. Yet, almost paradoxically, this year also marks his emotional and spiritual low, so much so that his album Station to Station yearns for an escape. From these conflicting thoughts emanates Stay, the last song off of the album. Though at first glance fairly straightforward in its meaning (Bowie parties, is attracted to someone, wants that person to stay, but he/she doesn’t), it is riddled with sinister undertones both musically (dissonance and atonality are given their moments) and lyrically. Both for its stunning opening (“This week dragged past me so slowly / The days fell on their knees / Maybe I’ll take something to help me / Hope someone takes after me…”), and constantly doubtful, almost contradictory lines (“Life is so vague when it brings someone new / Maybe tomorrow I’ll know what to do”), no one (except perhaps Roxy Music ) comes close to its portrayal of party melancholy.
Like many other of his songs (Word on a Wing the most obvious example), Quicksand deals with Bowie’s ideological and spiritual anxieties. Yet, unlike these other songs, this one manages to do so combining wit with a remarkable gravitas. After a touching – and occasionally amusing – recounting of the many brands of thought he appears to have encountered, from “Crowley’s uniform of imagery” to Schaeffer’s urging (“herald loud the death of man”), he breaks down under their strain: “I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought / And I ain’t got the power, anymore”. Had the song ended there, it would surely have been remembered as a pleasant little work of Mr.Jones’, not without some quality. However, what makes Quicksand truly one of his best is what comes next. Hung upon a rising, surreal and somewhat comforting melody, delivered by choir, is the bittersweet realization we should all be doomed to make:
“Don’t believe in yourself / Don’t deceive with belief / Knowledge comes with death’s release.”