David Bowie: Critical Perspectives 9780415745727, 9781315797755, 0415745721

Citation preview

David Bowie: Critical Perspectives

David Bowie: Critical Perspectives examines in detail the many layers of one of the most intriguing and influential icons in popular culture. This interdisciplinary book brings together established and emerging scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds, including musicology, sociology, art history, literary theory, philosophy, politics, film studies and media studies. Bowie’s complexity as a singer, songwriter, producer, performer, actor and artist demands that any critical engagement with his overall work must be interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in its scope. The chapters are organised around the key themes of ‘textualities’, ‘psychologies’, ‘orientalisms’, ‘art and agency’ and ‘performing and influencing’ in Bowie’s work. This comprehensive book contributes to the study of popular music, performance, gender, religion, popular media and celebrity. Eoin Devereux is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Limerick, Ireland and Adjunct Professor (Docent) in Contemporary Culture at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. He is the author of Understanding the Media (2nd edition, 2007) and editor of Media Studies: Key Issues and Debates (2007). Aileen Dillane is an ethnomusicologist based in the Irish World Academy at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She co-edited Morrissey: Fandom, Representations and Identities (2011) with Eoin Devereux and Martin Power. Her areas of research interest include ethnomusicological theory and practice, popular music and culture studies, performance studies and urban soundscape studies. Martin J. Power is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Recent publications include Morrissey: Fandom, Representations and Identities (2011, co-edited with Eoin Devereux and Aileen Dillane) and Marxist Perspectives on Irish Society (2011, co-edited with Micheal O’Flynn, Odette Clarke and Paul M. Hayes).

Routledge Studies in Popular Music

1 Popular Music Fandom Identities, Roles and Practices Edited by Mark Duffett 2 Britshness, Popular Music, and National Identity The Making of Modern Britain Irene Morra 3 Lady Gaga and Popular Music Performing Gender, Fashion, and Culture Edited by Martin Iddon and Melanie L. Marshall

4 Sites of Popular Music Heritage Memories, Histories, Places Edited by Sara Cohen, Robert Knifton, Marion Leonard, and Les Roberts 5 Queerness in Heavy Metal Music Metal Bent Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone 6 David Bowie: Critical Perspectives Edited by Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power

David Bowie: Critical Perspectives

Edited by Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data David Bowie : critical perspectives / edited by Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power. — 1st edition. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in popular music ; 6) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Bowie, David—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Rock music—History and criticism. I. Devereux, Eoin, editor. II. Dillane, Aileen, editor. III. Power, Martin J., editor. ML420.B754D44 2015 782.42166092—dc23 2014042220 ISBN: 978-0-415-74572-7(hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-79775-5(ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Eoin Devereux:  For my sons Joe and Gavin Devereux and to my wife Liz Devereux for meeting me in The Stella and ­lending me her David Bowie albums all those years ago. Aileen Dillane:  The Gilbert boys, Lochlann, Senan and ­Rossa, and especially Hayden, for his unwavering support, and ­Maureen, Seamus, Deirdre, Fionnuala and Noreen for their advice and inspirational example. Martin J. Power:  For Marian, Fiona and Stephen who keep me sane. To my niece Searlait for fighting the good fight and helping me see what is really important. Thanks to everyone who has had an input into making me who I am. Finally, thanks to John Boland and Stephen Ryan for making me get off the couch all of those years ago to go and see Bowie in Dublin. An evening well spent!

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

List of Figures, Cases or Illustrations Foreword

ix xi

G avin Friday

Preface Acknowledgments   1 David Bowie is

xiii xvii 1

K at hryn J o hnson

  2 In this Age of Grand Allusion: Bowie, Nihilism and Meaning

19

R ichard F i t ch

  3 Culminating Sounds and (En)visions: Ashes to Ashes and the case for Pierrot

35

A ileen Dillane , E o in D e v ere ux and M artin J. Power

  4 Turn Myself to Face Me: David Bowie in the 1990s and Discovery of Authentic Self

56

B e than y Usher and St ephanie F remaux

  5 ‘Crashing out with Sylvian’: David Bowie, Carl Jung and the Unconscious

82

Tanja S tark

  6 Dear Dr. Freud—David Bowie Hits the Couch: A psychoanalytical approach to some of his personae

111

A na L e o rne

  7 Moss Garden: David Bowie and Japonism in fashion in the 1970s H elene M arie Thian

128

viii Contents

  8 The “China Girl” Problem: Reconsidering David Bowie in the 1980s

147

S helton Waldrep

  9 Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness: David Bowie in ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence’

160

M ehdi D erf ou fi

10 Art’s Filthy Lesson

178

Tiffan y Naiman

11 Authorship, Agency and Visual Analysis: Reading (some) Bowie Album Covers.

196

I an C hapman

12 Revisiting Bowie’s Berlin

215

David Bu ckley

13 David Bowie: The Extraordinary Rock Star as Film Star

230

J u lie L o bal z o Wrigh t

14 The (becoming-wo)Man Who Fell to Earth 

245

D ene Oc to ber

15 Out of this World: Ziggy Stardust and the Spatial Interplay of Lyrics, Vocals and Performance

263

Barish Ali and Heidi Wallace

16 David Bowie Now and Then: Questions of Fandom and Late Style

280

N ick S t e v ens o n

17 How Superficial!—Bowie and the Art of Surfacing in 21st Century Literature 

295

Vanessa G arcia

Contributors Index

310 315

List of Figures, Cases or Illustrations

  1.1 Queues for David Bowie is, 24 July 2013 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.   1.2 ‘David Bowie is moving from Suburbia to Soho’ video installation. Design by Zsolt Balogh for 59 Productions © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.  1.3 David Bowie is © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Image reproduced courtesy of The David Bowie Archive and Kansai Yamamoto.   3.1 David Bowie as Pierrot (1980).   3.2 Opening musical riff of ‘Ashes to Ashes’.   3.3 Final two measures of opening instrumental riff of ‘Ashes to Ashes’.   3.4 The syncopated lyrics in the chorus of ‘Ashes to Ashes’.   4.1 David Bowie’s Q Magazine Interviews 1989–1999.   4.2 The retrospective look (left) from April 1990, juxtaposed with Bowie suited for Tin Machine.   4.3 The superimposed Aladdin Sane stripe—Q cover from May 1993.   4.4 Bowie (1989–1999) and Baudrillard’s Phases of the Image.   4.5 Nathan Adler artwork from Q Magazine, January 1995: 177.   4.6 Bowie the Raver, Q Magazine, August 1997: 168.   4.7 Bowie in “Dad’s clothes”, Q Magazine, October 1999: 8.   5.1 Art and image by Tanja Stark.   5.2 ‘All The Jung Dudes’. Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam centers around the iconic image of ‘a crack in the sky and [God’s] hand reaching down’ to spark life into Man.

1 9 13 42 46 46 48 60 62 62 68 70 72 74 82

89

x  List of Figures, Cases or Illustrations

  5.3 Imagery from the ‘Where Are We Now?’ 2013 film clip contrasted with the Noble Empress from the Rosarium Philosophorum, a medieval alchemic work that intrigued Jung (1963).   5.4 Artwork and image by Tanja Stark.   7.1 Norma Kemp, sister of Lindsay Kemp. Inscription reads ‘Love to Daddy from Norma’.  7.2 Ukiyo-e (woodblock print) of a samurai by Jisaemon Arimura, 1860.   7.3 Bowie wears hakama outfit ‘Space Samurai’ by Kansai. Bowie and Kansai photographed by Masayoshi Sukita, April 1973. Photo courtesy of Masayoshi Sukita. 11.1 Hunky Dory. RCA Victor SF 8244. December 1971. 11.2 Aladdin Sane. RCA Victor RS 1001. April 1973. 11.3 Diamond Dogs. RCA Victor APLI 0576. April 1974. 15.1 Back Cover of David Bowie’s Hunky Dory (1971). Image provided courtesy of RZO Music. 15.2 X-Ray of Bowie as Thomas Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). © STUDIOCANAL Films Ltd.

96 105 132 138 139 200 203 207 266 273

Foreword Gavin Friday

‘That weren’t no DJ, that was hazy cosmic jive’ The epiphany, for me, was in July 1972 when Bowie appeared on BBC’s Top of the Pops, an orange-haired androgyne in smoky-grey eyeshadow, a space oddity fallen to earth in a quilted two-piece suit and green-laced boots, strumming on a blue guitar and singing Starman, an arm draped sweetly over Mick Ronson’s shoulder. And there was me, alone, in a nondescript sitting-room in Dublin II, beguiled by it all. Here was a vision both instant and weirdly complete: the look, the sound, the stance, the sheer strangeness of it all, the teasing sexuality, the wild exotica. It was a future shock, and the future was now. My mind was blown. I hadn’t a clue what was going on but I knew and instinctively understood everything as Bowie beckoned to me (a finger pointing camera-ward at me as he sang ‘I had to phone someone, so I picked on you’), bidding me jump ship and join him and the Spiders from Mars. From that July night onwards, nothing would ever be the same again. I was a shy twelve-year-old from Dublin’s tough and tender northside, a kid who hated football but loved T Rex and Oscar Wilde, a lost boy full of pubescent angst and teenage rage. But then Bowie appeared—he appeared—a beautiful stranger from the strangest of lands, and everything changed. This was more than a new religion; he was the Saviour Machine, a transfiguration, and the disciple in me began seeking out everything and anything Bowie-related. I ransacked the record racks and tore through the back catalogue, pored over posters and cover art. I devoured every word, be it written, sung or mimed. This was so much more than your average teenage fan club, and me a casual member. I had enrolled at the University of Bowie, its most dedicated pupil. And for the next ten years, longer even, it was windfall after windfall, starfall after starfall—music, art, literature: from Brecht to Die Brücke, Reed to Reich, Weill to Warhol, the Jean Genie to Jean Genet—all via the ­Bowie-sphere and its glorious satellites. I am forever in debt to where Bowie’s music has brought me, to all he has introduced me to. He has been my exemplar, my portal, perennial and peerless, someone through whom I can look and listen to the world.

xii Foreword He was, and remains, a transformer, a diviner, a master—and me, like the contributors to this volume, a grateful witness. Thank You, Mr. Bowie. Gavin Friday | Dublin, January 2015

Preface Where are we now? Contemporary Scholarship on David Bowie Martin J. Power, Eoin Devereux and Aileen Dillane

During the early hours of 8 January 2013 (the eve of David Bowie’s 66th  ­Birthday), word began to circulate in cyberspace concerning a new David Bowie single as well as the promise of a new album. David Bowie fans awoke to a new song called ‘Where Are We Now?’ which was accompanied by a haunting, almost Beckett-like, video focused on his Berlin years and directed by Tony Oursler. The release of the single and The Next Day album, just two months later, ended years of groundless speculation and rumour concerning Bowie’s career and overall well-being. In old and new media settings Bowie was retired, Bowie was ill, Bowie was a recluse who spent his days painting. Bowie was leaving New York. The dominant media narrative which greeted the news that Bowie was recording again rehearsed many of these ill-founded and baseless rumours. In fact, Bowie had remained active as an artist following his recuperation from a significant health scare in 2004. He had clearly decided to work on his own terms and at his own pace. In the supposed hiatus between 2004 and 2013, Bowie collaborated by performing or recording with a wide range of performers (including Alicia Keys, David Gilmour, TV On The Radio and Lou Reed). He performed live twice with Arcade Fire in 2005 (a band whom he had championed and continues to record with occasionally) and in 2007 he curated the prestigious Highline Festival in Manhattan. All of this, in addition to working as a music producer and as an occasional actor in films like The Prestige (2006), appearing in animation series such as Sponge Bob Square Pants (2007), as well as playing a variety of cameo roles. Some three months before his ‘re-emergence’, the University of L ­ imerick in Ireland convened a major academic event on David Bowie. Strange ­Fascination? A Symposium on David Bowie was held over three days in late October 2012. The event featured papers, performances, artwork, screenings and a panel discussion on Bowie’s legacy to date. Participants (academics, fans, academics who are fans, fans who are academics) travelled from across the world to discuss, dissect, debate and, most importantly, to celebrate the work of one of the most significant figures in contemporary popular culture. There was a very high level of media interest in the event. Predictably, there was some bemusement or lack of understanding in certain media quarters as to the legitimacy of subjecting David Bowie to such earnest scrutiny

xiv  Martin J. Power, Eoin Devereux and Aileen Dillane in an academic setting. To us however the reasons were very clear. As working academics interested in culture and cultural production (in all senses of the term) we do not see ourselves as being locked away Rapunzel-like in an ivory tower. Our task is to engage with culture and cultural production as a real and lived experience whether in the library, on the street, in the supermarket or in the moshpit. In our media-saturated world the word ‘iconic’ is an overused and abused term. David Bowie is one of the few artists to whom the term is deservedly ascribed. In convening Strange Fascination? and in editing this collection of essays we seek to engage critically with one of the most enduring, intriguing and complex figures within popular culture and to add to the emerging academic debate which seeks to assess Bowie’s significance as a songwriter, performer, recording artist, music producer, actor, film producer and painter (see for example Stevenson, 2006; Buckley, 2014; Waldrep, 2004; Broakes & Marsh, 2013). As in any critical approach, our purpose here is to offer new perspectives on Bowie texts (taking ‘text’ in the broadest sense as some aspect of material culture having the ability to be ‘read’—from song texts to costumes, videos to album art, characterisations in film to the man himself and his other selves). To critically read often involves a leap of faith, even in the presence of compelling material evidence. But ultimately, engaging in the creative act of surmising on the pivot of a ‘perhaps’, as Fitch suggests (Chapter 2), surely has its rewards? The title David Bowie: Critical Perspectives also makes it clear that this book is neither an exhaustive account of everything David Bowie has ever done, nor a compendium of every analysis, opinion piece or interpretation undertaken of his life and artistic output thus far. Such a task is beyond the realm of this book, and far from claiming to be definitive; this volume— even though it features examples from each of the decades of Bowie’s extensive career—is unapologetically quite the contrary. The perspectives here are multiple but they are also specific, partial, varied and sometimes even contradictory. All are driven to a greater or lesser degree with the deployment of theoretical scaffolding (some disciplinary specific, others cross- and multidisciplinary) in order to critically explore ways to think, talk about and analyse the extensive and always provocative artistic output of David Bowie in its social, historical, political and cultural context. Key theorists whose ideas have exerted considerable influence across the arts, humanities and social sciences in particular, are harnessed throughout this volume, from sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard (Usher & Fremaux, Chapter 4; Naiman, Chapter 10) to philosopher and literary, film and art critic Gilles Deleuze (October, Chapter 14); from psychotherapist Carl Jung (Stark, Chapter 5) to psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan (Leorne, Chapter 6); from literary theorist and post-colonialist Edward Said (Waldrep, Chapter 8; Derfoufi, Chapter 9) to semiotician and literary critic Roland Barthes (Ali & Wallace, Chapter 15).

Preface  xv In terms of visual culture, the intentionality of Bowie’s album artwork (Chapman, Chapter 11), the context of his dramatic fashion choices (Thian, Chapter 7) and the carefully story-boarded content of a song video (Dillane, Devereux & Power, Chapter 3) all point to the importance of ‘the look’ as well as the sound of Bowie. That said, structures of feeling and Bowie’s various soundscapes also receive attention in close analyses of instrumental textures (Naiman, Chapter 10), the grain of Bowie’s voice (Ali & Wallace, Chapter 15) and in the metric, melodic and harmonic orientation of a Bowie song (Dillane, Devereux & Power, Chapter 3). Bowie and the multiple personae he has deployed throughout his career form the basis of a number of chapters, particularly those which e­ xamine processes of individuation and integration (Stark, Chapter 5) and the work performed by Bowie’s often perverse alter-egos (Leorne, Chapter 6) which have exerted profound influences not just on his psyche but also, by ­extension, his art. Some of the chapters have a reappraising orientation, of both celebrated musical output, such as the recording triptych of the so-called ‘Berlin Period’ (Buckley, Chapter 12), and of more generally written-off works, including the often-ignored band projects (Usher & Fremaux, Chapter 4). Bowie’s acting roles are also reassessed, from the potential hindrance of Bowie’s excessive stardom in playing a character (Wright, Chapter 13), to a cinematic role’s absolute dependence on this star quality (Derfoufi, Chapter 9), while some cinematic characters are dissected in great detail (October, Chapter 14). Bowie’s creative processes in relation to lyric writing, in particular his use of the cut-up technique (Johnson, Chapter 1), allusion (Fitch, Chapter 2) and intertextual referencing (Waldrep, Chapter 8), also find expression in his musical ‘dramas’ (Dillane, Devereux & Power, Chapter 3; Naiman, Chapter 10), all of which are replete with sonic and generic allusions from other times and places, drawing from both high art and low-brow, populist forms in playful and ironic ways. Many chapters ruminate on the significance of Bowie, from the curatorial level with the staging of David Bowie is (Johnson, Chapter 1), to his continued relevance to his legions of fans, including some of the authors here (Stevenson, Chapter 16), asking the question not ‘what’ his work means to people but ‘how’ it means (Fitch, Chapter 2), the answer to which is often unexpected, intimate and autobiographical (Garcia, Chapter 17). Unsurprisingly, virtually all of the chapters make claims for rethinking Bowie in a broader historical, cultural, political and aesthetic context, and, we would say, with good reason. Has there ever been an artist as intellectually, musically and visually compelling, as David Bowie? Martin J. Power, Aileen Dillane and Eoin Devereux University of Limerick, Ireland December 2014

xvi  Martin J. Power, Eoin Devereux and Aileen Dillane References Buckley, Liam. “David Bowie Is”. American Anthropologist 116 (3, 2014):1–3. Broakes, Victoria and Geoffrey Marsh eds. David Bowie Is ... London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2013. Stevenson, Nick. David Bowie: Fame, Sound and Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. Waldrep, Shelton. Aesthetics of Self Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie. ­Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Acknowledgments

For their help and support the editors would like to thank: Paul Boland, Sheena Doyle, Paul McCutcheon, Anne McCarthy, Amanda Haynes, Carmen Kuhling, Pete Rowan, Paul McLoone, Helen Kelly Holmes, Mary Shire, Eamonn Cregan, James Carr, David Collopy, Joe Gervin, Sam Keating, Adrienne Magliocco, Total Blam Blam, Nancy Chen, Gavin Friday, Rebel, Rebel, and Mick, Valerie and Neil Dolan at Dolan’s Warehouse. At the University of Limerick we would like to acknowledge the support received from the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the Department of Sociology, UL40, the Research Office, Corporate Affairs and Campus Life Services. Grateful thanks to those who gave their permission to reproduce original images in this collection.

This page intentionally left blank

1 David Bowie is Kathryn Johnson

Bowie’s release of The Next Day in 2013, his first album in ten years, ­generated a media frenzy. In what was described as the perfect comeback, the album charted in the top 10 in over 20 countries in March. In the same month, the Victoria and Albert Museum (hereafter V&A) opened David Bowie is. This was the first major museum exhibition on Bowie’s long career in music, and the first to draw fully on the collections of The David Bowie Archive. This chapter draws on my experience, as assistant curator, of working intensively with the Archive and in collaboration with a large project team to develop the exhibition between 2011 and 2013. The curators ­Geoffrey Marsh, Victoria Broackes and I devised the exhibition’s narrative without any knowledge of the impending album release, but with a firm belief in Bowie’s far-reaching influence and cultural importance in the ­twenty-first century. The exhibition was not conceived as a retrospective and its unorthodox title was written in the present tense to emphasise this. In the event, the emphasis was barely needed. David Bowie is became the fastest selling exhibition in the history of the V&A. Over 230,000 visitors came to see it in London and an international tour brought it to many more.1

Figure 1.1  Queues for David Bowie is, 24 July 2013 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

At the entrance to the exhibition, visitors were faced by this quotation from Bowie’s notes on the album 1.Outside (1995): “All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice, there are only multiple readings”. In Bowie’s notes, the scrawled

2  Kathryn Johnson originals of which could be seen on display nearby, this line is prefaced by a fuller explanation: Taking the present philosophical line we don’t expect our audience to necessarily seek an explanation from ourselves. We assign that role to the listener and to culture. As both of these are in a state of permanent change there will be a constant “drift” in interpretation. All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings. (Bowie, 1995) These words deliberately open up the album to interpretation by Bowie’s listeners. They echo views previously expressed by him in 1980 “a piece of music once it’s left the writer … becomes public property” (Bowie, Interview with Andy Peebles, 1981), and in 1972, “when an artist does his work it’s no longer his … I just see what people make of it” (cited in Copetas, 1974). Bowie’s expansion of the term ‘art’ to include rock and pop music finds wide acceptance today. The notion that art, in this broad sense, has a meaning that is open to personal interpretation is likewise familiar to contemporary readers and listeners. This principle has gained increasing recognition since the 1970s, the ‘Me’ decade as Tom Wolfe (1976) named it, in which Bowie and other artists of his generation contributed to the widespread championing of individualist philosophies. Moreover, music in the public domain is now easily recognisable as ‘public property’, not only in a metaphorical and intellectual sense but, increasingly, in a practical one as well. As Bowie predicted in 2002, the digital streaming of music on the internet has made much of it as readily available as, “running water or electricity” (Pareles, 2002). Yet, acute as Bowie’s statements are, they are not the common starting point for appreciation of his work. We know Bowie as a music superstar and global icon; the subject of both critical and popular acclaim. As a performer, Bowie projects awe-inspiring charisma and authority. For these reasons, his personal story remains the hook on which much interest in, and analysis of, his career hangs. Creem magazine ran a straight-talking, comic ‘letter’ to Bowie by Laura Fissinger (1983), which stated, “If they [Bowie fans] didn’t smell a person inside the fashion spectacle and musical melodrama, you would have been declared a dead lizard years ago”. Even a music critic such as Robert Matthew-Walker (1985), who notes it is important “to rely mainly on our own observations and analyses” in interpreting Bowie’s work, begins his study with an in-depth account of ‘The Man’. The majority of critical works on Bowie are biographies or variants on them; often full of subtlety and insight, yet invariably reinstating the kind of intentionality that Bowie himself disclaims in the quotation above. His work and music are interpreted chiefly in the light of his personal experience and choices.

David Bowie is  3 This means that a certain tension is generated when Bowie speaks from his position of cultural authority, in order to wilfully abandon it. If ‘meaning’ is not created by such a charismatic ‘author’, does that leave his audience empowered or unsatisfied? By creating work of extraordinary sophistication and originality, Bowie leaves us in no doubt of his own creative powers. By ensuring that the same work demands and sustains ‘multiple readings’, Bowie confers creative agency on us, his audience. In what follows, I suggest that this creative tension, between power and empowerment, is central to Bowie’s lasting cultural impact and enduring popularity. David Bowie is Who I Am Having made his extraordinary archive available to the Museum, Bowie chose to give the V&A curatorial freedom and did not comment directly on the exhibition’s development. The approach he described in 1972, “I just see what people make of it”, applied as much to the exhibition as to his work as a whole. The curatorial and design team faced a dual challenge: to define, convey and celebrate Bowie’s star appeal, while allowing for ‘multiple readings’ of his work. The interplay between power and empowerment described was not only key to understanding Bowie’s creative impact, but key to the success of the exhibition. The thousands of visitors to the exhibition were drawn by the chance to see objects from Bowie’s personal archive, many on display for the first time. As Tilda Swinton put it, on opening the exhibition, “We’re in the Victoria and Albert Museum preparing to rifle through your drawers. It’s truly an amazing thing” (Swinton, 2013). The David Bowie Archive is an exceptional collection of over 75,000 objects, and the V&A was privileged to be the first museum given full access to it. The collection dates from the 1940s to the present and illuminates the entire span of Bowie’s career. It includes not only finished products such as albums and stage costumes but also the working notes, models, sketches and drafts showing their development. By drawing together almost 300 objects from this collection for the first time, the V&A offered both fans and newcomers to Bowie a uniquely rich and intimate view of his creative practice. Given the V&A’s exclusive archival access, the curators were aware that many visitors would expect the exhibition to ‘reveal all’ and offer an authoritative summing-up of Bowie’s character and career. Even the most committed fans and Bowie experts would visit the exhibition to feel closer to his work and gain new insights. To a significant extent, the opportunity to display previously unseen working notes, sketches and lyrics satisfied this last expectation. They revealed the astonishing extent of Bowie’s creative control over each detail of his work, from album design to stage performances. Tracing the process of experimentation and thought which led to an iconic album cover or film footage refreshed readings of well-known objects. Some

4  Kathryn Johnson of the most fascinating ‘finds’ in the archive were unrealised projects, such as sketches for a musical film elaborating on and illuminating references in the Diamond Dogs album to the character of street gang leader Hallowe’en Jack and the urban dystopia of ‘Hunger City’. The exhibition demonstrated that Bowie’s commercially available work represented only a fraction of his creative output. It shed light on the multiple creative artists and works that inspired him, from George Grosz and Erich Heckel to the Beano and Viz. As Jarvis Cocker commented, “The main thing that will impress people as they go round the V&A is the sheer volume of stuff that Bowie has done, it made me feel very lazy” (Cocker, 2013). By giving primacy to creative process over finished product, the exhibition offered a new perspective on Bowie’s work. But in terms of the meaning of that work, there could be no revelations. Spending more than two years immersed in Bowie’s music, story and archived possessions convinced us as curators that Bowie’s cultural influence and importance could not be captured in a single reading. Diversity, polysemy and ambiguity colour Bowie’s creative language. His lyrics invite ‘multiple readings’, as do his album artworks, his astutely crafted public image and complex, theatrical stage performances. The many books and articles written about him form a palimpsest of interpretation, analysis and myth. To each of his fans he represents something intensely personal. One of Bowie’s more famous admirers, Gary Kemp, described his feelings en route to see the exhibition as follows: Bowie is who I am: I was fired up by Ziggy, my soul was stirred by his Young Americans, and my sense of cool was dictated by his Thin White Duke. He held my hand creatively throughout the Seventies and guided me to my choices in the following decade [in Spandau Ballet]. I’m not responsible for this show, but it is responsible to me, to my youth, to all the things that I became because of this man, and I’m desperate not to have that destroyed. (Kemp, 2013) The sense of responsibility was palpable. We were acutely aware that to present Bowie’s multifaceted career from a single angle would distort its real complexity. We wanted visitors to be able to revel in the sense of identification and ownership that Gary Kemp describes, “Bowie is who I am”. Rather than attempting to devise another definitive story, therefore, we aimed to capture the existing multiplicity of readings and allow for others to emerge. In an exhibition context this meant avoiding the didactic ‘authoritative voice’ often associated with museum displays. That tone would run contrary to Bowie’s own creative language. It would also assert authority over an area of popular culture in which many visitors could claim equal expertise. For this reason, curatorial texts in the exhibition were juxtaposed with excerpts from existing critical texts by David Buckley, Kevin Cann and Nicholas Pegg.2 By positioning the quotation, ‘All art is unstable … there is

David Bowie is  5 no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings’ at the entrance to the exhibition, we offered a curatorial disclaimer couched in Bowie’s own words. Conveying the dynamic power of Bowie’s work and, at the same time, its ability to spark a multiplicity of ideas and readings, became a core principle of the curatorial approach. This principle informed the choice of exhibition title David Bowie is, devised by music journalist Paul Morley.3 Both a statement and a deliberately unfinished sentence, the title functioned as a teaser and a catalyst. It was a statement of Bowie’s contemporaneity and cultural presence. At the same time, it provoked visitors to engage in defining and re-defining what Bowie ‘is’. It invited personal responses and did not rule out different and potentially conflicting readings. Paul Morley’s own variations on the theme, playful or thought-provoking, were embedded in the exhibition text and design: “David Bowie is moving like a tiger on Vaseline” borrowed Bowie’s lyric from, ‘Hang on to Yourself’. ‘David Bowie is making himself up’ or ‘David Bowie is a face in the crowd’ were deliberately ambiguous. For Gary Kemp, among others, this approach was successful. Kemp’s review read: It’s an exhibition that is thrilling and sensorial, with sound and vision working together to immerse or—dare I say—baptise you, in Bowieworld. But it’s not, I realised, about one man, it’s about all of us; all of us who invested so much and learned so much at his tutelage. As I left I thought about what the show’s open-ended title implied: David Bowie is … you. (Kemp, 2013) In terms of curatorial practice and exhibition design, David Bowie is aimed to take an existing trend to a new level. When Bowie questions the authority of his own ‘authorial voice’ in his notes on 1.Outside he describes his position as part of “the present philosophical line”. This philosophical tendency was registered across several cultural fields by the 1990s, including museum practice. The ‘new museology’ of the 1970s and 1980s focused critical attention on the social and ideological purpose of the museum, pushing curators to ask ‘why’, as well as ‘how’, objects should be preserved. Exhibitions were newly defined at this time as narratives driven by ideology. These ideas continued to gain urgency in the 1990s, at which time Mieke Bal accurately pinpointed the differentiating factor between the ‘new museology’ and previous curatorial approaches: it is the serious follow up on the idea that a museum installation is a discourse and an exhibition is an utterance within that discourse … Bringing this discursive perspective to the museum … deprives the museum practice of its innocence, and provides it with the accountability it, as well as its users, are entitled to. (Bal, 1996: 128)

6  Kathryn Johnson A questioning approach to curatorial authority entered along with this increased recognition of the curator’s accountability. It was widely felt that exhibition narratives delivering a single curatorial viewpoint risked becoming overly didactic. The interpretative agency of the visitor was given a new level of recognition and respect. The terms of this debate remain pressing today. Andrea Witcomb has argued that in order for museums to be more than ‘mausoleums’ it is vital to acknowledge the limits of curatorial understanding and authority: exhibition spaces need to be reconceptualised as … interactive in themselves. This requires museums to move away from a didactic, hierarchical model of communication towards an understanding of exhibition narratives as polysemic and open ended. (Witcomb, 2003: 130) Pop music exhibitions invite and require a curatorial approach and language that is in sympathy with this trend towards inclusive and multivalent exhibition environments. Unlike fine art, for example, pop culture is not commonly experienced in a didactic context. It is recognised, to borrow Bowie’s term, as ‘public property’. While David Bowie is shared curatorial insights derived from intensive research and study of archival objects, it was also designed in a manner that encouraged visceral individual responses and visitor interaction. Since the 1980s there has been an exponential increase in the number of exhibitions mounted across the world. The number of V&A exhibitions in development or on display at any one time increased by more than five times between 1990 and 2013. The increasing sophistication of exhibition design, over this period, owes much to the even faster advancement of design in other fields, including theatre and rock concerts. 59 Productions, the lead design company for David Bowie is, specialises in creating pioneering media installations for theatre, rock performances and live events. By applying this expertise in a museum context they created an atmospheric environment that helped to tell Bowie’s story in an intuitive and visual manner. As the design evolved in conversation with curators, it became clear that its authenticity and effectiveness would depend on the degree to which it referenced Bowie’s own work. Music and film, as Bowie’s key creative outputs, were clearly central to David Bowie is. They had to be fully integrated into the display and given equal status with more traditional objects. ­Visitors were surrounded by film montages, projection-mapped onto multiple s­urfaces, and a soundtrack delivered via headphones to individual visitors through Sennheiser’s wireless, digital visitor guidance system, guidePORT™. Using these technologies, the designers created a deeply ­entertaining and ­intriguing exhibition environment that appeared in constant movement.

David Bowie is  7 Theatrical techniques and visual language used by Bowie himself to disrupt the notion of a singular ‘authoritative’ narrative were assimilated into the design wherever possible. Books from Bowie’s eclectic reading list were, for example, suspended from the ceiling of the exhibition amongst a constantly changing sequence of images showing films, performers, writers, artists and thinkers who had also inspired Bowie. This feature paid visual homage to Bowie’s pioneering multimedia show at the Rainbow Theatre, London, in 1972. At that performance, Bowie projected photographs of Marc Bolan, Elvis and Andy Warhol, among others, behind the stage. Working notes indicate that he also considered projecting surrealist artworks by Magritte, and evocative images of flames and stars—a sensuous mélange of disparate images. Creative techniques favoured by Bowie, such as collage and ‘cut-ups’, would become central to the design language of the exhibition. From the entrance, visitors were faced with a choice of two doorways into the rest of the exhibition. Both were of equal size and in the event, equally valid. This momentary dilemma was intended as a playful provocation. It required the visitor to exercise an element of independent choice. Subsequent areas of the exhibition were also designed to be as ­free-flowing as possible, without an obvious or ‘correct’ path and sequence through them. Each section had a distinctive aesthetic and atmosphere. Moving through a sequence of atmospheric ‘changes’ gave many visitors the sense of entering Bowie’s creative universe. “Walking through the rooms is like walking through parts of his brain” wrote one reviewer (Caseby, 2013), while another registered “a sense of a fertile intelligence, changing constantly, shaping the world” (Crompton, 2013). The exhibition seemed chaotic and overwhelming to some, and crammed full of objects, but this challenging environment was also recognized as evocative of its subject: The restless, fragmentary approach of the curators is entirely apt for a subject who artistically never stood still … and who wrote many an obscure lyric by cutting up a page of written words and rearranging them arbitrarily. (Smart, 2013) This exchange between the exhibition format and Bowie’s creative processes and output is explained in more detail below, in a sequence loosely following that of the exhibition and moving from Bowie’s early career to his contemporary cultural status and influence. As will be seen, Bowie’s embrace of ‘multiple readings’ of his work, as expressed in his notes on 1.Outside, is not a temporary posture but a governing principle. Approaching his creative practice from this angle offers a fresh and illuminating perspective on the unique path he has charted through pop stardom.

8  Kathryn Johnson ‘Diversifying all over the place’: Early Years Bowie was recording and performing for several years before his breakthrough hit ‘Space Oddity’ in 1969. He did not become widely known until his creation of ‘Ziggy Stardust’ in 1972. When asked in a 1976 BBC radio interview about his relative lack of early commercial success as a pop star, Bowie remarked that at this time he had not learnt to direct his creative energy effectively: 71 was when I got down to seriously writing and trying not to diversify too much. I mean, I was just diversifying all over the place. I would try and get involved in anything that I felt was a useful tool as an artistic medium, from writing songs to putting on arts lab show to street theatre. I was trying to be a one man revolution you know. (Love You Till Tuesday, 1976) Kenneth Pitt, Bowie’s first manager, struggled to direct his protégé’s talents. As Pitt charmingly described the situation, “it was a very nice problem to have someone who had so much energy he didn’t know what to do with it or where to put it” (Love You Till Tuesday, 1976). At that time, neither Pitt nor Bowie could have fully realised that the broad spectrum of interests Bowie pursued alongside music in the 1960s, from advertising, art, mime and street theatre to the Arts Lab movement and Buddhism, would crucially enable his later pioneering work. By channelling these different art forms and interests into his music and performances he revolutionised the way ‘rock ’n’ roll’ could look and sound. Referring to the same magpie tendencies in a later interview, Bowie acknowledged, Really it’s an integral part of what I do now but it’s honed itself and it’s more sophisticated and bit more mature I guess but I’ve still got that erratic faddy thing about me, I mean I still get turned on by something for only a couple of weeks and then I drop it. (Changes, 1976) The first section of the exhibition focussed on Bowie’s early career but did not enact a ‘return to origins’. Instead, it aimed to return visitors to the moment at which, for Bowie, all diverse career possibilities were open. Through peepholes inserted into a series of fake doors, visitors could look into miniature worlds which represented alternative career paths that Bowie had been at one time drawn to. These included a Buddhist temple, in reference to Bowie’s wry statement, “I was still wondering [in 1969] … whether I had found God as a Buddhist, or whether I wanted to be a rock and roll star” (Love You Till Tuesday, 1976).

David Bowie is  9

Figure 1.2  ‘David Bowie is moving from Suburbia to Soho’ video installation. Design by Zsolt Balogh for 59 Productions © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Bowie’s decision to focus on rock ’n’ roll was in part motivated by a desire for public influence, as he explained in a later interview: I thought, “Well, here I am, I’m a bit mixed up creatively, I’ve got all these things I like doing at once on stage … I’m not quite sure if I’m a mime or a songwriter or a singer, or do I want to go back to painting again. Why am I doing any of these things anyway …” and I realised it was because I wanted to be well known […] I wanted to be the instigator of new ideas, I wanted to turn people on to new things and new perspectives … I always wanted to be that sort of catalytic kind of thing. (Changes, 1976) Through headphones, visitors could hear this quotation and other excerpts from radio interviews with Bowie. At the same time, they could watch an immersive three-dimensional video installation layering photographs and rare footage of Bowie from the 1960s and early 1970s with contextual images evoking London of the same period, including bombed streets, neon signs and music magazines. Evocative, witty and surreal, it aimed to suggest a mental state of dream, aspiration and fantasy while also referencing the physical reality of Bowie’s past and hinting at his future career. Later sections of the exhibition explored in greater detail Bowie’s adept use of collage and bricolage as creative approaches. From the early 1970s onward

10  Kathryn Johnson he moved from ‘diversifying all over the place’ to channelling his multiple interests into a coherent and phenomenally successful creative practice. ‘T. S. Eliot with a rock and roll beat’: Creative Influences Press releases for Bowie’s eponymous first album publicised his eclectic and sophisticated musical and literary interests: He loves to sit amidst a bank of column speakers listening to Stravinsky, usually ‘Ragtime for Eleven Instruments’. He adores Vaughan Williams, Dvořák, Elgar and Holst. His extensive record collection includes lots of Glenn Miller, Stan Kenton and Gary McFarland … He reads everything he can get his hands on … (Decca, 1969) These influences are hard to trace in Bowie’s first album, which arguably sounds less interesting than its creator. Yet Bowie continued to mine diverse sources of inspiration and later became adept at assimilating them into new and original work of rare variety and depth. Songwriting, for Bowie, became part of a holistic creative process which also involved visual design and resulted in a ‘total’, three-dimensional vision. In a review of his Royal Festival Hall gig in 1972, The Times newspaper described him as, “T. S. Eliot with a rock and roll beat” (Wale, 1972). The David Bowie Archive supplied the V&A with a list of 100 books that Bowie considered significant influences on his creative work. These titles include George Steiner’s In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards a Re-definition of Culture, which first introduced Bowie to an idea that would later become a central tenet of postmodernism: the conflation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. As Bowie described it in 2003, this translated into the revelation that “there was actually some kind of theory behind what I was doing with my work”, and that it was permissible to like “Igor Stravinsky and The Incredible String Band, or The Velvet Underground and Gustav Mahler” (Bowie, 2003). Bowie’s own appetite for an eclectic smorgasbord of cultural stimuli affirms Steiner’s view that a generation of young people in the 1970s were creating individual frames of cultural reference and standards of taste rather than absorbing a canon of works ratified by a previous generation. … aggregates of individualised ad-hoc reference are replacing set discriminations between learning and illiteracy. The line between education and ignorance is no longer self-evidently hierarchic. Much of the mental performance of society now transpires in the middle zone of personal eclecticism. (Steiner, 1971: 66)

David Bowie is  11 “David Bowie is either revolution or plagiarism” read one of Paul Morley’s statements at the V&A. It referred, in this context, to Bowie’s m ­ agpie-like borrowing from different media and other artists. An extremely wide range of musical and cultural influences, from German expressionist art to the Beano, leave their mark on Bowie’s creative work. Steiner’s phrase “aggregates of individualised ad-hoc reference” is a useful, if rather clunky, description of Bowie’s multilayered and allusive practice. Bowie has always signposted his multiple creative influences in a bold and deliberate fashion. On tour, for example, his choice of pre-show music provides a context for his own performance. He signalled the important link between the character of Ziggy Stardust and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, by playing Wendy Carlos’ arrangement of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ from the film’s soundtrack before performances. The influence of Krautrock on Station to Station was similarly made explicit by Bowie’s use of ­Kraftwerk’s ‘Radioactivity’ as pre-show music during the 1976 tour. Lee Brooks has noted a comparable bricoleur approach in the work of Bob Dylan, an early influence on Bowie, and Morrissey, whom Bowie arguably influenced in his turn. Indeed, as Brooks (2011: 260) notes, “musical commandeering is anything but rare in the history of popular music and has indeed always been an acknowledged mode of operation for genres like country and folk music”. Yet it is rare to generate work of startling originality and popularity by ‘commandeering’ elements from music and a wide range of other art forms. As Bowie’s career progressed, he honed his rare ability to synthesise avant-garde ideas and present them in a form that would resonate with a wide range of people. Music critic Howard Goodall identifies Bowie on this basis as a ‘second wave’ composer, a title which puts him, according to Goodall, in the illustrious company of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Gershwin. What all these ‘second wave’ composers have in common is a highly developed sense for what else is in the ether, what styles are emerging and where to find such ingenuity. They are then able to blend new, exploratory ideas with their own well-developed skills, packaging the ensuing mix for the general audience in such a way as to intrigue and delight without leaving them utterly bewildered. These are rare gifts. … (Goodall, 2013: 165) Bowie’s talent for synthesis also extends to the physical ‘packaging’ or visual design of the stage performances and album art that accompany his music. Bowie’s particular significance for the V&A, the UK’s national museum of art, design and performance, rests on the critical role he played in stimulating the fusion in popular culture of image and sound. As he told William S. Burroughs in their famous staged conversation for Rolling Stone magazine, music alone could not fully realise his creative vision, “I’m just not content writing songs, I want to make it three-dimensional” (Copetas, 1974).

12  Kathryn Johnson Camille Paglia (2013: 69) has suggested “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”. The readings which Bowie’s work invites are increased in variety by its dual aural and visual dimensions. He has identified himself, together with Roxy Music, as “representatives of an embryonic form of postmodernism” in his attempts to take ideas from other artistic media to “broaden rock’s vocabulary” (Bowie, 1998 cited in Pegg, 2011: 315–316). As the vocabulary of rock broadened in the 1970s it generated a greater variety of meaning and gathered more complex cultural significance. In expanding on the ‘three-dimensional’ quality of this work to William Burroughs, Bowie said, A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle. The rock stars have assimilated all kinds of philosophies, styles, histories, writings, and they throw out what they have gleaned from that. (cited in Copetas, 1974) The imbrication of rock music with a variety of other art forms and discourses was made clear in David Bowie is from the outset. The opening quotation “All art is unstable” was positioned beside Bowie’s original handwritten notes on 1.Outside, a page of digitally scrambled text relating to the same album, and a replica of the sculptural ‘Tokyo Pop’ bodysuit designed for Bowie by Kansai Yamamoto (a replica necessitated by chemical degeneration in the vinyl material of the original piece). Nearby were artworks by Roelof Louw, ‘Soul City’, John Cage, ‘Chess Pieces’ and Gilbert and George, ‘The Singing Sculpture’. ‘The grouping identified Bowie’s work explicitly as art but more specifically, unstable art, open to interpretation. Positioned nearby, a quotation from George Melly’s classic 1970 text Revolt into Style read, “British pop music is teetering on the edge of becoming art” (Melly, 1970). Bowie played a critical role in pushing pop over that edge in the late 1960s and 1970s. The appreciation and consumption of pop music have since become inextricably linked with that of visual art and design. By the 1990s, Bowie could easily borrow terms from literary and art criticism for his sleeve notes. His concept album 1.Outside is itself built around the narrative of an ‘art crime’. ‘Sound + Vision’, to borrow Bowie’s formulation, continue to be experienced simultaneously. A central area of the V&A exhibition illustrated this dynamic by juxtaposing objects from The David Bowie Archive with examples of the art forms that inspired them. Placing a stage costume designed for Bowie by Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto, for example, alongside a painted advertisement for a traditional Japanese kabuki theatre performance enabled visitors to appreciate the stylistic continuity and difference between the two (see also Chapter 7 by Helene Thian in this volume).

David Bowie is  13

Figure 1.3  David Bowie is © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Image reproduced courtesy of The David Bowie Archive and Kansai Yamamoto.

Archived working notes and sketches revealed Bowie’s complex web of visual, musical and cultural references in unprecedented detail. Notes on the set design for the Diamond Dogs tour of 1974, for example, reference Dadaist art and the satirical German artist George Grosz. It becomes clear from this that references from early twentieth-century European culture were shaping Bowie’s work some years before his well-known move to Berlin in 1976 and immersion in the landscape as well as the history and culture of the Weimar Republic era. The continued influence of Dadaism is evident in sketch designs by Bowie for an extraordinary black and white geometric outfit worn on the set of Saturday Night Live in 1979. Like the Diamond Dogs set, the final costume was realised by Mark Ravitz. Bowie sent the sketch to Ravitz accompanied by images of two seminal pieces of Dadaist theatre: Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, in a similarly restrictive tubular costume, and a scene from Tristan Tzara’s 1929 play Le Cœur à gaz [The Gas Heart].4 Original costume designs for The Gas Heart by Sonia Delaunay, held in the V&A collections, were displayed alongside the sketch and costume itself. These juxtapositions amplified and extended Bowie’s creative process by making chains of influence ‘three-dimensional’. The exhibition placed his work, in a direct physical sense, in the context of twentieth-century material culture. A fascinating tension exists between this intensely considered and detailed web of reference, and Bowie’s use of chance as a creative technique. An early working title for the exhibition was ‘Planned Accidents’—also a working title for the album which eventually became Lodger. This phrase captures the knife-edge between chance and artistic intention on which Bowie’s creative work appears to sit, balancing strong narrative with the

14  Kathryn Johnson erratic interference of rhythm and music, demonstrating both considered planning and the ability to capitalise on a lucky ‘mistake’ and making a strong statement while remaining open to ‘multiple readings’. The exhibition format, in which meaning can be created through spatial and visual juxtapositions, lends itself to multiple readings. As Mieke Bal (1996: 128) suggests in her seminal work Double Exposures, the exhibition can be considered an ‘utterance’ or narrative: “The utterance consists … of the productive tension between images, captions (words) and installation (sequence, height, light, combinations)”. A narrative told through visual motifs and juxtaposition of objects is innately polysemic and open-ended. While curatorial text can carry a particular, carefully considered and researched, story, it is a fact that only a small proportion of visitors will read it—however well written. The majority are drawing their own conclusions from primarily visual stimuli. Ultimately, the exhibition partakes in the character of music as Bowie describes it, and becomes ‘public property’. In the case of David Bowie is, this result was welcomed and encouraged as entirely in keeping with Bowie’s own desire to ‘just see what people make of it’. ‘To become a medium’: Creative Influence Bowie’s habit of signposting his cultural influences is consistent with the driving goal he expressed in the 1970s: I wanted to be the instigator of new ideas, I wanted to turn people on to new things and new perspectives … I always wanted to be that sort of catalytic kind of thing. (Changes, 1976) Rock music, for Bowie, was a tool and a medium through which he could achieve this catalytic impact: ‘I had to govern everything around that and I just … decided to use the easiest medium to start off with which was rock ‘n’ roll, and then to add pieces to it over the years and so that really by the end of it I was my own medium … I mean hopefully that’ll happen one day … that’s really why I do it … to become a medium […] I guess I was one of the first to come out and say I’m using rock n roll, it’s not my life … I’m only using it as a medium. (Changes, 1976) It is clear that the richness of meaning in Bowie’s creative output is also a result of his deep interest in music as a medium. He continually observes, reflects on and directs the dialogic relationship between the musician,

David Bowie is  15 the music and listeners. In adopting the persona of alien rock-god Ziggy ­Stardust in the early 1970s, or posing as Christ in the controversial music video for ‘The Next Day’ in 2013, he dramatizes and underlines the power of individual leaders to sway millions—thereby deliberately undercutting his own authority as a pop idol. Bowie’s aspiration to not only use rock as a medium of expression, but ‘to become a medium’ himself demands further consideration. This characteristically self-aware statement sheds new light on the somewhat hackneyed debate over Bowie’s lack of authenticity. His fluid adoption of disparate roles has left many commentators, from legendary rock journalist Lester Bangs onward, tired of asking ‘where is he in all this?’ and accusing him of superficiality. In the short film Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, Bowie plays both pop star and disgruntled audience member in order to mimic some of these critical voices, “You conniving, randy, bogus-Oriental old queen! Your record sleeves are better than your songs!” Bowie’s undoubted commercial appeal and slick professionalism have all too often been misinterpreted as a mark of creative compromise. Bowie’s creation of sophisticated and eminently saleable work can be more convincingly and coherently interpreted as part of the process of becoming a ‘medium’. A medium, in artistic terms, is a substance with distinctive characteristics which can be taken and used to serve a new and individual creative purpose. In this sense, Bowie gives us a medium, rather than a message. Christopher Frayling has commented on Bowie’s consummately stylish presentation of himself and his music as follows: You don’t want to be him because of what he believes in or because of what he’s fighting for. You want to be him because you like his style— and that turns the audience into consumers … I think Bowie really picked up on the idea that there’s no shame in commodifying yourself. Actually, it doesn’t ruin the art—in some ways it enhances it. (Frayling et al, 2013) Bowie’s consummate stylishness is one distinctive aspect of the medium he offers his audience. It could, as Frayling suggests, be described as a commodity but one which stimulates the consumer’s creativity rather than supplanting it. If viewed in this way, Bowie’s art is undoubtedly enhanced by the rich diversity of artworks it has inspired and shaped. Bowie’s admirers include an unusually high number of other contemporary artists working in diverse areas from fashion, art and music to dance, films and video games. Those contributing their voice or work to the exhibition included Tilda Swinton, Michael Clark, Hanif Kureishi, Kansai Yamamoto and Jeremy Deller. Each had been inspired by Bowie’s work, or during collaboration with him, to realise their own intensely individual creative vision in their respective areas of film, dance, literature and art.

16  Kathryn Johnson The final section of the exhibition included a montage of works and artists inspired by Bowie, from matryoshkas fashioned in the image of Bowie by artist Tanja Stark (see Chapter 5 by Tanja Stark in this volume), to pieces by fashion designers Phoebe Philo and Dries Van Noten, to anonymous street art. In its eclecticism it mirrored the ability of Bowie, as a ‘medium’, to be transformed into an astonishingly wide range of work. It provided a fitting finale to an exhibition that, by focussing not on personal history but on creative inspiration, process and impact, affirmed Bowie’s powerful ability to set a dynamic process of creative influence in motion. Moreover, the exhibition itself was not excluded from this process but, indeed, integral to it. In taking the totality of Bowie’s archive collection, his music and work, and presenting it in a new three-dimensional form, David Bowie is, the exhibition, was only the latest in a long series of works generated from the rich medium that is David Bowie.

Notes 1.  David Bowie is opened to the public at the V&A in London on 23 March 2013, to both popular and critical acclaim. Its run was extended due to visitor demand and it eventually closed on 11 August 2013. A film of the exhibition David Bowie is Happening Now (directed by Hamish Hamilton and produced by Done + Dusted, in collaboration with the V&A), was screened in UK cinemas to an audience of over 23,000 on 13 August. At the date of writing, international exhibition tour venues include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (27.09.13–29.11.13), The Museum of Image and Sound, Sao Paulo (31.01.14–20.04.14), the Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin (20.05.14–10.09.14) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (23.09.14–04.01.15). The touring exhibition may be modified in consultation with the V&A; in Berlin, for example, additional pieces were displayed relating to Bowie’s life in the city and the albums Low, “Heroes” and Lodger. These included Erich Heckel’s painting Roquairol on loan from the Brücke-Museum in Berlin; a source of inspiration for the album covers of both “Heroes” and Iggy Pop’s The Idiot. 2.  This selection was intended to represent a range of approaches to Bowie, David Buckley’s biography adopting a very different tone to Kevin Cann’s exhaustive record of the early years and Nick Pegg’s comprehensive annotated discography. Each text had proved invaluable during the making of the exhibition and informed the curatorial text beside which it was placed. 3.  Paul Morley acted as an advisor to the exhibition in the last year of its development, together with graphic artist and designer Jonathan Barnbrook. 4. The classic account of the Dadaist movement by the artist and filmmaker Hans Richter, first published in 1964, remains one of the most insightful and lucid. See Hans Richter Dada: Art and Anti-Art (Thames & Hudson: London, 1997).

David Bowie is  17 References Bal, Mieke. Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis. New York: ­Routledge, 1996. Bowie, David and Kenneth Pitt. Love You Till Tuesday: The David Bowie Story. Interview by Stuart Grundy. BBC Radio 1, May 1976. BBC Sound Archive. Bowie, David. Changes: The David Bowie Story. Interview by Stuart Grundy. BBC Radio 1, May 1976. BBC Sound Archive. Bowie, David. Interview by Andy Peebles. BBC Radio 1, 5 January 1981. BBC Sound Archive. Bowie, David. Manuscript notes on 1.Outside. 1995. Courtesy of The David Bowie Archive. Bowie, David. “David Bowie – Words On A Wing”. Interview by Jérome Soligny. Rock & Folk, December 1998. Bowie, David. Interview by Ingrid Sischy. Interview, October 2003. Broackes, Victoria and Geoffrey Marsh, eds. David Bowie is. London: V&A ­Publishing, 2013. Brooks, Lee. “Talent Borrows, Genius Steals: Morrissey and the Art of Appropriation”. In Morrissey: Fandom, Representation and Identities, edited by Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane and Martin J. Power. Bristol: Intellect, 2011. Buckley, David. Strange Fascination: David Bowie, The Definitive Story. London: Virgin Books Random House, 1999. Cann, Kevin. Any Day Now: David Bowie, The London Years (1947–1974). ­London: Adelita, 2010. Caseby, Becca. “Review of David Bowie is”. Intermission Bristol, 22 July 2013. http://www.intermissionbristol.co.uk (accessed 13 May 2014). Cocker, Jarvis. “Preview of David Bowie is”. Evening Standard, 18 March 2013. Copetas, Craig. “Beat Godfather meets Glitter Mainman”. Rolling Stone, 28 ­February 1974. Crompton, Sarah. “Review of David Bowie is”. The Telegraph, 18 March 2013. Decca Record Company Ltd. Press release for David Bowie, 1969. Courtesy of ­Kenneth Pitt and Kevin Cann. Fissinger, Laura. “As I Write this Letter …”. Creem, July 1983. Reprinted in The Bowie Companion, edited by Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman. New York: Da Capo, 1996. Frayling, Christopher. “David Bowie then … David Bowie now …”. In David Bowie is, edited by Geoffrey Marsh and Victoria Broackes. London: V&A Publishing, 2013. Goodall, Howard. “Bowie: Music, ‘Lucky old sun is in my sky …’” In David Bowie is, edited by Geoffrey Marsh and Victoria Broackes. London: V&A Publishing, 2013. Kemp, Gary. “Preview of David Bowie is”. Evening Standard, 18 March 2013. Matthew-Walker, Robert. David Bowie: Theatre of Music. Kent: The Kensal Press, 1985. Melly, George. Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain. London: Allen Lane, 1970. Paglia, Camille. “Theatre of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution”. In David Bowie is, edited by Geoffrey Marsh and Victoria Broackes. London: V&A Publishing, 2013.

18  Kathryn Johnson Pareles, Jon. “David Bowie, 21st-century entrepreneur”. New York Times, 9 June 2002. Pegg, Nicholas. The Complete David Bowie. London: Titan Books, 2011. Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997. Smart, Alastair. “Review of David Bowie is”. The Telegraph, 23 March 2013. Steiner, George. In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture. London: Faber & Faber, 1971. Swinton, Tilda. Opening speech for David Bowie is. V&A, 21 March 2013. http:// www.vam.ac.uk/b/blog/va-network/tilda-swintons-dinner-speech-opening-davidbowie (accessed 18 February 2014). Thomson, Elizabeth and David Gutman, eds. The David Bowie Companion. New York: Da Capo, 1996. Wale, Michael. “David Bowie: Festival Hall”. The Times, July 1972. Witcomb, Andrea. Re-imagining the museum: beyond the mausoleum. London: Routledge, 2003. Wolfe, Tom. Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter & Vine: And Other Stories, Sketches and Essays. London: Bantam, 1976.

2 In this Age of Grand Allusion Bowie, Nihilism and Meaning Richard Fitch

Introduction Bowie, philosophy, politics—perhaps an unlikely juxtaposition; a dogeared paperback jutting out from a pocket, flirtatiously giving you a flash of its title, perhaps Nietzsche as in the artwork for Heathen, there The Gay ­Science? Has the book been read or does it just appear read to those who gaze at it too innocently? Perhaps. Which pocket? Perhaps from a trouser worn on a platform at Victoria Station, in reach of an arm shaping towards an infamous gesture, or perhaps not. Did it happen? Did the cut shapes fall that way? Perhaps. What is Allusion? In this opening paragraph can be found a direct reference and at least two allusions. There is an explicit reference to the representation of a book by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the artwork of Bowie’s album Heathen (Nietzsche, 2001; Bowie, 2002).1 There is an allusion to an event at a London railway station, and another which might refer to Bowie’s use of cut-up techniques in song composition, or to a Yardbirds song he covered, or to both, or to neither. An allusion is still a reference of sorts but it is “covert or indirect” where “the identification of something that the speaker or writer appears by his words to have in mind but does not name, is left for the hearer or reader to make” (Fowler, 1983: 16). It is up to you, not me, to make the connection. People who know of Bowie’s life in the 1970s should make a Victoria Station connection. But the ‘cut shapes’ is probably more obscure. It depends on you. However, the creator of allusions is not lazy or trying to give the reader work. He is giving the reader something to play with, a semantic toy. How the reader plays with the toy is up to the reader.2 Etymologically, allusion can be traced to the Latin alludere, which means ‘to play with’. What motivates the ideas found in this chapter is the suspicion that the key to understanding the attraction of Bowie’s work for the intellectually and culturally curious lies in his playful manipulation of allusion. He

20  Richard Fitch is a master of allusion, and as a master his allusions allow for more potential connections. Allusion allows the curious to play countless games of fruitful interpretation with Bowie’s songs and performances. The curious can play by making their own connections because, in the absence of direct reference, there is no way of determining, once and for all, what connections Bowie had in mind when he crafted his allusions. The chapter will explore how Bowie’s mastery of allusion can contribute to the organisation of the chaos which results from the problem of nihilism. So this chapter is not concerned with what Bowie or his work mean, but with how it can mean. The title of this chapter is itself an allusion to the opening of ‘Word on a Wing’ from Station to Station, whose lyrics run “In the age of grand ­delusion / You walked into my life out of my dreams / I don’t need another change / Still you forced a way into my scheme of things” (Bowie, 1976). Indeed grand delusion might be an allusion to Jean Renoir’s 1937 film La Grande Illusion, which might itself allude to Nicholas Angell’s 1909 a­ nti-war tract The Great Illusion (Renoir, 1937; Angell, 1909). And then one can make connections forward, so that one might also find allusions to Renoir’s ­ anti-war ­prisoner of war film in Nagisa Oshima’s 1983 POW film Merry ­Christmas, Mr ­Lawrence, in which Bowie starred (Jaehne, 1984: 45; Oshima, 1983; see Chapter 9 by Mehdi Derfoufi in this volume). ­Following allusions beats paths through culture which might lead the curious almost anywhere and thus expose the curious to culture that they might not ­otherwise have stumbled upon. These paths can amount to novel cultural genealogies, revealing connections where none were previously perceived. Allusion has an intimate connection to another concept often associated with Bowie: ambiguity. William Empson defined ambiguity broadly as “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language” (Empson, 1947: 1). And by refusing the temptation to give a direct reference, the master alluder gives ample room for various reactions to the same piece of language that comprises the allusion. Consider a song that trades roughly in allusion: ‘The Jean Genie’ from Aladdin Sane (Bowie, 1973). The culturally promiscuous might make one connection and see the title as a play on Jean Genet, the transgressive French playwright, or they might make another connection through the song’s allusions to the wilder side of the New York scene (Doggett, 2012: 160–162). Each connection has its own validity. The album title Aladdin Sane can of course be taken as a pun (a lad insane) which is another type of indirect reference. The fruitfulness of allusion does not mean that direct reference does not have its place. It has a juridical function, protecting the intellectual property of others, and also discouraging plagiarism. It has a pedagogic function, offering suggestions of further reading, or suggesting what should not be read. It can also render a text less obscure and keep rampant allusion in check. Otherwise, eventually everything might carelessly be treated as a potential allusion to potentially anything, and any determinate meaning of

In this Age of Grand Allusion  21 the text might be lost. But whether this is a problem depends on what the text is trying to communicate and what potentialities the author has sought to set up. If it is trying to communicate the fertility of allusion then obscurity might be sought out, not avoided, because the more obscure the allusion the greater the range of connections that might be made and hence the better the creative power of allusion demonstrated. Any potential allusion acts as a site for potential connections and, as such, allows for the construction of secret genealogies by author or reader. These are secret to the curious player and their construction of these secret genealogies can personalise, for example, a Bowie song for them. Their interpretative labour in making connections, in its own small way, merges with the labour of the performer. And a virtue of allusion is that there is no need to justify your secret genealogies to anyone else because to justify them would destroy them by turning them into direct references. As the twentieth-century French critic Jean Paulhan observed “An allusion which is explained no longer has the charm of allusion … In divulging the mystery, you withdraw its virtue” (Pasco, 1994: 10). A pernicious aspect of direct referencing is its use in the attempted domestication of the wild-eyed and strange by confining it within a framework of received opinion, an accepted canon or a settled and all too safe scheme of things. Allusion can loosen the grip that nets of references have on us, nets thrown over us by the societies in which we find ourselves, in order to bind us to those societies and their norms. When secret genealogies are shared or collide, accidental communities can coalesce around them, such as those of Bowie boys and girls and all other stations; “the audience should be allowed to feel the pleasure and power of discovery and creativity in order to produce an optimal feeling of intimacy and community” (Irwin, 2002: 530). Allusion thus empowers and connects those who make the connections. And these connections can, in turn, act back on the original allusion and enrich it by pointing out connections that the composer or performer might not have originally envisioned. Allusion poses a problem for this chapter and the work it is purporting to do. Doesn’t directly referring to Bowie’s allusions dispel their mystery and thus drain them of their aesthetic virtue? The vice of direct reference is to confine curiosity, and the virtue of allusion is to use ambiguity to open up interpretative space. So rather than analysing Bowie’s allusions and thus reducing them to direct references, this piece tries, in the spirit of his grand allusion, to open up the contexts in which Bowie’s work is considered. The musical context is expanded to include the long history of Western Art Music (so to include what is often called ‘classical’ music).3 And the cultural context is expanded to include philosophical and political expressions not usually connected with Bowie. As the avant-garde composer György Ligeti once said, “Even things seemingly unrelated and devoid of tradition have their secret connections to the past” (Kassel, 2004: 6).4 And these connections can be revealed in the work prompted by the reception of allusion. The point is not to prove the correctness of these connections, but to try and

22  Richard Fitch show how allusion can open intellectual space in order to achieve, however ineptly, an effect akin to that achieved by Bowie’s skilful manipulation of allusion. The connections suggested here might at first appear absurd, but that is the initial desired effect. By imagining the strange and absurd, the limits of what appears conceivable are broadened and this in turn can allow us to better grasp our worlds as they are and might be. Allusion can educate our imaginations and our desires. Having explored the nature of allusion, the chapter will now pick up where the opening paragraph left off with a word closely connected with allusion and ambiguity: perhaps. Bowie Perhaps A perhaps implies an undecided question, perhaps an undecidable one. At the opening of his Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche worried if any would worry themselves … with such dangerous perhapses! For that we have to await the arrival of a new species of philosopher, one who possesses tastes and inclinations opposite to and different from those of its predecessors— philosophers of the dangerous ‘perhaps’ in every sense. (Nietzsche, 1990: 34) From where might these creatures of a new species, with their contrary predilections, arrive? A superman exiled from outer space seeking to transform inner space with what follows from the dangerous perhaps: ambiguity? Or just a boy who could play guitar and really sing? In the end, do all these perhapses amount to nothing more than an act? In his late notebooks Nietzsche, now looking back, not forward, claimed that there had only ever been three true philosophers: Socrates, the ancient Pyrrhonians of whom only Sextus Empiricus’ writings survive, and, of course, himself (Nietzsche, 1988: Notebook 14, Fragment 129). The rest, those who called themselves philosophers, they were just play-actors. How does an actor become a philosopher? Perhaps they have to crack? That which is thought to be certain or decided might have to crack into perhapses? Is Bowie an actor or a perhaps? Brian Eno once said, “Some people say Bowie is all surface style and ­second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me” (Jones, 2012: 14). Is this a compliment or a subtle put-down? To a philosopher, as ever perhapsing all they can, it might sound like a pejorative definition of ‘Theory’ in its various manifestations, postmodern and otherwise. Ideas created as, and by, dangerous perhapses are taken and are used to create surfaces over questions that should remain open. The theoretical reaction to Bowie as man of words and man of music has been to connect him—or is it it, or them?—to a postmodern politics of fluid identity (e.g., Stevenson, 2006).

In this Age of Grand Allusion  23 This surface tells us the story that Bowie is the one, or more, who showed us that we can escape ourselves by transforming ourselves into exotic characters, and for that, for this, he should be celebrated. What follows here tries to displace the centrality of this theoretical narrative, not because Bowie shouldn’t be celebrated. He should, as an artist and performer. And it is not disputed that Bowie played with characters throughout much of his work, or that many have been inspired by his knowing playing. These are now almost commonplace observations.5 What is disputed is the power of the claim that Bowie’s chief intellectual significance lies in the conscious transformation of self. Rather it lies, according to the argument of this chapter, in his artful manipulation of social norms, and his sensitivity as to how the disintegration of these norms can affect us. A way to approach this is to consider Bowie in a broader social and cultural context than is usually the case. Broadening Bowie’s Context Tim Blanning’s The Triumph of Music (Blanning, 2009) is a broad, serious but popular, historical survey. It examines, chiefly, the relation of composer, performer and audience in Western music after Monteverdi, a composer whose name stands for the epochal break marked by the invention of opera and the attendant secularisation of art music. Bowie appears very fleetingly in the text, but in a book of few photographs there is a Mick Rock picture of Ziggy Stardust (Blanning, 2009: 320). What is striking is that this image is not out of place in the company of the likes of Beethoven and Wagner, as marking a moment of social and aesthetic, of socially aesthetic, transformation. But these very different composers and performers of musical transformation have a complicated relationship to social and political transformation. And this is before the even more complicated question of their reception is considered. And that reception is not over, as the vexed questions of the use of Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ as the anthem of today’s ‘Europe’, and of the de facto ban on the playing of ­Wagner in Israel, reveal.6 This is to look forward from them. If we look back from them we find a problematic relation to failed political transformation. With ­Beethoven there is the dashing of the hopes of the French Revolution. In 1804 he violently scratched out the dedication to Napoleon of his third symphony when the French leader proclaimed himself emperor. In Wagner the relation is to the failure of the 1848 Revolutions, during which Wagner had stood alongside the great anarchist Bakunin on the barricades of ­Dresden. His subsequent works can be interpreted as a working through of that failure, and the search for a response, a searching that would later inspire purported revolutionaries of both right and left. And Bowie emerges from obscurity in the immediate wake of the 1960s, he expresses disdain for “that revolution stuff” (‘All the Young Dudes’: Bowie, 1995), yet equally works through that failure and searches for differently enacted emancipations.7

24  Richard Fitch Beethoven and Wagner consciously sought to give their work social force, albeit in different ways.8 That seems less clear-cut with Bowie, but that doesn’t lessen his work’s impact. The power of what he sings and plays here has the character more of caricature than of the chameleon changer of self. Consider Peter Doggett’s observation on Bowie’s smile during that performance of ‘Starman’: it’s … the brand of a man who is not taking any of this remotely seriously: who knows in fact, that there are few things more ridiculous than posing as a red-haired spaceman on prime-time BBC television, apart from the fact that it is about to make him irreversibly famous. (Doggett, 2012: 155) His work does not seek to embody political force, but, whatever the intention behind it, it does express something telling about the contours of the social worlds in which he found himself and we find ourselves. He does not denounce, as is usually the case in punk and folk, but he renders absurd, often by creating an absurd, otherworldly reflection of the world.9 The denouncers, with their tongues crying rage, know how the world should be and find the world as it is wanting. The absurdist knows that the ­denouncer’s other world might be as much of a problem as the world as it is, and that undoes the power of the original denunciation. This means that whatever the appearance of revolutionary transformation, nothing much changes through denunciation and hope for the world as it should be—“hope, boys, is a cheap thing” (‘Sweet Thing’: Bowie, 1974). Instead, the absurdist starts by turning to face the strange, but that is only a beginning. The point is not to embrace the strange for its own sake, or simply to play, or be, an exotic character in order to try to escape from oneself. It lies in what t­ urning towards the strange does to one’s relation to the world as we find it. The strange draws us out of that world for a moment, giving up a different ­perspective upon where we have found ourselves.10 Where does this leave the traditional ‘player with selves’ thesis? There are hints to be found in Bowie’s work that it is flawed. Bowie’s ­involvement in the TV series The Hunger can be viewed as providing a knowing, mature commentary on the history of his own hungers (Showtime, 1998–2000).11 In the third episode his character, art-terrorist Julian Priest, warns the viewer “Be careful. You can escape everything in this life. Everything. Except yourself.”—a reminder, whether an allusion or not, of the nineteenth­ century Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard’s observation that true despair is not what prompts one to change oneself or to try to flee into another self. It is what arrives when you realise that, after all, you can’t escape yourself (Kierkegaard, 1983: 14–21). Bowie’s own intensive playing with his selves, it appears, led to the brink of his own mental and physical dissolution before what is represented as his escape from LA to Berlin. As he said in 1978: “I  was being threatened by my own characters.” Recovery entailed

In this Age of Grand Allusion  25 “coming down from the high mountain of fabrication. On the route down, I’ve taken some realist attributes to try and stabilise my personality. It must still be in there somewhere” (White, 1978). Just trying to be a different man amid the stream of warm impermanence—or is it of one permanent sense (see ‘Changes’: Bowie, 1971)—proved to be an inadequate response, even if creatively productive in the short term. Like revolution, it couldn’t be sustained, and the difficult task is how to carry on in the wake of its failure. Even within the characters, I think the clue lies as much in the settings as in the selves. The ‘Five Years’ we have left (Bowie, 1972), cracked H ­ ollywood’s where ‘a trickle of strangers were all that were left alive’ (‘Panic in Detroit’: Bowie, 1973), Hunger City with its little Johnny Rottens (‘Diamond Dogs’: Bowie, 1974; Pegg, 2011: 68), America young in the shadow of old Nixon (‘Young Americans’: Bowie, 1975), and the Thin White Duke, as if an extra escaped from Visconti’s The Damned (Bowie, 1976; Visconti, 1969). If you could transform yourself so easily, then why the hell would you want your new self to find itself in such hells? They’re no game. At best they are absurdist mirrors held up to the face of the world as it is, but they are not the world as it should be, or even a marginally more desirable world even for those now on the margins. But something is happening here which this Mr Jones seems to know something about, whatever it is, and it lingers.12 Consider some remarks from Wilfrid Mellers, the first musicologist to contemplate Bowie. For him “Rock music was a deliberate dethronement of the ‘values’ of so-called civilisation” (Thomson & Gutman, 1995: 52). If so, then what Bowie demonstrates in his various ways is that this dethronement does not lead to the triumph of higher, more authentic values, but to the absence of value, to chaos, to Hunger City, to the temptations of dictatorship, while also knowing that this process cannot simply be reversed. As Mellers further suggests, “Bowie accepts bewilderment as his birthright, recognising that the most he can hope for is to get by with a smile or guffaw” (Thomson & Gutman, 1995: 53). Is he perhaps both bewildered and creative bewilderer? Or “All my idiot questions / Let’s face the music and dance” (‘New Killer Star’: Bowie 2003). But, even if the guffaw is there, the questions remain real. It is perhaps not that dancing is a way of forgetting the questions that engulf us, but rather of facing them and striving to find an aesthetic response that is worthy of them: the Music Hall of some apocalypse. In a sense, it was always there. In 1972 he said of ‘Five Years’ to interviewer Charles Shaar Murray, that he was trying to “get a mocking angle on the future. If I can mock something and deride it, one isn’t so scared of it. People are so incredibly serious and scared of the future that I wish to turn the feeling the other way, into a wave of optimism.” And in the same interview, regarding Zappa, “I like my parody to be a little softer because I’m a pacifist by nature and hostility in any form, even on a mental level, I find not endearing” (Murray, 1972). A peace-loving resistance through parody rather than, perhaps significantly, through irony or satire. A resistance, in

26  Richard Fitch love with or desirous of certain emancipations—sexual and otherwise—but also sensitive to the threat of attendant disintegration. If always a resistance in the service of fame. Dissent in popular music usually proceeds by attacking existing social and political norms in the name of more authentic norms expressive of higher values or of a subculture. By contrast, Bowie situates many of his most striking songs outside any conventional world, in spaces where norms no longer bind people or performers: dystopic futures; outer space; alien life; alternative presents. Might this theatrical suspension of social norms be a more effective intellectual stance than the confident denunciation used in folk or punk? Might ambivalence trump moral and political certainty? The Problem of Nihilism Bowie seems to have an implicit but sure grasp of the problem of nihilism. The key to the problem of nihilism is the insight that simply overturning existing social values will not directly result in the flourishing of new, better, values. Rather, it will result in a general disintegration of all social values leaving all in a state of chaos. Though Nietzsche famously grasped this, here I’ll approach the problem using the ideas of those other dangerous perhapsers: the Pyrrhonians. To reconstruct their insights giving emphasis to the social import of their insights: the logic of dissolution follows from the appearance of difference and especially of our differences—the fact that there is more than one of us, yet everyone of this ‘us’ is different. This is compounded by the fact that we experience everything relative to ourselves. My experience is mine and never yours. As we are all different, and cannot but experience the world from our own perspective, we seem fated to think differently from each other if we take care with our thought, and are thus fated to disagree if we express ourselves to others. The question of power then arises. If we all tend to think differently and disagree, who decides what is to be done? How might social disagreement be resolved? There are two options: coercion or reason. With reason, reasons will be given and taken in order to justify social decisions and norms, and establish shared ways within which life can be lived peacefully despite our differences and disagreements. Reasons legitimate forms of life so we have reason to at least tolerate social decisions and norms we personally disagree with or differ from. In coercion, one is forced to accept the norms of others through various forms of violence, whether physical or mental (such as propaganda or enforced social conformity). But the path of violence will always be inherently unstable because the illegitimacy of submission will be naked: we have no reason to submit, so submission can only be guaranteed with increasing levels of violence. Fear is not a reason but the imposition of mental violence in ‘landscapes filled with wrath’ (‘You Feel So Lonely You Could Die’: Bowie, 2013a). Violence ultimately fails to

In this Age of Grand Allusion  27 ground social life unless it is absolute, and it cannot be absolute while people are still free to think, even silently. However, reason also fails to ground social life. To successfully ground something through reason is to justify it. Justification is achieved by identifying the best or better reasons involved in any particular decision. However, the Pyrrhonians showed that justification can never be achieved because if we reason rigorously, then reasons will always be revealed to be of equal value. This happens because any attempt to justify will suffer one of three fates, all of which equalise reasons. These fates, from which there appears no escape, are infinite regress, circularity, and hypothetical dogmatism.13 What this means is that the legitimacy of social norms is at best a mirage. As soon as they are questioned they should be dispelled if reason is allowed to function freely. If it is not free and violence is deployed, then this violence will only beget further violence, never legitimate social norms. It should be noted that the greater the social difference, the more intense this logical condition will present itself in social life. And when these social norms, the values that putatively bind us, dissolve, they are not replaced by other more legitimate or natural values. This is sometimes called nihilism because the dissolution of social norms leaves nothing in the sense of no justification and no good reasons. But it does not mean that there are no reasons at all, rather that all reasons, and thus all social norms, are in a state of equipollence. A reason to do something is as good, or as bad, as the reason not to do it. Or, as Bowie was to note in a 1995 interview, “Every piece of information is equally as unimportant as the next” (Roberts, 1995). Reasons for living have become mere information. At first this might appear to be a liberation from repressive and illusory social values. But it is not just nasty norms that dissolve. Desirable ones also evaporate. How then are we to live together—and we are together whether we like it or not—where reason, value and even coercion can no longer bind, or rather, when we awake to the fact that logically and practically they never could? Many are tempted by what seems to be an obvious response. The logical undoing of the social fabric begins with difference and disagreement, so it would appear that if difference and disagreement could be disposed of, or logically disarmed, then all would be well—“Give us back our unity. Give us back our family” (‘Song for Bob Dylan’: Bowie, 1971). Anything that unites people, or gives them a secure shared identity, and so represses their difference would seem to achieve this. The logic of normative dissolution is traumatic, so it is understandable to be tempted by what appears to be an easy way out. For example, people might look to a saviour figure to bring people together and thus escape from this logic, and Bowie seems to have been tempted by this approach from The Man Who Sold the World (Bowie, 1970) to the incident at Victoria Station. If the leader has messianic ­charisma then they might seek to provide unity through the simple force of their personality. Alternatively, people could be offered something which they are told is what really unites them. It might be their race, their

28  Richard Fitch nationality, their sexuality, their gender or some other category. But whatever the unity is, it is just another social norm that requires justification if it is to be logically and non-violently effective. Thus it provides no escape from the logic of dissolution. At best it can only defer the dissolution for an instant. But as soon it is tested by difference or disagreement, which is likely to happen when someone tries to implement it socially, then the logic will reassert itself. And those in power, seeing their false identities being frustrated by logic, are likely to resort to an ever more intense violence to repress difference now that their ruse has failed. The Grand Organisation of Chaos What of Bowie’s response? In the liner notes to The Buddha of Suburbia he writes, “My own personal ambition is to create a music form that captures a mixture of sadness and grandeur on the one hand, expectancy and the organisation of chaos on the other. A music that relinquishes its hold upon the 20th century yet searches out that which was stimulating and productive as a basis from which to work in the 21st century”. Though he also confesses “my writing has often relied too arbitrarily on violence and chaos as a soft option to acknowledging spiritual and emotional starvation” (Bowie, 1993). The sadness and grandeur might be that of the inevitable dissolution of even the highest values. But there perdures a sensibility that, for us to live, chaos must be organised without violence. This in itself might be a greater cultural insight than those usually used to connect Bowie and postmodernism. That fashion is perhaps too limited for his musical tasks. Postmodernism fades, Bowie’s work endures, with him having had his wicked way with the ­postmodern, as he has with so much that has piqued his curiosity. How might Bowie’s music forms be understood against the background of the problem of nihilism and any subsequent attempt to organise chaos? The first act is to come to an awareness of the problem of nihilism. In n ­ ihilism the social forms of our world lack legitimacy. But by the same gesture there is no legitimate place from which to denounce the illegitimacy of the world because we are all prey to the same logic of illegitimacy. This means that denouncing the illegitimacy of the world in the name of some putatively more legitimate world is just as much a symptom of general illegitimacy as the social world’s own illusory claims to legitimacy. Transgression in the sense of simply breaking the rules of the social world is equally inadequate. Looking to break the rules assumes that there are functioning rules to be broken, and that breaking them can achieve liberation. But the legitimacy of the rules was always an illusion and so the idea that they rationally bound us, and that transgressing them can liberate us from them, is equally an illusion. Indeed, trying to break them might only serve to perpetuate the illusion that the rules are more than a mirage. Though doing nothing is also not an option as that will only allow violence to proliferate while we stay deluded.

In this Age of Grand Allusion  29 The social world and its rules have to be put into question, but in a way that is not itself questionable. I’ve suggested Bowie, wittingly or unwittingly, achieves this by creating songs about spaces and times where all social norms and rules have been suspended, and thus chaos has ensued. They are not offered as alternatives to the present social world, but allow us to perceive the logic of nihilism at work in our world by showing another world where that logic operates nakedly. How does he create these other worlds, with their characters, such that they allow us to perceive this? They are dying worlds, so “humming Rheingold / we scavenge up our clothes” (‘Strangers When We Meet’: Bowie, 1993). This is an allusion to Wagner. Das Rheingold is the opening opera of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which is his chief aesthetic reflection on the crisis of the social.14 The Ring ends in the collapse of the old order of the gods. This collapse is set in motion in Das Rheingold when love is renounced in order to acquire gold, from the River Rhine, that can be forged into a ring that promises absolute power. The gods then steal the gold in order to pay the workers (two giants) who have built their new social order, (Valhalla) for them, having first failed to cheat them. In order to establish a new social order a chain of theft, murder and betrayal is unleashed that will ultimately destroy that order and the gods themselves. Someone humming Rheingold in a dying world shows an awareness of the futility of trying to make a world live again through violence, as well as perhaps of the futility of Wagner’s own mythical response to the dying of the world. The clothes ‘we’ scavenge might be the ideas and culture in which that world was once dressed. ‘We’ scavenge those clothes that appear “stimulating and productive as a basis from which to work” today (Bowie, 1993). But much as the dying world cannot simply be born again, so we can no longer wear those clothes in the same way. Now the once proud fashions are just rags and scattered pieces of cloth. But arranged artfully these rags can suggest a sad grandeur expectant for a better future. And who is ever better dressed than Bowie, whatever he wears?15 These rags are akin to the allusions in which his songs are drenched and out of which so many are constructed. They connect the world of the songs to the dying world that is our world. That connection enables his suspended worlds to allow us to suspend the hold our world has over us without delivering us into the tyranny of another dying world. Once we are aware of nihilism, what is to be done when doing almost anything seems vulnerable to nihilism? Are there any clues in Bowie’s allusions? To accompany the opening of the Toronto leg of the David Bowie is exhibition, Bowie released a reading list (Bowie, 2013b). While there are no books of traditional philosophy, there are texts that reflect on the crisis of culture and attempts to address it. For example, on it can be found Tom Stoppard’s trilogy of plays The Coast of Utopia which dramatizes the nineteenth-century Russian search for revolutionary social transformation (Stoppard, 2008). There is also George Steiner’s In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some

30  Richard Fitch Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (Steiner, 1971). In the last of these four lectures the text reflects its age when it claims that “the vocabularies, the contextual behaviour-patterns of pop and rock, constitute a genuine lingua franca, a ‘universal dialect’ of youth” (Steiner, 1971: 118). Today it is the lingua franca of more than youth, but it remains central to the ‘musicalisation’ of culture that is one of the symptoms of the death of the old culture of classical humanism (Steiner, 1971: 120). Steiner thinks this death cannot be reversed, and that leaves two options: either a stoic acquiescence or a “Nietzschean gaiety in the face of the inhuman, the tensed, ironic perception that we are, that we always have been, precarious guests in an indifferent, frequently murderous, but always fascinating world” (Steiner, 1971: 140). Steiner chooses the latter, to carry on debating with the unknown rather than seek safety in restraint. This amounts to a ‘laughing no’ to a timorous withdrawal from dangerous perhapses as, after all, “We are hunters after reality, wherever it may lead” (Steiner, 1971: 136). And in the end Bowie hunts after reality with the best of them (Bowie, 2003). Chaos cannot be organised as any attempt at organisation will be consumed by chaos, but chaos can be put in question, that old dangerous perhapsing of what remains. And Bowie’s allusions facilitate that questioning, because they serve as both temptation and opportunity for the intellectually curious, those voracious hunters, and few have a greater appetite than Bowie. The Pyrrhonians had a similar response, seeking a tranquillity of mind through the full and free exercise of curiosity that expected no answers but only ongoing investigation. Their reasoning could be said to run something like this: It’s cowardly. It’s ‘I believe in you, I don’t believe in you, I believe in you.’ I think ‘make up your mind! Get off the fence!’ But you know what, that kind of vacillation is just a byword for my spiritual life. It’s terrible and I get naked with stress about this, but it always has been that way with me. Ever since I was a teenager there has been this endless search. And as I get to the days of finality, it becomes less and less clear. The only thing I know is that none of the questions I ever ask will be answered, not in this lifetime. But it still doesn’t stop me from asking. (Pegg, 2011: 419) This is Bowie not as actor but as joyfully dangerous perhaps. Is this all too much? Well, as the man said “Show something where intellectual analysis or analytical thought has been applied and people will yawn. But something that’s pretentious—that keeps you riveted” (Crowe, 1976). Conclusion David Buckley’s and Paul Trynka’s recent biographies of Bowie both claimed in their titles to amount to definitions of Bowie (Buckley, 2005;

In this Age of Grand Allusion  31 Trynka, 2011). This brief investigation makes no such seductive claim. And it does not seek to establish Bowie’s intellectual, philosophical or political significance. But it does think that asking the question, d ­ ancing the dance, is something fruitful, whether it is putting in question the usual story told of Bowie’s cultural significance, or putting forward an a­ lternative questionable story as another question. And here it’s a q ­ uestion about allusion and nihilism. In the chaos that results from nihilism, nothing can be made secure in the sense of being justified. But allusion can move with the chaos and thus subtly give shape to it. Allusion allows connections to be made, and thus secret genealogies can be made, unmade and remade. And from these, accidental communities can wax and wane to the sounds and visions of a Bowie soundtrack. As long as you can make a connection you’re never alone when Bowie’s playing. This is the power of the master alluder. All this can be taken as an implicit response to the problem of nihilism and this might go some way to explain the intellectual ­attraction of his work. This is the connection I have chosen to make inspired by his allusions. Other connections can be made. What connections does he really mean? As long as he’s still playing, that question’s a god-awful small affair. Notes 1.  The best introduction to Nietzsche is to first read some of his work, such as The Gay Science, before consulting any secondary text. 2.  See Chapter 15 by Barish Ali and Heidi Wallace in this volume on a reading employing Barthes’ ‘Birth of the Critic’. 3.  See also Chapter 10 by Tiffany Naiman in this volume. 4.  To make a connection: Ligeti’s music was used, unbeknownst to the composer, by Stanley Kubrick in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey which influenced Bowie especially at the time of the composition of ‘Space Oddity’ (Bowie, 1969; Kubrick, 1968; Trynka, 2011: 89). 5.  See Chapter 6 by Ana Leorne in this volume which champions this idea. 6.  As an introduction to Beethoven, see Cook (1998: 19–38) which can be supplemented by a survey like Lockwood (2003). On Beethoven and ideas of s­ elfhood see Burnham (1995). On Beethoven and ‘Europe’ see Clark (1997). Geck (2013) provides a useful introduction to Wagner which deals extensively and carefully with his problematic relationship to Judaism. Newman (1949) is still the best introduction to the content of his works and Millington (2001) contains many useful introductory essays. Nattiez (1993) explores the Bowiesque topic of androgyny in Wagner with Bowie referred to at 260. Badiou (2010: 2) also sees Wagner as a precursor of Bowie. 7.  This perspective is not necessarily opposed to that taken by Jacques Attali who thinks that musical upheavals anticipate social revolutions, indeed that “Music is prophecy” when it comes to social developments (Attali, 1985: 11). Attali looks forward while this chapter looks back, but there is no reason why you can’t look both ways.

32  Richard Fitch 8.  For sophisticated considerations of the social import of their work see Adorno (1998 and 2005). The latter also includes a provocative foreword by Slavoj Žižek. 9.  See Hebdige (1979). 10. Thus far this position concurs with that argued for from a broadly Marxist perspective in Hebdige (1979: 60–2, 88–9), however it will soon diverge as the problem of nihilism dissolves the perspective from which Hebdige argues. 11.  In 1983 Bowie starred in Tony Scott’s modern vampire film The Hunger (Scott, 1983). In 1998 Scott and others developed a TV series loosely inspired by the earlier film. Each episode is a separate story but all explore the theme of excessive and transgressive desire. Bowie stars in the first episode of the second series and then, still in character, introduces the other episodes in that series. The first episode, entitled ‘Sanctuary’ and also starring Giovanni Ribisi, is rich with references and allusions to Bowie’s career (See also Pegg, 2011: 631). 12.  Bowie’s original surname is Jones. The allusion is to Bob Dylan’s song ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ from his album Highway 61 Revisited (Dylan, 1965). Bowie’s relationship to Bob Dylan is worthy of further investigation. It runs throughout his career from ‘Song for Bob Dylan’ on Hunky Dory (Bowie, 1971) to ‘(You Will) Set the World on Fire’ on The Next Day (Bowie, 2013a). And both these songs reflect not so much on Dylan’s songs but on his status, and both songs concern the coming of a mysterious ‘she’. One comes to ‘scratch the world to pieces as she comes on like a friend’ unless she is dispelled by a couple of his old songs (Song for Bob Dylan). The other comes to ‘set the world on fire’ with her own songs ((You Will) Set the World on Fire). 13.  For the philosophical details of these arguments see Barnes (1990). To see how they impact on problems in social and political thought see Fitch (2012). 14.  See Newman (1949: 415–669); Geck (2013: 147–227, 291–317). 15.  In the October 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine Bowie was voted the bestdressed Briton in history (Hodgman, 2013).

References 2001: A Space Odyssey. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1968. MGM. Adorno, Theodor. W. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. Adorno, Theodor. W. In Search of Wagner. Translated by R Livingstone. London: Verso, 2005. Angell, Norman. The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage. London: William Heinemann, 1909. Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian ­Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Badiou, Alain. Five Lessons on Wagner. Translated by Susan Spitzer. London: Verso, 2010. Barnes, Jonathan. The Toils of Scepticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Blanning, Tim. The Triumph of Music: Composers, Musicians and their Audiences, 1700 to the Present. London: Penguin, 2009. Bowie, David. Space Oddity. Phillips, SBL 7912, 1969.

In this Age of Grand Allusion  33 Bowie, David. The Man Who Sold the World. Mercury, SR-61325, 1970. Bowie, David. Hunky Dory. RCA Victor, SF 8244, 1971. Bowie, David. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. RCA Victor, SF 8287, 1972. Bowie, David. Aladdin Sane. RCA Victor, RS 1001, 1973. Bowie, David. Diamond Dogs. RCA Victor, APLI 0576, 1974. Bowie, David. Young Americans. RCA Victor, RS 1006, 1975. Bowie, David. Station to Station. RCA Victor, APLI 1327, 1976. Bowie, David. The Buddha of Suburbia. Arista, 74321–170042, 1993. Bowie, David RARESTONEBOWIE. Trident Music International/Golden Years, GY014, 1995. Bowie, David. Heathen. ISO/Columbia, 5082229, 2002. Bowie, David. Reality. ISO/Columbia, 5125559, 2003. Bowie, David. The Next Day. ISO/Columbia, 88765461922, 2013a. Bowie, David. “Bowie’s Top 100 Books—The Complete List.” davidbowie.com. 1 October, 2013b. http://www.davidbowie.com/news/bowie-s-top-100-bookscomplete-list-52061 (accessed 6 May 2014). Buckley, David. Strange Fascination: David Bowie, The Definitive Story. Revised ed. London: Virgin, 2005. Burnham, Scott. Beethoven Hero. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Cook, Nicholas. Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Clark, Caryl. “Forging Identity: Beethoven’s ‘Ode’ as European Anthem”. Critical Inquiry 23 (4, 1997): 789–807. Crowe, Cameron. “Candid Conversation: An outrageous conversation with the actor, rock singer and sexual switch-hitter”. Playboy, September 1976. Doggett, Peter. The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s. London: Vintage, 2012. Dylan, Bob. Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia, CL 2389/CS 9189, 1965. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions, 1947. Fitch, Richard. “The Task of Dialectic Beyond Domination and Dogmatism”. ­Studies in Social and Political Thought 20 (2012): 106–21. Fowler, Henry. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage First Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Geck, Martin. Richard Wagner: A Life in Music. Translated by Stewart Spencer. ­Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979. Hodgman, C. “David Bowie voted Best-Dressed Briton in History”. Historyextra. com. 15 October 2013. http://www.historyextra.com/david-bowie (accessed 6 May 2014). Irwin, William. “The Aesthetics of Allusion”. Journal of Value Inquiry 36 (2002): 526–532. Jaehne, Karen. “Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence”. Film Quarterly 37 (3, 1984): 43–47. Jones, Dylan. When Ziggy Played Guitar: David Bowie and Four Minutes that Shook the World. London: Random House, 2012. Kassel, Matthias. From Point A to Point B … Connections and Passages in Music, with a Trailer on Musical Traffic. Basel: Paul Sacher Stiftung, 2004. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

34  Richard Fitch La Grande Illusion. Directed by Jean Renoir. 1937. RAC. Lockwood, Lewis. The Music and the Life of Beethoven. New York: Norton, 2003. Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. Directed by Nagisa Oshima. 1983. Recorded ­Picture/Cineventure/Oshima. Millington, Barry, ed. The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Murray, Charles Shaar. “David at the Dorchester”. New Musical Express, 22 July 1972. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jun/12/david-bowie-ziggy-stardust-­ interview (accessed 6 May 2014). Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Wagner Androgyne. Translated by Stewart Spencer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Newman, Ernest. Wagner Nights. London: Putnam, 1949. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe 13: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1887–1889. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. L ­ ondon: Penguin, 1990. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pasco, Allan H. Allusion: A Literary Graft. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Pegg, Nicholas. The Complete David Bowie. London: Titan, 2011. Roberts, Chris. “Action Painting”. Ikon, October 1995. http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/david-bowie-action-painting (accessed 6 May 2014). Showtime. The Hunger. Showtime Television, 1998–2000. Steiner, George. In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971. Stevenson, Nick. David Bowie: Fame, Sound and Vision. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Stoppard, Tom. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. London: Faber & Faber, 2008. The Damned. Directed by Luchino Visconti. 1969. Italnoleggio/Praesidens/Pegaso/ Eichberg-Film. The Hunger. Directed by Tony Scott. 1983. MGM. Thomson, Elizabeth and David Gutman, eds. The Bowie Companion. London: ­Sidgwick & Jackson, 1995. Trynka, Paul. Starman: David Bowie, The Definitive Biography. London: Sphere, 2011. White, Timothy. “Turn and Face the Strange”. Crawdaddy, February 1978.

3 Culminating Sounds and (En)visions Ashes to Ashes and the case for Pierrot Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux and Martin J. Power

I’m Pierrot. I’m Everyman. What I’m doing is theatre, and only theatre […] What you see on stage isn’t sinister. It’s pure clown. I’m using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time on it. The white face, the baggy pants—they’re Pierrot, the eternal clown putting over the great sadness of 1976. (Bowie cited in Rook, 1976)

Introduction In October 2013 David Bowie released a self-directed homemade video for the James Murphy remix of his latest single ‘Love is Lost’ using two mannequins from the David Bowie Archive. Shot over one week and commencing with the ‘real’ David Bowie repeatedly washing his hands, the video’s central character is that of a Pierrot clown dressed in black. In the video’s relatively simple storyline Pierrot is watched over by the ‘real’ David Bowie and by another mannequin who closely resembles the Thin White Duke. Devoid of any make-up, David Bowie’s face is superimposed on Pierrot’s. Many readings could undoubtedly be made of this video. The merging of Bowie and Pierrot; the resurrection of the sinister looking Thin White Duke; the frightened, vulnerable clown dressed in funereal black; Pierrot’s feet tap-dancing in the expectation of a visit from Columbine; the skeletal shadows and the obsessive washing of hands all suggest potentially fruitful starting points for analysis and discussion. For us however, the video serves as a further reminder of the recurrence of the figure of Pierrot in Bowie’s lifelong work. Bowie’s many connections with this sad or insolent clown are well documented. These include his performances in and songwriting for the Lindsay Kemp production of Pierrot in Turquoise (1967), dressing as Pierrot in a performance of The Man Who Sold the World with the late Klaus Nomi in 1979 (Hawkins, 2009: 61) and his numerous references to Pierrot in media interviews, including this one, which we take as a point of departure, not as a definitive statement: What the music says may be serious, […] but as a medium it should not be questioned, analysed or taken too seriously. I think it should

36  Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux and Martin J. Power be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium. The music is the mask the message wears—music is the Pierrot and I, the performer, am the message. (Bowie cited in Mendelssohn, 1971) Bowie’s most extensive use of Pierrot is of course to be seen in the promotional video for his 1980 single ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and it is to this song and video we turn in this chapter. Variously interpreted as being a requiem or an epitaph for Bowie’s past incarnations; as a 1980s nursery rhyme; as an updated account of ‘Space Oddity’s’ Major Tom; or as a thinly-veiled account of Bowie’s many trials and tribulations with both the music industry and drug addiction, ‘Ashes to Ashes’ remains one of David Bowie’s most critically acclaimed, popular and commercially successful songs. The song and its accompanying video have been the subject of much discussion online,1 in the many biographies and compendia published on David Bowie (see Pegg, 2004; Buckley, 2000 & 2004) and in critical academic literature including a musicological analysis by Moore (1995) of the use of the ‘Flattened 7th’ in ‘Ashes to Ashes’, a queer reading of Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ performance by Hawkins (2009) and a comparative analysis of Bowie and Schoenberg’s use of the Pierrot mask by Carpenter (2010). In this chapter we focus on ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and offer a critical reading of both the song and the video. Instead of seeing Bowie as Pierrot merely engaging in a sort of ‘tidying-up’ exercise, we read the song as being as much about Bowie’s future as his past. The spectre of Pierrot is one that appears and reappears in Bowie’s oeuvre as a figure of continuity, in key moments of Bowie’s career, none more so than in ‘Ashes to Ashes’. We begin this chapter with a brief introduction to ‘Ashes to Ashes’, honing in on the figure of Pierrot. This is followed by a discussion of the history and significance of the Pierrot figure, establishing Bowie’s connection with Pierrot and with various musical-dramatic forms more broadly, particularly from the early twentieth century. ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is then examined in detail and we offer a close critical reading of both the promotional video (our account of which includes some new material in terms of explaining its provenance) and the song, maintaining Pierrot and the various historical allusions at the centre. We conclude by reasserting the importance of musical drama and of the Pierrot figure not just in terms of understanding ‘Ashes to Ashes’ but also David Bowie’s broader career. People Are Turning To Gold: A Brief History of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ The song ‘Ashes to Ashes’ was co-produced by David Bowie and Tony Visconti in 1980. Originally entitled ‘People Are Turning to Gold’, the ­ demo was recorded without lyrics in the Powerhouse Recording Studios (New York) in February. Bowie requested additional time to complete this and other songs on what was to become his Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) album. In April he recorded the song which he had, by now, re-titled

Culminating Sounds and (En)visions  37 ‘Ashes to Ashes’ at Visconti’s Good Earth Studios (London). While we will discuss the structure of the song in more detail later in this chapter, it is worth noting at this juncture that it was originally intended to use a ­Wurlitzer Organ in its recording as if to underscore its carnivalesque aspect.2 Bowie has offered a number of possible explanations for what the song was intended to be about. These include updating us on the fate of Major Tom, a marked sense of disillusionment with the promise of technology (and the ‘Space Race’ in particular) as well as the proposition that it represented a kind of nursery rhyme. In an interview in 1980 he summarised ‘Ashes to Ashes’ as follows: “It really is an ode to childhood, if you like, a popular nursery rhyme. It’s about spacemen becoming junkies … (laughs)” (Bowie cited in MacKinnon, 1980: 37). The song has also been read as a not too thinly veiled autobiography of Bowie’s 1970s and it has been noted that the album from which it came—Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)—was in itself seen as a kind of purge for Bowie. Bowie explains ‘Ashes to Ashes’ further in an interview which RCA Records released as a promotional device for Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). When I was thinking of how I was going to place […] Major Tom in […] what would be the complete disillusion with the […] great dream that was being propounded when they shot him into space […] And we left him there and now we come to him 10 years later on we find the whole thing has soured because there was no reason for putting him up there […] so the most disastrous thing I could think of is that he finds solace in only some kind of heroin type drug […] cosmic space itself was feeding him with an addiction and he wants now to return to the womb from whence he came. (Bowie, 1980) ‘Ashes to Ashes’ was the first song to be released as a single from Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). Pierrot was the persona adopted by Bowie for the album’s artwork and all its associated promotional materials.3 ‘Ashes to Ashes’ was a resounding critical and commercial success, reaching number one in the UK singles charts.4 Although Pierrot is not specifically referred to in the song, all three of the record sleeves used to promote the song featured Bowie dressed as the clown. As if to reinforce the Pierrot motif further, the first 100,000 pressings of the single included a sheet of one of four sets of stamps5 with Bowie styled as Pierrot.6

The Bowie-Pierrot Complex The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and power. (Taussig, 1993: xiii)

38  Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux and Martin J. Power Who is Pierrot and why would David Bowie decide to activate and maintain him as a stock figure in his performances and representations? As well as exploring the historical figure of Pierrot who, for over four centuries, has been part of the dramatic arts across Europe, we look at his changing role as an archetype, a modulating persona, a dramatic convention and a powerful representation of the human condition (Storey, 1978; Youens, 1984). We follow this with a closer examination of Pierrot in the early twentieth century, in particular as found in Arnold Schoenberg’s expressionist piece Pierrot Lunaire (1912). This is an era with which, we surmise, David Bowie was quite familiar, potentially as a result of personal research into facets of German culture and politics during time spent in Berlin but also building upon exposure to expressionist art in his early days as a student. We then comment on one of Bowie’s earliest TV roles in Pierrot in Turquoise, which we argue has been seminal in shaping Bowie from the outset, placing the dramatic arts right at the centre of his expressivity and installing Pierrot as a recurring theme or leitmotif across his career.

Past Pierrots Pierrot-type characters have been presented in various forms and guises across four centuries of European drama, but it is generally agreed that Pierrot cohered into a recognizable figure from the commedia dell’arte in sixteenth-century Italy, emerging in dramatic forms across the continent, from Italy to Spain, France to England and beyond (see Storey, 1978; Behr et al., 1993). The hallmark of Commedia, an improvised dramatic form, was a self-conscious theatricality, full of exaggeration and artifice. This early manifestation of Pierrot or ‘Little Peter’ was in the form of a quick and capricious buffoon who, over time, began to take on greater complexity and vulnerability during the eighteenth century, a beautiful if often lost soul, or sometimes a vessel for multiple characters (Storey, 1978: 3). This was the period in which Pierrot’s Commedia white costume and white-faced appearance became firmly established (Kurth, 2010). ­Pierrot gradually took on a decidedly more dandified persona amongst the ­nineteenth-century Romantics (Hawkins, 2009). In England, Pierrot was part of Harlequinade—a slapstick version of the Commedia f­eaturing Harlequin and Pierrot as the two principal figures. Pierrot the clown was, for many, most associated with pantomime form. A young David Bowie encountered such dramatic forms, including mime, in his training with choreographer Lindsay Kemp in the late sixties7 and soon embodied, ­ ­playing the role of Cloud in Pierrot in Turquoise in 1967. However, before discussing that formative experience for Bowie, it is also worth considering how the P ­ ierrot character developed new facets and greater psychological depth at the turn of the twentieth century. This Pierrot took on a darker side, exerting a huge influence on Western modernism, particularly from 1890 to 1930 (Green & Swan, 1993). Many avant-garde writers, painters

Culminating Sounds and (En)visions  39 and composers mobilised this darker version in their works, particularly those from the Expressionist cadre.8 In light of this, perhaps it is not surprising that in his own era, Bowie would also turn to the powerful figure of Pierrot to energise his creative output.

Moonstruck One canonical work from that era is the melodrama by composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) entitled Pierrot Lunaire, which premiered in ­Berlin’s Choralion-Sall in 1912. Pierrot of the Moon contrasted to its sunny commedia dell’arte progenitors as Schoenberg crafted “a darker and more sinister Pierrot” for that time (Linder, 2012).9 This work, with its new, taut atonal10 sounds, dramatic and textured ensemble, and varied vocal techniques explored new depths in the psyche, deploying parody and ironic ­detachment to marshal excessive expressionistic tendencies. Schoenberg was seen as a transformative figure in the music world (Sandford, 1996; Brinkmann, 1997), someone who moved away from the excesses of ­nineteenth-century Romanticism, with its lush orchestration and sentimentality, and into, at least in this piece, the macabre, which is carefully and deliberately expressed at a distance by the composer (Carpenter, 2010). Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is based on a series of poems by Albert Giraud (1860–1929), first published in 1884, and featuring a complex figure shifting between hero and fool (Marsh, 2007; Richter, 2001). In this setting, Schoenberg presents Pierrot as the centrepiece of a melodrama—high art presented as cabaret. Within its taut and dramatic soundscape, song and speech blur, male roles are sung by a woman and the subject position vacillates between first and third person, all tricks familiar to the Bowie oeuvre. One song from the cycle, ‘Der Kranke Mond (the Sick Moon)’ features the verse “you nocturnal deathsick moon / there on the sky’s black pillow / your gaze / gross with fever / enchants me like an alien melody”. One wonders if Major Tom of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is in fact simply a moonstruck Pierrot at an “all time low”, nocturnally drugged and in a nightmare from which he can’t awaken. It is more than possible Schoenberg’s Pierrot exerted considerable influence on Bowie, not least because of the character’s depraved, moonstruck delirium and his complex psyche, all supremely controlled in this tightly woven, avant-garde musical form. Bowie would most likely have studied Expressionist painters as a young man and a self-portrait of Bowie from around 1980 bears striking resemblance to a self-portrait by Schoenberg.11 As Murray has pointed out, Bowie’s own paintings and drawings seemed to be specifically influenced by Die Brücke, a key German Expressionist group with which Schoenberg had ties (Murray, 2013).12 However inspiring Pierrot of the Moon may have been for Bowie, the Pierrot with whom he had the most experience was the commedia dell’arte-type figure of Cloud in Pierrot in Turquoise.

40  Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux and Martin J. Power

Threepenny Pierrot Pierrot in Turquoise was a theatre creation of British choreographer, actor and mime artist Lindsay Kemp who was a very influential figure in Bowie’s early career. Starring alongside Kemp as Pierrot, Bowie played the character of Cloud and composed and performed the musical numbers for the show, including ‘Threepenny Pierrot’, ‘Columbine’, and ‘The Mirror’, which he wrote anew and which debuted in Oxford in December 1967. The theatre piece was subsequently broadcast in 1970, having being recorded by Scottish television in 1969. In his role as Cloud and as song performer, Bowie was a troubadour, a narrator and the framing device for the action, supplementing the mime and offering commentary on the emotional state of the characters and audience. The plot was simple: Pierrot attempts to win the love of Columbine, but when she ‘betrays’ him with Harlequin, Pierrot murders her (hence ‘The Looking Glass Murders’).13 Even though he did not play Pierrot, Bowie’s exposure to the character meant that Pierrot was deeply implicated in Bowie’s own biography, particularly as evidenced by his professional and personal relationships with the cast and crew of Pierrot in Turquoise. In what could only been interpreted as a case of life imitating art, during that period Bowie’s relationship with Kemp (Pierrot) and with the costume designer Natasha Korniloff created a Pierrot-Columbine-Harlequin love triangle reminiscent of many older commedia dell’arte scenarios (on finding out of the betrayal, Kemp apparently slit his wrists and these wounds later reopened during a performance, at which point the audience responded enthusiastically to the exceptional realism of the play).14 The songs themselves look both back and forward stylistically— ‘Columbine’ and ‘The Mirror’ in particular offering a glimpse of the future with their shimmering guitar figurations and harmonic progressions, and ‘Threepenny Pierrot’ is pure homage to musical theatre with its oom-pah piano vamping configurations and simple song construction that narrates the appeal of Pierrot for his audiences: ‘Thre’penny Pierrot / we love you / Thre’penny Pierrot loves us too / Pockets of gladness, gaytime eyes / comical hero Thre’penny Pierrot’.15 As a stock character with historical longevity and cultural capital, Pierrot was the consummate ‘rockstar’ of each era in which this character found himself, from early commedia dell’arte right through to the twentieth century, where many actors and mimes literally became Pierrot heroes as a result of their commanding portrayals of the character. Bowie simply did the same by taking on this celebrated form and by copper-fastening the connection between mime (with its posing and exaggeration) and rock ‘n’ roll performance. Pierrot may have been a lovelorn fool but the fool is paradigm for the artist, especially one who takes risks as Schoenberg did and as Bowie did, particularly in ‘Ashes to Ashes’. But before performing an analysis of that video and song, there is one more crucial connection to be made with early twentieth-century musical theatre which allows us to consider the song and video as a pop opera or music drama for the modern MTV era.

Culminating Sounds and (En)visions  41 The Rise and Fall … There were two key events before and after the release of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ in 1980 that are critical to performing contextual analysis of the song. The first relates to the 1978 release of an acoustic version of ‘Space Oddity’16 as the B-side of ‘Alabama Song’, and the second is concerned with the Baal EP from the BBC TV production of the same title in 1981. These two recordings in particular evidence Bowie’s connection with the dramatic work of B ­ erthold Brecht (1896–1956) and his musical partner Kurt Weill (1900–1950). ‘Alabama Song’ is from Brecht and Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany (1930), and the Baal EP features five songs from Brecht’s 1918 play, written before his partnership with Weill. The EP was entitled David Bowie in Berthold Brecht’s Baal, recorded in 1981 and released by RCA in 1982. Like Schoenberg, Brecht and Weill captured a particular aesthetic in early twentieth-century Germany, the echoes and traces of which can be found in the style and content of ‘Ashes to Ashes’. Like Schoenberg, Brecht’s plays and Weill’s music engaged with themes of darkness and interiority, but their work recognised alienation in a more socially grounded way and they used hybrid, Surrealist techniques to explore their ideas.17 The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany is all about man’s love of wealth, particularly gold, and how he is ultimately doomed (it is worth reiterating that ‘Ashes to Ashes’ originally bore the title ‘People are turning to Gold’).18 A further connection between Bowie, Brecht and Weill comes in the form of Pierrot in Turquoise just discussed. It was also known as ‘Threepenny Pierrot’ after one of the songs Bowie wrote for the TV programme. This in turn may be an allusion to The Threepenny Opera19 (1928) by Brecht and Weill, itself an adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera20 (1728) by John Gay (1685–1732), raising the likely possibility that familiarity with the Brecht-Weill duo may well have preceded Bowie’s Berlin days, as, probably, did Bowie’s assumed awareness of Schoenberg’s Pierrot.21 Tying Brecht and Weill to Schoenberg is important as the influence from these artists is evident in our analysis of ‘Ashes to Ashes’. We begin with the video as a theatrical piece for the 1980s, saturated with Expressionist and Surrealist techniques, and culminate with an analysis of the song which focuses on the many allusions to older creative ideas and theatre forms. ­Pierrot is firmly kept at the centre, as the narrator and disciplining figure. Pierrot recasts Major Tom and other Bowie characters in a particular way, but also points to the future through a compelling musical and visual statement that speaks to the timelessness of art and to the universalism of human nature in flights of fantasy and of the subconscious.

Bulldozers, Bonfires, Black Seas and Pierrot: Creating the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ Video The path-breaking promotional video for ‘Ashes to Ashes’ was co-­directed by David Mallet22 and David Bowie. Shot over three days in Hastings and

42  Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux and Martin J. Power

Figure 3.1  David Bowie as Pierrot (1980). Image Reproduced by kind permission of the David Bowie Archive and V&A London.

Ewart Studios in Wandsworth, the video cost £35,000 to make23 rendering it the most expensive rock music video for its time. The video was storyboarded by Bowie who was responsible for its overall concept and styling, with Mallet in charge of the treatments used. This is a crucial point as Bowie exerted absolute control but was open to improvise with any ideas and materials presented to him, a skill he had undoubtedly developed in theatre. Bowie and Mallet contributed specific ideas to the overall mix. The cards (mini-screens) held by Pierrot and others which facilitate the transition between individual scenes, for example, came from Bowie. The umbilical cord through which the spaceman (Major Tom) is connected to the Cosmos at the video’s conclusion came from Mallet who was inspired by the 1958–59 BBC science fiction series Quatermass and the Pit.24 He recalled: With Bowie it’s a genuine collaboration because he knows exactly what he wants. The discussion was: “I want to be a clown. I want

Culminating Sounds and (En)visions  43 to be on the beach and I want some Modern Romantics with me.” Then I would say: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the sky was black?” And he would say: “Yes, and we can have a burning brazier.” And I would say: “Then we can do the scene from Quatermass where you are plugged into a spaceship.” And he would say: “Great, and I can hang like this.” And I would say: “Yes, great, we can extend your veins out to the spaceship. (Mallet, 2013) The video’s overall ‘look’ was created by accident and not through the technique known as ‘solarisation’ as had been widely reported. In 1979 David Mallet was directing a video for the Hot Gossip song ‘Supernature’25 in Hastings. By chance, he devised a way to darken the sky which he attributes to a peculiarity of the outside broadcasting van and video mixer being used on the day.26 Some of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ sets (the padded cell and the astronaut strapped into his chair in the kitchen complete with nurse/kitchen-­maid) had been previously seen on a television performance by Bowie (also directed by David Mallet) of ‘Space Oddity’27 in late 1979. These were re-created to generate a series of flashbacks for viewers thus cementing the connection between both songs. The cast of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ drew upon a number of key figures from the New Romantic scene (specifically The Blitz Club) in London. They included Steve Strange28 (Visage), Judith Frankland and Darla Jane Gilroy. In addition to the video’s carefully thought out storyboarding, at least one key scene came about by chance. While filming on the beach in Hastings it was discovered that there was a large bulldozer being used in a nearby quarry and Bowie requested that it be used in the film to signify “oncoming violence”. Bowie would later describe the video as being ‘surreal’ in reference to the decision to include a woman who resembled his mother (Peggy Jones nee Byrnes) in the storyline (Bowie, 1993). Furthermore, he makes specific reference to the use of “… the clown costume […] based upon a Commedia Del Arte figure— Pierrot—of an Italian comedy […] Renaissance Comedy” (Bowie, 1993). The song may ostensibly have been about Major Tom, but the video is dominated by the Pierrot figure.

Spacemen, Madmen and Drowning Clowns: Reading the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ Video In its closing frames a brooding Major Tom is suspended mid-air in his spaceship/womb. As viewers, we bear witness to the spaceman’s dream sequence/nightmare or hallucinations which are told to us through a series of interlinked vignettes beginning with vague shots of two figures preparing a funeral pyre on a beach. The video is an example par excellence of the influence of Expressionism, together with Surrealism,29 within popular culture and is testament to the influence of these movements on David Bowie.

44  Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux and Martin J. Power The storyline’s apparent lack of logic, its placing of characters in seemingly incongruent settings and its blend of vivid colouring and black and white imagery all point to these influences. Although the song’s lyrics are directly concerned with ‘Space Oddity’s’ central protagonist Major Tom, the dominant figure in this groundbreaking video is in fact Pierrot.30 It is Pierrot who orchestrates scene changes in this melodrama. It is Pierrot who reports on the fate of Major Tom. It is Pierrot’s narrative which is interspersed with images of a funeral procession; of Major Tom in two separate settings (strapped into his spaceman’s chair in the ‘exploding’ kitchen and hooked up to the Cosmos in a spaceship/womb) and a man incarcerated in a padded cell. The clown, replete with Ziggy-influenced stripe, is centrally positioned in the group bulldozer shots, he is the one who is being lectured at and he is the one who is ultimately consumed/drowned by the darkened sea. A range of secondary characters also feature: the New Romantics dressed in ecclesiastical garb (referred to as ‘monks’ by Bowie), an elderly mother figure, a press photographer and a nurse/kitchen maid. The inclusion of the man in the padded cell references Bowie’s earlier concerns with impending madness.31 It is also directly tied to the song’s reference to auditory hallucinations which are a common symptom of schizophrenia/psychosis. This is achieved through Bowie repeating the song’s lyrics through spoken voice underneath the vocals. The presence of certain images (the bulldozer, the dove being set free by Pierrot, the bonfire and Pierrot being photographed) all invite rich interpretative possibilities. The powerful bulldozer, the funeral pyre, the unleashing of the dove all point to a ritual cleansing. Bowie has talked about the bulldozer symbolising ‘oncoming violence’; Columbine (from Pierrot in Turquoise discussed earlier in this chapter) has previously been represented by a dove. In setting the dove free, Pierrot is conceding that Columbine is in love with Harlequin. The bonfire represents a funeral pyre being readied to dispose of a corpse (or corpses). Taken together, these specific images may be understood as a sweeping away of the past. The video’s colouring is also of significance. Its radical mixing of garish hues and the blackening of the sky and sea also offer us many cues. Darkness and the colour black in particular signify danger, a sense of foreboding and ultimately death. The colour red signifies blood and the possibility of death through violence. Pierrot’s white face can be read as having the pallor of the dead. Serving as Bowie’s alter ego, Pierrot is used to exorcise old ghosts, to bury the dead and to pave the way to a new future. Pierrot is also that stock figure from over four hundred years of theatre who channels universal trials and tribulations, triumphs and defeats, and that specific modernist Pierrot who takes us into dangerous places in our psyche.

Culminating Sounds and (En)visions  45 Modernist Melodrama: A Musical Analysis of ‘Ashes to Ashes’32 If the video of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is a garish sequence of powerful visuals, the music operates to underscore this sense of not moving forward in a logical sequence but rather moving in circles, with no clear beginning and end. In performing this analysis, we draw upon musicological and contextual analytical techniques and approaches from Middleton (1990), Shuker (2001), Brackett (2000) and Hawkins (2009), and deliberately focus on the song structure, which we view as being constructed of different styles, conventions, and subject positions, being assembled in a particular kind of way that is replete with allusions to other art forms. Expanding on O’Leary’s assessment of the song as a “vertical, organic, and deliberate mess”,33 we view it as a tightly structured composition, full of deliberate historical and structural allusions and crafted with technical sophistication, as Bowie has never really “done anything out of the blue”. Certainly, one may agree that at face value ‘Ashes to Ashes’ seems “composted from old records, stitched together out of discarded rhythms and random tracks” but it is also clear that other sounds and style, from other musical influences, are operating here, all orchestrated by the master of ceremonies of this fantastic cabaretcum-video-and-song performance, Pierrot. One crucial influence is the Danny Kaye (1952) rendition of ‘Inchworm’ (written by Frank Loesser) for the movie Hans Christian Anderson which has been acknowledged by Bowie as an important influence on ‘Ashes to Ashes’. In an interview in Performing Songwriter he states: I loved it (‘Inchworm’) as a kid and it’s stayed with me forever. I keep going back to it. You wouldn’t believe the amount of my songs that have sort of spun off that one song. Not that you’d really recognize it. Something like ‘Ashes to Ashes’ wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t have been for ‘Inchworm.’ There’s a child’s nursery rhyme element in it, and there’s something so sad and mournful and poignant about it. It kept bringing me back to the feelings of those pure thoughts of sadness that you have as a child, and how they’re so identifiable even when you’re an adult. There’s a connection that can be made between being a somewhat lost five-year old and feeling a little abandoned and having the same feeling when you’re in your twenties. And it was that song that did that for me. (Bowie cited in De Main, 2003) In the first section, we look closely at the harmonic and metric structure of the song, particularly the opening riff (and closing coda) which sets up a kind of circular and discombobulating structure for the song. This is followed by a closer look at some of the recitative-like song line configurations throughout the song which are suggestive of other genres, of cabaret and

46  Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux and Martin J. Power of expressionist songs featuring Sprechstimme techniques (speech-song). This brief look at some of the lyrics as they relate to the overall structure, particularly in terms of style and declamatory approach, is suggestive of conventions and universal thematic contents found frequently in both commedia dell’arte dramatic forms, as discussed earlier, and in terms of madness and interiority as associated with and performed in expressionistic works in particular, such as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. In other words, we suggest that, as in our analysis of the video, the song is as much cabaret masquerading as lowbrow opera as it is a pop song concealing its debt to earlier genres.

Metrical and Harmonic Concerns The key signature of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is given as Ab major, though the song proper (i.e. when the lyrics enter “do you remember”) begins on the home chord of Ab major, the very important introductory riff suggests the key of Bb minor.34 There is an opening, memorable arpeggio figure beginning on the note of F and moving in the following sequence or F Bb C / C F / Bb Eb / F Bb C. In a time signature of 4/4 (four quarter notes in a measure), the notes fall on the beats highlighted thus: one and two and three and four and/, etc. Here is the full pattern of the first four-measure phrase, a standard unit of measurement in pop and folk songs.35 Measure no. 1. 2. 3. 4. Chord choice Bb min 7th Ab maj Eb min Bb min 7 Down/offbeats 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +/ 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +/ 1 + 2 +  3  + 4  +/  1  +  2 + 3 + 4 +/ Notes FBbC…………/ C……F………/ Bb….Eb……… / FBbC…………./

Figure 3.2  Opening musical riff of ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

This is then further extended by two more measures (not a full four, as might be expected).36 The first of these is empty, while the second has a fragment that is an echo of the materials found in measure 3: 5. Ab maj 6. Eb min 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +/ 1 + 2 + 3 + 4+/ ………………/ Bb … Eb……../ Figure 3.3  Final two measures of opening instrumental riff of ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

The first four-measure phrase with its two-measure extension is worthy of comment both in terms of harmonic/metric and syncopated properties and the manner in which tension is created by such harmonic and metric ambiguity. This riff functions as a mini overture, setting up the story of the song, and establishing a key motif that persists throughout the composition. In terms of harmonic content, to start on Bb minor, the second on the scale of Ab major, is to start a little outside the hierarchy of tonal harmony that would easily lead back to the home chord of Ab (they do not have a

Culminating Sounds and (En)visions  47 particularly strong harmonic relationship as chords, though they are far from alien). The opening Bb chord is further destabilised with the added seventh note which causes it to pivot, not quite allowing it to commit. The second chord, Ab, doesn’t feel at all like a resolution or a coming home to chord I of the song (it’s in the key of Ab major). The riff then moves onto the third chord, Eb minor. Eb major is chord V of Ab major, a strong relationship, but here the Eb is in a minor manifestation, so it really belongs more with the first chord of the riff, as an extension of that initial Bb minor. The fourth chord of this four-measure riff brings things back where we started, to Bb minor. The two-measure extension of empty space and then a repetition of the figure found in measure three, based on an Eb minor chord, sets us up to move from a minor version of chord V in Ab major, to the song proper in Ab. In order to fully appreciate what is happening in these initial four plus two measures, it is important to look at where the notes are falling in the melodic riff (see Figures 3.2 and 3.3). At the start of measure 1, the three notes fall on the downbeat (1), off-beat (+) and down beat (2) respectively, leaving the rest of the measure empty. Measures 2 and 3 have a down beat note followed by one off-beat, with lots of space and air, creating a strong syncopated feel. Measure 4 is a copy of measure 1, in part suggesting the riff is, in fact a three-measure phrase and one that is about to be repeated. But there is a rupture. There is an empty measure and then a reprise of measure 3. It is a kind of echo of the first three measures, thereby creating a three-against-four feel, disconcerting the listener as to his place in the phrase (rather than getting two four-measure phrases, we receive a truncated six-measure phrase that ambiguously lies between a 4+2 and a 3+3 construct). This resultant groove is an off-kilter one. But the opening riff has a second, very important function. It is reprised between verses and crucially is repeated in a particular way at the song’s end, something which disrupts the sense of time moving forward and suggests, rather, moving in circles, similar to the synchronous feel of a nursery rhyme, underpinned by the nah-nah-nah-type chanting of ‘My mama says, to get things done, you better not mess with Major Tom’ which references an old nursery rhyme which warns: “My mother said / I never should / Play with the Gypsies in the wood” (Anonymous).37 Bowie makes the connection to the persistence of that genre in 1980: It’s very much a 1980s nursery rhyme […] and I think that 1980s nursery rhymes will have a lot to do with the 1880s 1890s nursery rhymes which were all rather horrid and had little boys with their ears being cut off. (Bowie, 1980) In each of these re-utterances of the rhyme, there is a slight change in where the ‘start’ of the riff aligns with the vocal line, and where it also ends before being repeated, creating a rather out-of-phase feel. As we have suggested in

48  Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux and Martin J. Power our video analysis and in our broader understanding of the function of this song, the riff and its strategic structural deployment creates a feeling of both looking back but also looking forward, at being stuck in a groove and at being timeless. The fact it is delivered on a mediated instrument that, for all intents and purposes, hints to a kind of organ-grinder (an allusion to earlier dramatic theatre and street forms) but also to futuristic synthesizer sounds, doubly underpins this observation. This is the most memorable structure in the song and little wonder it should reappear so many years later in Murphy’s mix of ‘Love is Lost’ which accompanied Bowie’s homemade video featuring Pierrot. That clown and this riff are inextricably linked.

Keeping Off-Kilter: Structure, Style and Allusion If the opening riff, which also functions as a bridge and a closing gesture, works in a particular way to create a sense of the off-kilter, the song proper seems to have another kind of form and function, though it remains connected to the groove of the opening riff. Some parts are quite typical, even predictable, such as the chorus melody line and rather straightforward harmonic progression of IV-V-I-vi-IV-V … then leading back into the opening riff. This is the part where we can all sing along in unison, it would seem. But underneath that very classical kind of harmonic movement, there is still that off-beat edge. IV V 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + / 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + / A-shes to A---------shes / Funk to Fun---key / I vi 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + /1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +/ We know Ma----jor Tom/----- ’s a ju-un-key /

Figure 3.4  The syncopated lyrics in the chorus of ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

The melodic material is simple though, with “Ashes to ashes / funk to funky” sharing a three note motif moving down stepwise from Gb to F to E repeated across two measures. “We know Major Tom’s a Junky” stretches across the same two bar structure, just starting a note above the original but with the same melodic movement of moving down stepwise, Ab to Gb to F (or sometimes you’ll hear the backing vocals singing two notes below, in harmony with this line, i.e. F to E to D, more clearly). “Strung out on Heaven’s high” is almost identical to the first phrase, moving Gb to F to E, and then the last four measures move slowly and laboriously to a guttural “all-time-low”, landing on middle C, the lowest note in the range. This relationship between sounding out or representing mood and feeling through the use of melodic contour is a familiar convention in the world of music drama. So too is the use of a kind of falsetto, starting on the high Ab, in the verses of the

Culminating Sounds and (En)visions  49 song. In these sections we also find repeated descending phrases, musically representing the fall of the protagonist, but this time the melodic materials are repeated three times before the end of the phrase runs into a kind of speech-song articulation, the conversational “oh no, don’t say it’s true” and “oh, no, not again”, light allusion to, perhaps, the dramatic Sprechstimme38 technique used by Arnold Schoenberg discussed in earlier sections, but certainly also to more typical dramatic conventions. The tone is overwrought and exaggerated, gossipy even, just like how the clown would muse conspiratorially in a show, or how one might represent a conversation between two people or an interior exchange between two sides of one person, struggling perhaps, under the influence of drugs. In a later part of the verse from “the shrieking of nothing to … I ain’t got no hair”, a melody line is still evident, but the flowing delivery of the words and syllabi is suggestive of an almost recitative-like approach, with rhythmic oscillations rubbing against the underpinning motor rhythm of the song. The harmonic movement here is very typical of the kinds of harmonic underpinning found in a more conventional operative recitative which is deployed not just to reveal the thoughts of the protagonist but more especially to move the action forward. In such a case, the underpinning harmony can also go through a rather dramatic sequence. Here, if the chords of this sequence are analysed and a probable melodic line extracted, it takes the shape of a semitonal descent, from Bb to A to Gb and so forth, a rather dramatic device that creates tension. The song is one of three parts or acts, then—the opening riff or overture, the clearly melodically and harmonically defined chorus and the slightly wayward verses that move between conversational tones and recitative-like gestures, all of which hark back to older more declamatory forms of musical theatre. Finally, there is the coda, the nursery rhyme of “My mama said”, which also conjures the darker side of childhood, of scary monsters and super creeps, as it goes around in circles, a metric, harmonic and phrasing dissonance created between the closing rhyme and the opening riff which interweaves and ultimately consumes it, allowing the story to continue past the boundaries of the lyrics and the song itself. Conclusion The lyrical content and structure, and the associated imagery of the video of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ are all about performing interiority, of a conflicted or dream state, on subjects that are often taboo, tying ‘Ashes’, stylistically and contextually, to both expressionist (Schoenberg) and surrealist (Weill and Brecht) influences. With its Pierrot-dominated, soliloquy-like moments the effect is one of pure and utterly controlled performance, compelling the listener/viewer to engage with all aspects of this melodrama called ‘Ashes to Ashes’ which permitted Bowie to reassert his hegemonic position within the music industry. Little wonder that Pierrot should reappear in The Next

50  Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux and Martin J. Power Day (2013) over forty years after Bowie first encountered Pierrot in mime and some thirty-two years after the release of ‘Ashes to Ashes’. Pierrot is too compelling a figure to leave behind, with his rich historical and dramatic connotations, his obvious longevity and his patent efficacy; the perfect vehicle for engaging with the inner state of the artist (in this case, David Bowie), and, crucially, the outer listening and viewing world of the audience, who, for centuries, have been learning more about others and especially about themselves through such dramatic art forms. We all return to what we have known before. Notes 1.  See for example http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/category/scary-monsters-1980/ and http://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/scarymonsters.html. 2. See http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/category/scary-monsters-1980/ for an account of how Visconti achieved the song’s Wurlitzer sound through using the Eventide Instant Flanger. 3.  The artwork featuring Bowie as Pierrot on the cover and liner sleeve for Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) was based on a concept devised by David Bowie and the late Brian Duffy. Duffy’s photography was then treated by the artist Edward Bell who interestingly chose to include a number of references to the previous Bowie albums “Heroes”, Lodger, Low and Aladdin Sane. The images are painted over as if to banish them to the past where they belong. Brian Duffy had previously worked with Bowie on the covers for Aladdin Sane and Lodger, while Edward Bell went on to design the cover of the Tin Machine album. 4.  Although ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is sometimes read as representing a clean break with the past it is interesting to note that its B-side was ‘Move On’ from his Lodger album. The obvious connection between ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and ‘Space Oddity’ was underlined by RCA who released a 12” version of the single entitled ‘The Continuing Story of Major Tom’ which simply segued both songs. ‘Ashes to Ashes’ was Bowie’s first number one single since the release of ‘Space Oddity’. 5.  The work of former glam art rocker (The Bon Bons) turned postal art specialist, Jerry Dreva was the inspiration for the sheets of stamps which accompanied the single’s release. Dreva’s influence was acknowledged by Bowie by his inclusion of the words ‘Bon Bon’ on the stamps. The late Dreva was a contemporary of Bowie’s in his LA period. 6.  The presentation of Bowie as Pierrot owed much to the talents of three people. Richard Sharah (make-up), Gretchen Fenston (hat) and Natasha Korniloff (costume). Korniloff also designed the costumes for the 1967 production of Pierrot in Turquoise directed by Lindsay Kemp. Sharah noted how “… David came to me and said he wanted a Pierrot look, and he let me design from there. Most of the time I draw up some ideas and then work with the subject around those. The preparation for David’s make-up took one and a half hours”. http://www. bowiegoldenyears.com/scarymonsters.html (accessed 1 Aug 2014). 7.  See Chapter 7 by Helene Thian in this volume. 8.  Expressionism was a modernist artistic and literary movement that sought to present the world in terms of emotion, feeling and meaning, from an often exaggerated

Culminating Sounds and (En)visions  51 or distorted subjective position. For a detailed discussion of Expressionism, see Gordon (1987). 9.  Schoenberg wasn’t the only composer of the time to draw upon the figure of Pierrot as a means for inspiration. Eric Satie composed a piece for piano entitled ‘Pierrot’s Dinner’ in 1909 and Claude Debussy’s 1915 Sonata for Cello and Piano was, at one point, set to be called ‘Pierrot angry at the moon’. 10.  Music that works around a particular hierarchy of relational pitches and chord structures is known as tonal music. Music that treats all pitches as equal and sees chords constructed in a way that any familiar harmonic movement is not really possible or desirable, and uses chromatic scales, i.e. moving up and town by semitones in unrelated ways, is known as atonal music. See Forte (1972 & 1998). 11. Compare Schoenberg’s self-portrait from The Schönberg Centre, ­self-portrait number 008 http://www.schoenberg.at/index.php/en/schoenberg-2/bildnerischeswerk/selbstportraits with Bowie’s acrylic on canvas self-portrait of 1980 http://www.bowiewonderworld.com/art/art2.htm (Scroll down to ‘Self Portrait’). 12.  Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter were two expressionist movements which evolved in Germany in the first decades of the twentieth century. The groups were made up of architects, painters, writers and musicians who believed in the place of art in the future and viewed their work as being a bridge to that future. Schoenberg was a member and his 1909 composition Drei Klavierstücke (Op. 11) inspired fellow Blaue Reiter member Vasily Kandinsky to paint Impressions III (Concert). For more on Expressionism and music, see Behr et al (1993) and Brinkmann (1997). 13.  In another connection with The Next Day, Pierrot’s joyous dance while waiting for Columbine in Pierrot in Turquoise mirrors with the dance sequence in ‘Love is Lost’. 14.  See http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/the-mime-songs/. 15.  Mime, too, has its connections to Commedia dell’arte, particularly through the figure of the French theatre director Jaques Copeau (1879–1849). See Kurtz (1999). 16. In many ways, this version of ‘Space Oddity’ is more likely the real requiem for Major Tom. The structure has been pared down to solitary vocals, a basic rhythm section, and a restless, aggressive 12-string guitar providing rather harsh harmonic accompaniment. Significantly, the countdown section which appeared in the original version is absent, this silence alluding to perhaps, the void of space and the loss of hope. 17.  Music critic Theodor Adorno cites Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of City of Mahogony as powerful Surrealist compositions, in their recognition of illusion and lack of concealment of that state (Adorno, 2002: 395–397). 18.  This can be interpreted in two ways: people were becoming more enamored with money and profit rather than with social relations and/or through their greed, people were ossifying into golden statues. The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany (1930) is a satirical opera which was banned by the Nazis in 1933. The story centres on the founding of a pleasure city by fugitives from the law, seeking to service those coming from the Alaskan gold fields, where the emphasis is on having fun but where, in the end, chaos and despair reigns. The musical score features jazz and ragtime as well as more formal elements of Western art music (see Unwin, 2005; Taylor, 1991). Its themes of debauchery, excess, s­elfishness,

52  Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux and Martin J. Power pleasure, artifice, exaggeration and depravity resonate with many of the ideas explored by Bowie in his own work during the 1970s. 19.  The importance of The Beggar’s Opera itself, as well as in terms of its adaptation by Weill and Brecht, in reading Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’, including within the context of the Scary Monsters album as a whole, cannot be underestimated. Gay employed numerous, short scenes and a sequence of brief songs in his opera (something that is reflected in the video with sequences cutting to new tableaus at a rapid pace using the postcard effect to change scenery). Even more significantly, Gay’s opera proved very successful because he included mementos for the public, including images of his characters on clothing, playing cards and fans. As can be seen in Scary Monsters, Bowie has adapted this approach to his own work, harking back to the practices of another place and time while simultaneously creating and feeding desire for the traces of a creative moment and experience, point to the fact that Bowie saw this album as more than an album of songs. It too was a kind of drama with longevity, pointing to the future as much as to the past. 20.  The connection to Gay’s satirical and subversive The Beggars Opera is significant in other ways too in that this English form, known as Ballad Opera, used popular songs of the day alongside spoken word, and parodied opera seria or ‘serious’, high-art opera from the continent. 21. ‘Mack the Knife’, from the Threepenny Opera is perhaps Weill’s most famous song, with lyrics by Brecht. The score reveals the strong influence of jazz, and the lyrics by Brecht are full of violence and dark imagery, representing the ominous figure of Mack the Knife who, “when that shark bites with his teeth, babe/ scarlet billows start to spread”. 22.  David Mallet and Bowie are long-time collaborators with Mallet directing over twelve Bowie videos and concert recordings. 23. Interview between Eoin Devereux (ED) and David Mallet (DM) April 16th 2014. 24.  Interview between ED and DM April 16th 2014. 25.  See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXwS1IJVmVA&feature=youtu.be. Note the similarities between this and the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ video in terms of location and overall look. 26.  Interview between ED and DM July 31st 2014. Some of the visual techniques used may also be seen in Mallet’s video for The Boomtown Rats ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ (1980). 27. The TV performance of ‘Space Oddity’ was directed by David Mallet for the Thames TV show Will Kenny Everett Make it to 1980? 28.  Strange had previously worn Pierrot outfits and his styling in the Visage video for the song ‘Fade To Grey’ is also worth noting. 29.  Expressionism and Surrealism are linked, with Expressionism dating from about 1890 and Surrealism from the 1920s. Expressionism was less concerned with realistic representations of external reality and more with expressing emotional states and ideas that were taboo (see Gordon, 1987). Surrealism shared these traits but was primarily concerned with the subconscious, with irrational behavior and the relationship between reality and the dream-state (see Durozoi, 2004). 30.  The video is 3.37 minutes in duration. Pierrot appears for a total of 1 minute and 40 seconds, the man in the padded cell is on screen for 42 seconds and Major Tom for just 39 seconds.

Culminating Sounds and (En)visions  53 31.  See for example ‘All the Madmen’ (1970) and ‘Aladdin Sane’ (1973). 32.  For our analysis we use the official sheet music of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (piano part and vocals) published under license from EMI, © 1980 Tintoretto Music/RZO Music Limited (84%)/EMI Music Publishing Limited (16%). We also draw upon recorded versions of the song, including from various youtube clips. 33. See O’Leary’s Bowie song blog, http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/category/ scary-monsters-1980/ (accessed 20 June 2014). 34.  The riffs used some thirty-three years later on the DJ James Murphy ten-minute remix of ‘Love is Lost’ accompanying Bowie’s 2013 homemade video speak to this. http://pitchfork.com/news/52835-video-david-bowie-love-is-lost-remixedby-james-murphy/ (accessed 20 July 2014). 35.  The first line constitutes the measure number, the second the chord, the third the beats within a measure, and the fourth the melodic notes of the riff. 36.  It is crucial to note that this six-measure riff appears in the official sheet music of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ but the 1980s music video only uses the opening four. In many live recordings subsequent to the 1980s’ video, right through the 1990s, Bowie returns to this riff and even has it extended and repeated at the start and throughout the song, highlighting how structurally important it is. 37.  A further allusion to this rhyme ‘I went to sea / no ship to get across’ is possibly made in the video when we see Pierrot wading waist-high in the sea. 38. In Pierrot Lunaire Schoenberg employed the technique of Sprechstimme or speech-song. Speech’s melodic quality is represented as higher and lower tone contours in the music score. It is not a songline as we know it, but neither is a simple speech act. Sprechstimme is sometimes assumed to have being invented by Schoenberg for Pierrot Lunaire but, in fact, the vocal technique and its representation had been used as early as 1897 in Engelbert Humperdinck’s Konigskinder.

References Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert; new. Translated by Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002. ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (piano part and vocals) published under license from EMI, © 1980 Tintoretto Music / RZO Music Limited / EMI Music Publishing Limited. Behr, Shulamith, David Fanning, and Douglas Jarman. Expressionism Reassessed. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993. Bowie, David. Scary Monsters and Supercreeps Interview Disc. RCA, 1980. Bowie, David. ‘Ashes to Ashes’. Scary Monsters and Supercreeps. RCA, 1980. Bowie, David and David Mallet. ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (Video). RCA, 1980. Bowie, David. ‘Threepenny Pierrot’. Pierrot in Turquoise. 1967. Brackett, David. Interpreting Popular Music. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2000. Brinkmann, Reinhold. “The Fool as paradigm: Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and the modern artist”. In Schoenberg and Kandinsky: an historic encounter, edited by Konrad Boehmer. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997. Buckley, David. Strange Fascination. David Bowie: The Definitive Story. London: Virgin Books, 2000.

54  Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux and Martin J. Power Buckley, David. David Bowie The Complete Guide To His Music. London: Omnibus Press, 2004. Carpenter, Alexander. “‘Give a man a mask and he’ll tell the truth’: Arnold Schoenberg, Davie Bowie, and the Mask of Pierrot”. Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music 30 (2, 2010): 5–24. De Main, Bill. “A Candid Interview with David Bowie on Marriage, Music and Art”. Performing Songwriter 72 (October/November 2003) http://www.performingsongwriter.com (accessed 11 Aug 2014). Durozoi, Gerard. History of the Surrealist Movement. Translated by Alison A ­ nderson. University of Chicago Press, 2004. Forte, Allen. “Sets and Nonsets in Schoenberg’s Atonal Music”. Perspectives of New Music 11 (1, 1972): 43–64. Forte, Allen. The Atonal Music of Anton Webern. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Gordon, Donald E. Expressionism: Art and Idea. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Green, Martin and John Swan. The Triumph of Pierrot: the Commedia dell’Arte and the modern imagination. University Park: Pennsylvania, 1993. Hawkins, Stan. The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Humperdinck, Engelbert. Konigskinder “Sprechstimme”. 1897, http://www.britannica. com/EBchecked/topic/561251/Sprechstimme (accessed 5 August 2014). Kurth, Richard. “Pierrot Lunaire: persona, voice, and the fabric of allusion”. In The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, edited by Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 120–134. Kurtz, Maurice: Jacques Copeau: Biography of a theatre. Carbondale: Southern ­Illinois University Press, 1999. Linder, Matthew. Pierrot Lunaire’: Deprived as a Saviour—An Introduction, http:// www.theretuned.com/pierrot-lunaire-deprived-of-a-savior-an-introduction/ (accessed 4 August 2014). Linder, Matthew. “Canons: Schoenberg, ‘Pierrot’ and the Second Use of the Law”. Retuned, 4 January 2013. http://www.theretuned.com/canons-schoenbergpierrot-and-the-second-use-of-the-law (accessed 4 August 2014). Longhurst, Brian. Popular Music and Society, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. MacDonald, Malcolm. Schoenberg (Master Musicians Series). Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 2008. MacKinnon, W. Angus. “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be”. New Musical Express 13 (September 1980): 37. Mallet, David. Interview with Eoin Devereux, 31 July 2014. Mallet, David. Interview with Eoin Devereux, 16 April 2014. Marsh, Roger. “‘A Multicoloured Alphabet’: Rediscovering Albert Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire”. Twentieth-Century Music 4 (1 March 2007): 97–121. Mendelssohn, John. “David Bowie? Pantomime Rock?” Rolling Stone, 1 April 1971. Middleton, Richard. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990. Moore, Allan. “The So-Called ‘Flattened Seventh’ in Rock”. Popular Music 14 (2 May 1995):185–201. Moore, Allan F., ed. Analyzing Popular Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Culminating Sounds and (En)visions  55 Morgan, Robert P. Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America. A Norton Introduction to Music History. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991. Murray, Martin “Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes: David Bowie Is and the Stream of Warm Impermanence”. Postmodern Culture 23 (2 January 2013). http://muse.jhu.edu/ journals/postmodern_culture/v023/23.2.murray.html (accessed 24 March 2014). Nicoll, Allardyce. Masks, mimes and miracles. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963. Nicoll, Allardyce. The World of Harlequin: a critical study of the commedia dell’arte. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1963. O’Leary, Chris. “The Mime Songs”. Pushing Ahead of the Dame: David Bowie, Song by Song. http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/the-mime-songs/ (accessed 20 May 2014). O’Leary, Chris. “Scary Monsters 1980”. Pushing Ahead of the Dame: David Bowie, Song by Song. http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/category/scary-monsters-1980/ (accessed 20 June 2014). Pegg, Nicholas. The Complete David Bowie. London: Titan Books, 2004. Régnier, Gérard, ed. The great parade: portrait of the artist as clown. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Richter, Gregory C. Albert Giraud's “Pierrot lunaire”. Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press, 2001. Rook, Jean. “Waiting For Bowie and Finding A Genius Who Insists He’s Really A Clown”. Daily Express 5 May 1976. https://exploringdavidbowie.wordpress. com/2013/02/06/waiting-for-bowie-and-finding-a-genius-who-insists-hes-reallya-clown/. Rosen, Charles. Arnold Schoenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Sandford, Christopher. Bowie: Loving the Alien. London: Little Brown, 1996. Schoenberg, Arnold. Pierrot Lunaire, Op 21. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1914. Reprinted Mineola: Dover Publications, 1994. Shephard, John and Peter Wicke. Music and Cultural Theory. London: Polity Press, 1997. Shuker, Roy. Understanding Popular Music. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2001. Storey, Robert F. Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. Storey, Robert. Pierrots on the stage of desire: nineteenth-century French literary artists and the comic pantomime. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1985. Taussig, Michael. Memesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993. Taylor, Ronald. Kurt Weill: Composer in a Divided World. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991. Unwin, Stephen. A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht. London: Methuen, 2005. Weill, Kurt and Berthold Brecht. “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer / The Ballad of Mack the Knife”. The Threepenny Opera, 1928. Youens, Susan. “Excavating an Allegory: The Texts of Pierrot lunaire”. Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 8 (2, 1984): 95–115.

4 Turn Myself to Face Me David Bowie in the 1990s and Discovery of Authentic Self Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux

Introduction In the two years leading up to the release of The Next Day (ISO Records, 2013) there was renewed media interest in David Bowie’s career due to two important milestones: the 40th anniversary of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (RCA Victor, 1972) and the celebration of Bowie’s 65th birthday. In focusing on Bowie as the red-haired, spandex clad icon of the 1970s, recent books and retrospectives (McLeod, 2003; Cann, 2010; Doggett, 2011; Jones, 2012; Trynka, 2011; Goddard, 2013) have largely overlooked what is arguably one of the most important phases of Bowie’s development as an autonomous performer: his self-discovery during the formation and performance of Tin Machine and his solo output of the 1990s. Examining this work gives insight into the damage caused to his creative process by record company pressure and the domination of his created personae. While Bowie’s success in the 1970s and early 1980s offered stability and leverage to reinvent himself “as often and as radically as he needed to”, public and critic expectations, increasingly tense relations with producer Tony Visconti and record label demands (first RCA Victor and then EMI) for product and promotion had a deteriorating effect on his sense of autonomy as an artist (Doggett, 2011: 5). Bowie fully embraced the structures of the popular music industry, giving tours and interviews readily, reaching out to mainstream audiences and seizing new opportunities for promotion. But he also used his characters to comment on the darker side of celebrity and the society the industry fostered. They embodied alienation—“the other”—living within but also critical voyeurs of the world of fame. This chapter aims to initiate a re-examination of Bowie’s work during this time. Through a detailed textual analysis of Bowie interviews and feature articles in Q magazine from 1989 to 1999,1 as well as a critical examination of Bowie’s 1990s’ image, this chapter will demonstrate how Tin Machine enabled Bowie to emerge as a musician entirely on his own terms, freeing himself from the expectations of the personae from the 1970s and the commercial pressures of the 1980s. However, by acknowledging a post-structuralist approach to identity and the self, we propose that an examination of Bowie’s authentic self is problematic, due not only to the many layers of artifice, but the way he performs versions of authenticity.

Turn Myself to Face Me  57 It is this performance of “the other” (Hegel cited in Taylor, 1975) and ­ owie’s movement to a performance of authentic self during the period of 1989 B to 1999 this chapter seeks to examine. It argues that while Tin Machine—the band he fronted from 1988 to 1992—was a ­commercial and critical failure, it acted as a catalyst to a cathartic cleansing of p ­ erformance of characters and commercial pressures. By the mid-­eighties, Bowie felt as though he was sliding into a cycle of the aged rocker, rehashing hits and churning out weak material. Never Let Me Down had been ordered by EMI after his impressive Live Aid performance in 1985, but had ­little ­artistic merit, and offered his worst chart performance since 1971 (Pegg, 2011). Reflecting on that period in a 1996 interview, Bowie ­commented, “I thought I was obviously just an empty vessel and would end up like everyone else …” (Pegg, 2011: 374). Though critics remained sceptical about Tin Machine, the shift of focus from solo to collaborative artist enabled ­distance from past work and mainstream industry pressures, as fear of failure was shared. On album covers and photo-shoots Tin Machine members often sported dark suits, none outshining the next. However, while suited and booted Bowie hanging out with his friends had the appearance of authenticity—or at least normality—this chapter will show that while his time in the band helped him move beyond performance of “the other”, it was a ­simulacrum through which Bowie performed another “hyperreal” version of self (­Baudrillard, 1994). Authentic or the Hyperreal: Bowie’s Versions of Self The phases of the image Baudrillard outlines will act as the “markers” or “codes” established by Dyer (1991) and Marshall (1997) to identify authenticity in performance. Dyer (1991: 137) argues these markers are moments of lack of control, premeditation and glimpses into the private realm and that by identifying and analysing them it is possible to go beyond the controlled surface to find instances of authenticity. Marshall (1997) identifies certain codes used by celebrities that are specific to the mediums of film, television or the concert stage. Drawing on Baudrillard’s concepts of simulacrum and “ecstasy of communication”, he claims there is an issue “around the ultimate freedom of the sign from the trappings of permanent value” (Baudrillard, 1997: 11). This could clearly be applied to Bowie’s prolific pilfering of cultural references when constructing his own image, but also the way he subverts or builds on moments from past personae to support the construction of authenticity in the 1990s. It should be noted that our use of “authenticity” is informed by Rubridge who describes it as “not a property of, but something we ascribe to a performance” (original emphasis, Rubridge, 1996: 219) and, as noted by both Dyer and Marshall, authenticity is not fixed. Previous personae were fictional characters performed by Bowie, at least initially, as if he was an actor rather than a pop star. In

58  Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux contrast, during the 1990s, Bowie takes elements of his own personality and interests, magnifying and manipulating them to offer new versions of self. Working within a collective not only allowed him to experiment with fresh ideas, but also enabled him to shed layers of artifice which his previous personae had required. Bowie used his experience as a performance artist to challenge traditional spaces between audience and stage in order to give his characters a sense of authenticity. For many of Bowie’s personae, this game play extended into the news media to the point of confusion. For example, an article about Ziggy by Roy Hollingworth, which reviews “The Farewell Gig” in Melody Maker dated 14 July 1973 opens, “There was nothing sad about Bowie’s farewell concert … his music was brilliant. Yet I’ll shed no tear over his departure …” (Uncut, 2011: 44). It is clear to see that Hollingworth struggles to grasp how Bowie is performing Ziggy. For him, Ziggy and Bowie are one and the same. This was not unique to Hollingworth. D. A. Pennebaker’s 1973 film of that performance documents the audience’s reaction to Ziggy’s announcement by the shrieks of disappointment that echo throughout the venue. Bowie’s tangled and often confusing use of personae on stage and off makes it impossible for the audience to realise that Bowie’s announcement marks the retirement of a character, rather than of himself as an artist. Popular music has always supported the creation of personae, both musically through lyrics and through the marketed image.2 Often there are strong elements of authenticity, particularly demonstrated through the blurring of the public and private self. In essence the audience understands this as an extension of the real. This is very different to Bowie’s use of personae. He creates fictional characters brought to life through live performance and media interviews. Indeed, it is well documented that Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and the Thin White Duke each took over Bowie to the point of excess. Supported by narcotic abuse, the line between reality and fantasy became blurred, affecting his sanity and physical well-being. Press and fans’ inability to differentiate between Bowie and his personae was supported by Bowie himself who, at times, spoke in character as Ziggy or emphasised them as being one and the same. For example, in the liner notes for the 1972 Santa Monica gig album, which appeared in the 2008 re-issue, Bowie writes of Ziggy, “It’s no longer an act; I am him”. In retrospect Bowie seems keenly aware of how possessed he became by the Ziggy character. In a Melody Maker interview from 29 October 1977 he describes Ziggy as a “positive artistic statement …” and “a beautiful piece of art … The whole guy …” (Uncut, 2011: 73). However, he also describes his inability to leave Ziggy behind to the point where he questioned his sanity. He has moved from speaking as Ziggy to speaking about him in the third person, clearly emphasising it as a performance, but also highlighting that it was an all-consuming one. Frith notes the use of persona functions by “objectifying the artist as the medium of the art [and by]

Turn Myself to Face Me  59 subjectifying the artist as the site of the narrative” (Frith, 1998: 205). In this way, ­Bowie’s use of personae was meant to be a piece of performance art, reinforced through the ideas and themes presented in his lyrics, but is complicated by the way that Bowie framed the performance “within the everyday” (original emphasis, Frith, 1998: 207). By using joke telling as an analogy, Frith highlights the complexity in undertaking such a performance by stating how in the first instance, the performer needs to be skilled enough with the language to engage with the performance and in the second instance, the audience needs to be able to recognize and interpret the language (Frith, 1998: 208). This point becomes crucial when analysing Bowie’s interviews in Q during the 1990s. Purpose, Performance and Promotion: Bowie’s Q Magazine Interviews 1989–1999 Bowie’s description of his personae as addictive demons from which he needed to free himself—using similar language to that of the addict describing kicking the habit—provides an interesting example of “the other” ­proposed within Hegel’s concept of the master/slave dialectic (­Taylor, 1975). Hegel argues the struggle between master and slave can be carried out between the self-conscious developing out of ­consciousness. He argues all “men strive for recognition” to “achieve integrity” and the achievement of this by the master depends upon the instillation of the fear of death in the slave. However, this fear of death is a ­motivator for the slave to change their life and eventually gain advantage over the master, as it is the slave who actually has provided the labour for s­ uccess. To e­ xamine Bowie and his personae against Hegel’s dialectic, he, at times, allowed his personae to be the master—to be in control and ­public ­facing—while Bowie was the creator, the labourer, the slave. (­Taylor, 1975: 156). As Hegel argues, “the man-made environment thus comes to reflect him [the slave], it is made up of his creations” (Hegel cited in ­Taylor, 1975: 156). George ­Herbert Mead built on Hegel’s ideas to examine the split between the private and public self. He argues there is a “veridical self” ­represented by the ‘I’ and “the self as seen by o ­ thers” ­represented by the ‘Me’ (Rojek, 2001: 11). If we examine Bowie in ­relation to Hegel’s ­argument he can be seen as having a number of master/slave struggles: the first is between his various personae and himself (the “I” and “Me” of Mead’s ­dichotomy), and another is his struggle for a­ rtistic autonomy within a highly structured music industry. The commercial pressures of the latter can lead to the blurring of the celebrity’s public and private selves by the media. When this occurs, the personality can ­experience identity confusion or even worse, a “clinical or sub-clinical loss of ­identity” (Rojek, 2001: 11). In the Q interviews this is clearly demonstrated when Bowie fulfils c­ ommercial duty by putting out Greatest Hits material and when he discusses periods where he allowed himself to be dictated to by his record label.

60  Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux The difficulty in maintaining fictional characters, audience expectations and working under the pressures of the music business had a negative impact on Bowie’s success as a mainstream pop star. The same press that he used as a performance space was criticized for never really accepting anything other than Ziggy Stardust, something that Bowie found to be creatively stifling (Uncut, 2011: 118). Never Let Me Down represented Bowie out of control and dictated to and was a commercial failure. Tin Machine was the vehicle in which Bowie was no longer solely reliant on artistic creation. By defusing pressure amongst a collective, Bowie could start to reclaim his identity. Bowie as part of Tin Machine may still be a performance, but it has clear elements of his authentic self. His involvement with the group was the cathartic catalyst in restoring his confidence to make music on his own terms. The slave is freed from both the dominance of his personae and the dominance of the industry. These dynamics are clearly illustrated when examining Bowie’s Q interviews from 1989–1999. As demonstrated by Figure 4.1, the interviews themselves can be organized into two distinct categories: the retrospective, which considers Bowie in terms of a linear narrative of creative progression and the discussion of new material and current creative identity. Clearly, Bowie’s aim is to draw a line under his past as he moves into new creative territory by offering pieces focused on his histories. While the interviewers often aim to place Bowie’s new material in some form of linear context, he often appears unwilling to do so. New material is seen as something distinct, particularly from the Ziggy identity of the 1970s and the commercial success of the 1980s. As interviewer, Adrian Deevoy describes: You sense a flurry of retrospective activity might be attempts to reconcile the fractured, even splintered, elements of Bowie’s complex, some would say schizophrenic character. (Q, May 1993: 74) In the first of the retrospective pieces in 1990, Bowie clearly outlines to the audience that this interview, and the Sound and Vision Tour itself, are not a reflection of his creative self, but part of commercial duties, quipping, “Still in New York but taking a day off from rehearsals to attend publicity chores. I must do my duty as a good pop artist” (Q, April 1990: 61). His image for the accompanying photographs has also transformed. For the interview with Tin Machine the previous year he was in a dark suit, part of the crowd, wearing something he explained as similar to what he wore in real life. The over-styled bright coloured waistcoats and quaffed hair, which dominated his 1980s’ image, returned. He has been re-restyled as the Bowie who sells to a mainstream MTV audience.

Turn Myself to Face Me  61 While the third image, which features the Aladdin Sane stripe, may suggest an element of performance of his past, the stripe was digitally superimposed and without Bowie’s permission. He later contacted Q via email stating that he thought they had been “cheeky”.3 Date

Title

Writer/­ Journalist

Content synopsis

June 1989

Ready to Rock? David Bowie “back on course” with Tin Machine.

Adrian ­Deevoy

Bowie’s excited revelation of new band and new material.

April 1990

Put your hands together for … Ziggy Stardust! The Thin White Duke! The Laughing Gnome! (?) David Bowie in the Q interview.

Paul Du Noyer

Retrospective to promote Sound and Vision Tour.

October 1991

Are Tin Machine crap? Discuss.

Charles Shaar Murray

Bowie and Tin Machine discuss second album.

May 1993

“God, I remember this …” David Bowie This Is Your Life.

Adrian ­Deevoy

Picture led retrospective piece. Brief mention of new album Black Tie, White Noise.

January 1995

The Diary of ­Nathan Adler or The ­Art-­Ritual ­Murder of Baby Grace Belew. An ­occasionally on-­going short story Internet Conversation Between David Bowie and Brian David Bowie Eno.

David Bowie

Short story which accompanies Outside album. Discussion of current artistic/digital and philosophical influence on material.

February 1997

Bowie at 50!

David ­Cavanagh

Discussion of new Earthling album placed within a linear ­retrospective of ­creative/public identity.

August 1997

Dizbusting David Bowie hopes you like his new-ish direction.

Martin Aston

Concert review from Earthling tour with supporting quotes.

April 1998

Looking Good, ­Davie! Feeling Good, Ig?

Steve Malins

Feature on David ­Bowie’s relationship with Iggy Pop ­described as 1970s’ ‘Love Affair of the Decade.

October 1999

Now Where Did I Put Those Tunes?

David Quantick

Interview promoting Hours album with moments of personal/ private identity.

Figure 4.1  David Bowie’s Q Magazine Interviews 1989–1999.

62  Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux

Figure 4.2 The retrospective look (left) from April 1990, juxtaposed with Bowie suited for Tin Machine.

Figure 4.3  The superimposed Aladdin Sane stripe—Q cover from May 1993.

Turn Myself to Face Me  63 The separation of creative and commercial visions of self dominates ­Bowie’s interviews throughout the 1990s. In the May 1993 interview, during which the journalist showed him a variety of pictures and asked him to comment, he states he was “never more uncomfortable” than during a particular ­promotional shoot adding, This wasn’t a happy time. I wasn’t really interested and let everyone tell me what to do. A wave of total indifference came over me. (Q, May 1993: 84) These reflections by Bowie in regard to his past reveal a division of the body from self, especially in terms of his earlier 1970s’ personae (see ­Descartes, 1993: 66; Cockburn, 2001: 112). This kind of separation of self is clearly ­evident in several of the retrospective pieces where Bowie moves to d ­ iscussing moments of his past in the third person: The thing that I found is the amount of enthusiasm and fire in the earlier stuff—there is a desperate edge to it. This guy really wanted to be heard. (Q, April 1990: 63) Bowie’s use of third-person narrative when talking about his past demonstrates an ability to separate his personal and creative being, particularly at moments when he is not comfortable with his behaviour. While the separation from early versions of self in these retrospective interviews is not always characterized by the third person, the idea that he does not see himself as the same person in certain moments of his past appears both in the June 1989 and May 1993 articles. In these articles Bowie answers questions about the alleged ‘Nazi salute’ incident at Victoria Station in May 1976 and mentions how his time in Berlin was a time of being a “major drug period” when he was trying to escape himself and the drug dependency (Q, June 1989: 70). Me at Victoria Station. What was I thinking? No I don’t know. I really don’t know. I was in another world by that time I have no idea what I thought between 1975 and 1977. I didn’t give a Nazi salute. Not in this picture anyway. But I don’t think I’d have done anything as daft as that. (Q, May 1993: 82) The question of the ‘Nazi salute’ is hotly contested by biographers (see ­Doggett, 2011: 256; Buckley, 1999: 228), and Bowie’s lapse in memory and lack of affinity with his former self, can be partially explained by his drug use. However, his ability to separate the personal self from the image

64  Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux of his creativity is paramount to the development of his different personae, particularly in the earlier moments of his career with Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. The main difference with the new personae he created in the 1990s is that they appeared to have a closer affinity to the reality of Bowie. The lines between his creative and personal beings blur, producing a new form of mediated persona. Building on Descartes’ work around the philosophy of mind, Parfit argued that in order to understand human beings at the varying stages of their life, we should not see them as static individuals who possess emotions or thoughts, but instead in terms of connecting these characteristics (cited in Cockburn, 2001: 122). For example, former Spiders from Mars keyboard player, Mike Garson (who rejoined Bowie’s band in the mid-1990s after an 18-year separation) described the similarities between Bowie in the 1990s and Bowie in the earliest part of his creative journey. Speaking to Q in 1997 from the Earthling tour bus, Garson stated, “Spiritually [Bowie] had advanced … his actions were a lot more sane and rational. But in essence as an artist, he was exactly the same” (cited in Cockburn, 2001: 58, authors’ emphasis). While Bowie changed in terms of his image in the most simplistic sense—his physical and musical appearance do transform—what can be seen in the 1990s is a clear sense he has found something of his creative sensibilities again. This is characterised by similarities in his beliefs, interests and artistic character as demonstrated across the Q interviews. There is a sense that he lost his way in the 1980s and through Tin Machine he rediscovered his creative impetus and sense of self. This self has a range of key characteristics which reappear throughout the period: creative adventure seeking; the hunt for artistic influence and new “skins” to re-invent his image; a sense of constant performance; and a discomfort with the commercial realities of being a successful musician. Adventure, “Art-iface,” and the Artist I think there’s still room for adventure. One of us is going to stumble on it sooner or later … Please God, let it be me! (David Bowie in Q, April 1990: 70) Bowie’s aim to be a creative and artistic adventurer categorises his musical material during the period of 1989 to 1999 and this desire permeates the promotional interviews in Q. The separation between creativity and commercial realities is also a key topic even when he achieves creative emancipation. At the turn of the decade it is clear he was uncertain of what the future would hold. In an April 1990 interview, Bowie discusses the crossroads at which he feels himself as a musician in a “teenage” medium, emphasising the pressures on him and his contemporaries as

Turn Myself to Face Me  65 they became the first generation of popular music stars to reach middle age. “Who of us is going to make a breakthrough and show it can really work? Jazz artists proved it can … but rock ‘n’ roll hasn’t yet because we still have the baggage of it being a teenage music” (Q, April 1990: 69). Whether Bowie means “breakthrough” in the artistic or commercial sense—or both—is unclear, but what is clear is that while working with Tin Machine he had recaptured his artistic sensibilities. The two Tin Machine albums were not a commercial or critical success. While reviews for the first album were largely optimistic, they were lukewarm and negative by Tin Machine II.4 In fact, the challenging thrash metal with at times frankly bizarre lyrics, from the racist war theme of ‘Under the Sun’ to references about children “whoring their bodies” in ‘Crack City’, did not process the sensibilities of an artistic soul which categorizes so much of Bowie’s output. However, as Bowie himself articulated in a June 1989 Q interview, Tin Machine enabled him to remember himself as an artist rather than a commercial pop star. In that interview Bowie argues that he loves the ability to reinvent himself and to follow his artistic sensibilities wherever they may take him, even at the cost of disillusioning fans. “Commercial survival is Rod Stewart. Artistic survival is reinvention …” The tension between the artist and the commercial realities of the music business permeates the Q interviews across the entire decade. Adorno (2001) argued that popular music in capitalist societies is part of a ­culture industry which creates product rather than art. This, in his view, has led to a ­standardisation of music with songs and even artists becoming ­interchangeable. Bowie seems acutely aware of the pressures this has on him and his fellow artists, arguing, “… designed is the key word … There’s a lot of very well designed music about. Poor real musicians” (Q, ­October 1991: 63). It is clear Bowie is trying to produce something from “real ­musicians” with Tin Machine and, ironically, it is the commercial failure of the band that finally frees him from his record industry prison. After demanding a greatest hits tour and album, EMI released him from contract and in doing so relieved commercial pressures that were preventing him from exploring new musical and creative directions. This is something he clearly embraces, giving him new drives and dreams. In Tin Machine g­ uitarist Reeves Gabrels he found an artistic ally—or as Gabrels calls himself a “bad influence”— who stays with him across the decade and helps steer and support his experimental track. As Gabrels reminds Bowie during the 1997 Earthling tour, “commercial survival is Rod Stewart. Artistic survival is reinvention” (Q, February 1997: 59). It is clear by this point that Bowie’s concerns about whether he will do anything of musical merit during the decade have also been alleviated:

66  Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux I know what happens when I play the classics … So why would I want to do it again? I don’t want to throw my chance to experiment away. (Q, February 1997: 56) Bowie argues that his contemporaries may be able to say in the future that he has no audience, but he wants to see how far he can take his music while there is still time. The removal of the commercial pressure allows him to move beyond Adorno’s (2001) searing analysis that popular music is standardised with artists and songs interchangeable. This depends on the artist being tethered by commercial need or the desire to remain a commercial success. He has broken free of those shackles and has emerged an exciting and vibrant artist once more. In some sense Bowie as commercial pop star was no less a performance than any of the other characters he adopted throughout his career. However, when reading the Q interviews it would appear the performance of characters is not only key to his artistry, but also part of his personal identity. On 19 different occasions there are references to him ‘adopting a voice’ or ‘adopts the personality of’ while answering a question. These range from Kenneth Williams to Bing Crosby, from South London civvies when wanting to appear self-deprecating, to Yorkshire dryness when making a point about his homeland. Indeed, the Q interviewers seem keenly aware that Bowie is performing for them and question the authenticity of their interaction. Adrian Deevoy mentions how Bowie is “one of the few people in the world who actually says Ha ha ha ha like a Martian who has taken an evening class in The Audible Expression of Human Amusement” (Q, May 1993: 74), while David Quantick describes how he is “notorious for agreeing with anything an interviewer says” and that during the course of the interview he will say “… Yeah 23 times and No only once” (Q, October1999: 99). For Baudrillard, media itself—in this case Q—forms a “sort of genetic code which controls mutation of the real into the hyperreal” (Baudrillard, 1983: 55). He argues through media, the real is destroyed and degenerated until it is replaced with something which is hyperreal. This hyperreal is not dream or fantasy but a “hallucinatory resemblance of the real within itself” (Baudrillard, 1983: 142). The idea of perceived or performed reality eclipsing actual reality is something Bowie himself seems intrinsically aware of: I am only the person the greatest number of people believe I am. So little of it has anything to do with me … (Q, October 1999: 90) There is, perhaps, little surprise in the fact that Bowie, even in his supposedly authentic state (in this case being interviewed), is the hyperreality of his ‘real’ self. Since his earliest material there has always been a sense of “simulation” (Baudrillard, 1983), where the real is substituted for another form of reality. As discussed earlier this simulation has also “threatened the difference between the ‘true’ and ‘false’, between the ‘real’ and imaginary

Turn Myself to Face Me  67 (Baudrillard, 1983: 5). Other than the period when he was Bowie ‘the good pop artist’ (Q, April 1990: 61) and he allowed his image and sound to be dictated, his music and artistic identity have always relied on him creating personae which draw on a range of cultural influences. When looking back at his career for retrospective pieces in Q, he constantly discusses his searches for different ‘skins’ and identities. Commenting on his earliest material he remarks, “I didn’t know if I was Max Miller or Elvis Presley” (Q, April 1990: 65). When discussing how he created Ziggy Stardust he reveals it was an amalgamation of people he’d come into contact with either physically or artistically including one of his “favourites” The Legendary Stardust Cowboy and 1960s’ rocker Gene Vincent. During another interview Bowie makes reference to the fact that at one point he tried to “write like ‘Townsend’”, was “desperately keen on mime and … trying out of images” during the early 1970s (Q, May 1993: 77). This magpie-like taking of creative jewels, the need to re-invent the creative image and to blur the line between reality and fantasy, drives Bowie. Was it Ziggy Stardust or David Bowie who was a gender bending alien-like creature? Did the Thin White Duke become a Nazi sympathiser or Bowie himself? The answer is that the reality of David Bowie has at times been replaced by another version of himself. While a representation offers an alternative where the reality still exists, simulation envelops the whole edifice. ­Bowie’s performances are hyperreal because they eclipse previous versions of reality and become the reality. In the 1990s this dynamic shifts; Bowie does not openly perform a character, he always presents himself as ‘David Bowie’. However, while the name may not change, the person appears to do so and this reveals an interesting dynamic. At times the simulation has eclipsed the reality, but the drive to simulate is also the reality of Bowie as an artist. Throughout his career he has passed through successive phases of Baudrillard’s image because the desire to simulate is the driving force behind his artistic vision. It is clear that Bowie’s early 1990s work is the reflection of basic ­reality during a period when he is trying to re-establish himself as an ­artist on his own terms. The cover of Tin Machine (1989) is minimalist and stripped back, with a relaxed Bowie and the other members of the band all dressed in dark suits, mirroring the way they presented ­themselves for Q ­interview. Though Bowie is still arguably putting on a performance, his look appears more reflective of what he wears when not performing. Pegg argues Tin Machine was “an invaluable process of creative ­therapy” and quotes Bowie as saying, “It accomplished exactly what it was s­ upposed to do, which was bring me back to my absolute roots and set me back on the right course of what I do best” (Pegg, 2011: 377). This process was achieved by “forcibly [jettisoning] the mainstream audience” whose expectations had reduced Bowie to trying to repeat his Ziggy Stardust successes and the commercialization of his image and music for the emerging MTV generation (Pegg, 2011: 376). It also took

68  Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux Phases of the image

Bowie’s output/personas 1989 to 1999

It is the reflection of basic reality

Tin Machine: Bowie dressed in his ‘own clothes.’ Relaxed, enjoying being part of the crowd. “It’s really like exposing yourself in a way. It’s been an incredibly insular experience making it, almost tunnel vision at times. Finally breaking it open to other people – it’s uncomfortable.” (June 1989: 64) “… we’re finding a lot more about ourselves and it’s given me a feeling for what I want to do again as a solo artist , no doubt about it.” (April 1990: 63)

It masks and perverts a basic reality

Hours: Bowie offering a vision of an alternative version of his life. Drawing on his own history but perverting and changing it. “So what I had to do was sink into a situation psychologically that was less than happy with life, which in my case is not true. I had to create the situations. There’s lots about this guy falling in and out of love and being disappointed and all that … what I see in my friends, they kinds of half-lived lives they have, and it’s really sad.” (1999: 90) They are not necessarily my mother, father and brother; it was the nuclear unit thing. Obviously I am totally aware of how people read things into stuff like this.” (1990: 90)

It masks the absence of a basic reality

Bowie in Greatest Hits mode. Allowing others to dictate his clothes and choose the songs to make up the album. “I thought I should make as much money as I could and quit … I was obviously just an empty vessel and wound end up like everyone else, doing these stupid fucking shows, singing Rebel Rebel until I fall over and bleed.” (1997: 58)

It bears no ­relation Outside and Earthling to any reality Bowie’s pseudo-person ritual art murder detective‘Nathan Adler’ ­whatever it is its own for the Outside album. pure ­simulacrum “Our expectations of an ending or conclusion … learned from a ­repeated story-film-narrative culture gives us a completely ­unjustified set of expectations for life, Brian. Read my Kant”. “I would like to mention that Rob Athey the performance artist will commit an act of scarification on a friend and fellow artist in public on Thursday night here in NYC. What are we to make of this current move towards ritualisation.” Techo-loving humanoid ‘Earthling’ character. “Tastes are in jungle, in nerve-shredding guitar, in computer cut up lyrics … ” (1997:55) “I want to play a techo club straight after the gig … ” (1997: 56) Some disembark, but not David Bowie or Reeves Gabrels. Still glowing a faint orange in their stage make-up from the Boston gig, they insert a Prodigy cassette into the tape machine. And with the afterhours Central Park traffic drifting past their drawn curtains, they get the all-night rave underway. (1997: 59)

Figure 4.4  Bowie (1989–1999) and Baudrillard’s Phases of the Image.

Turn Myself to Face Me  69 pressure away from the record label’s demands for Bowie to tour as a solo artist. Bowie went on to release two more albums with Tin Machine before the group was disbanded, Tin Machine II (1991) and Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby (1992). Bowie’s return as a solo artist saw the release of Black Tie White Noise in 19935 and featured a simple, full frame close-up of Bowie’s face. Despite a return to Nile Rodgers for production duties, the first time the two had worked together since Let’s Dance, Bowie creates a new direction experimenting with jazz saxophone and electronic dance beats. Black Tie White Noise includes references to his recent marriage to Somalian supermodel Iman Abdulmajid in 1992 and this coupled with a song referencing the death of his half-brother, Terry (‘Jump They Say’), begins to point to Bowie allowing the listener into his private world. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Bowie commented on how the album reflected maturity and “a willingness to relinquish full control over [his] emotions, let them go a bit, start relating to other people” (Pegg, 2011: 381). The final album in this phase of his image is The Buddha of Suburbia,6 the soundtrack to the BBC miniseries broadcast in 1993. While the original cover does not feature Bowie on the front, the back image shows a similar photograph as to the cover of Black Tie White Noise. This is further emphasized by the long liner notes in which Bowie discusses in great detail the creative experimental process, revealing a new confidence to create music his way, without worrying about commercial pressures or audience expectations. To draw on Hegel, the ‘real’ slave has overcome the ‘created’ master. While personae like Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke were created as standalone, fictional characters, the personae Bowie experimented with for Outside (Virgin, 1995) and Earthling (BMG, 1997)7 were magnified parts of his inner self and inspirations. Bowie’s image as represented in these two entities becomes a pure simulacrum; they rely on blurring the lines between Bowie and Adler and Bowie and the “Earthling” to intentionally distort. Outside saw the reunion of Bowie with Brian Eno for the first time since the Berlin trilogy. Eno’s interest in “role-playing games” at the time and Bowie’s interest in contemporary art came together to create the story for Outside, featuring Bowie’s pseudo-person ritual art murder detective Nathan Adler (Pegg, 2011: 387). This package of music, fiction and art aimed to create a hyperreal dystopian world historically placed at the end of the last millenium. The protagonist, Adler, is not Bowie. However, he both references Bowie and, in the accompanying short story found in The Diary of Nathan Adler or the Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Belew, establishes that he lived in Berlin at the same time. The artwork created by Bowie portrays Adler both investigating the scene of the “art-ritual murder” and standing in classic detective mode. In both images, his physical appearance is similar to Bowie’s, although the faces in both pieces are distorted and grotesque. Bowie’s image—or perhaps Adler’s—on the front cover is also abstract and smudged.

70  Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux

Figure 4.5  Nathan Adler artwork from Q Magazine, January 1995: 177.

The fact that this is a painting is also significant—it is not a real image of Bowie as previously captured by his early album cover photographs. The artwork included in Outside includes “computer-enhanced images in which … Bowie’s face morphed into the features of each of the album’s characters” (Pegg, 2011: 391). Unlike previous characters, Bowie does not have to become Adler full time. He can experiment with identity and image within the space of this album. By creating a package that is both sonically and visually artistic, Bowie is able to demonstrate a sense of real artistic autonomy, moving beyond the conventions of the music industry. The content in Q, which coincided with the releases of Outside and ­Earthling, offers insight into the increasingly complex and sophisticated way that Bowie draws on his own interests and inspirations to produce not only new music, but also simulacrums of himself. In January 1995, Q asked Bowie to produce something for their 100th edition. He offered the

Turn Myself to Face Me  71 first part of The Diary of Nathan Adler or the Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Belew from the Outside album and an internet c­ onversation between ­himself and Brian Eno dated 26 October 1994 in which the b ­ lurring of lines between Bowie and Adler continues. Both Adler as ­narrator of the short ­fiction and Bowie in his conversation with Eno, reference violent ­performance artists Chris ­Burden, Ron Athey and the ‘Gothenburg/Viennese castrationists’. In Art and the Artefact, published two years after Bowie’s Outside, ­Baudrillard discussed the contemporary art movement and how it uses not just three dimensions to produce realistic image, but a fourth dimension to make it hyperreal, which results in the extermination of the real by its double (­Baudrillard, 1997: 9). He argues that art has become iconoclastic, ­producing and reproducing images so they become the (hyper) reality and that this is the “secret of simulation” as not only has the real world disappeared, but “the question of its existence no longer makes sense” (Baudrillard, 1997:12). When considering Outside and the blurring of lines between Bowie ‘the artist’ and Nathan Adler ‘the artist’s creation’, the real world has indeed disappeared. Bowie is going to watch Ron Athey the ­performance artist “commit an act of scarification on a friend in public” and Adler is going to watch the same event in order to investigate performance art and how it has inspired art-ritual murder. Bowie’s conversation with Brian Eno may aim to show off his intellectual prowess and knowledge of the art world as his authentic self—and he certainly makes reference in the conversation to shared experiences with Eno—but it is in fact a performance, a simulacrum through which he performs a ‘hyperreal’ version of self. This version of reality is both Bowie and Adler. For Baudrillard this is the pinnacle of a world of simulation. Reality has altogether disappeared, and at the same time what is left masks the disappearance and appears authentic. For his next album Earthling, Bowie has moved from the narrator of a dystopian fictional world to an inhabitant of the underground dance scene. His latest simulacrum is that of the raver existing within 1990s’ ­subculture. To this end, Bowie played small underground venues and nightclubs, ­including the Dance Tent at the 1997 Phoenix Festival under the name the Tao Jones Index. In her 1995 study of rave and dance culture, Thornton draws on the work of Bourdieu arguing that one of the salient features of club culture is the way participants seek to advance their claims to being cutting edge by discovering new sounds and being ‘hip’ to new ­developments. Club culture has, Thornton argues, created a new structure of life—or what Bourdieu would term the ‘habitus’. Thornton claims that to be part of club culture is to be involved in a habitus which demands knowledge of clubs and records, ways of thinking and living, such as late nights listening to dance music, ways of dressing and even ways of moving (Thornton, cited in Longhurst, 2007: 187). In the Q interview from February 1997 and the review of a small gig at a London nightclub six months later it is clear that Bowie has completely immersed himself in this dance habitus. In total he spent almost 18 months touring dance nightclubs and

72  Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux is clearly enjoying every moment describing how playing Earthling in dance clubs gives him a “buzz”. Involvement in this habitus—the all-encompassing lifestyle of the dance world—has helped Bowie create a new simulacrum, that of the ­electro-raver. This simulacrum has again overtaken aspects of his life. As Thornton describes, some involved in the dance habitus may seek to be seen as leaders in the field. They may deploy their hipness as “­subcultural” capital (Thornton, cited in Longhurst, 2007: 197).

Figure 4.6  Bowie the Raver, Q Magazine, August 1997: 168.

Turn Myself to Face Me  73 At the Hanover Grand gig in June 1997 which is reviewed in Q (August 1997: 168), he plays “Earthling’s dizbusting drum n bass” in front of the ‘hippest’ members of the dance music scene, including popular DJ Goldie, while Björk percussionist and techno pioneer Talvin Singh is his opening act. His performance may not have the open artifice of Nathan Adler and Outside, but it is no less a simulacrum wherein he embodies his latest artistic influences and presents it as himself. There are also whispers of other selves represented in the “Earthling” character. On the front cover of E ­ arthling his hairstyle is a hybrid of the red Ziggy mane and early spikes popular with dance groups such as The Prodigy. Bowie also wears a tattered Union Jack patterned jacket he designed with ­Alexander McQueen and is turned away from the camera overlooking green fields, popular places for underground raves. Pegg notes the “­Colossus-of-Rhodes stance” could be read as Bowie comfortable in his place as artist and musician (Pegg, 2011: 395). He had taken control over his image and his work, becoming free from the music industry’s restraints and the demands of his record label. He can perform and tour on his own terms and the stance represents not only standing above his past confidently, but also looking towards his future. In 1997, in full ‘raver’ attire, Bowie was interviewed by Dave Fanning for Planet Rock MTV and his interactions and body language offer an interesting insight into his performance of authenticity during this period. Fanning asks, “There’s no way David Bowie wants to work with a safety net?” (12:55), to which he replies, “Not really, because when I’ve endeavoured to do that, I’ve just felt the most dissatisfied c­reatively as I ever could feel” (13:00) … destroying everything worthwhile in my work” (13:10), before lowering his eyes and beginning to fidget, picking imaginary fluff off his jumper. Dyer argues it is moments such as this which expose “what is behind or below the surface” and therefore “unquestionably and vitally by ­definition, the truth” (Dyer, 1991: 136). This moment of ‘truth’ is extended as, while Bowie discusses how disappointed he was with himself for ­bowing to ­commercial pressure, the camera pans from his averted gaze to a close-up of his fingers fidgeting on his knee. Of course it could be argued that Bowie, the consummate performer, is aware that here he is performing a moment of authenticity to show how much he regrets allowing his artistic self to be tempered by the commercial imperatives of the music media machine. Through his performance of awkwardness, he gives the audience signals that this is the version they should accept as authentic and thus urges them to reject the moments of his past with which he is no longer comfortable. Earthling represents both Britain as the fabric of Bowie’s identity and his new home amongst the cosmopolitan, avantgarde urban landscape of New York City where the album was recorded. Pegg also notes that the figure on the front cover can be said to represent “the isolated visitor in an alien landscape evoked many years earlier by the Ziggy Stardust sleeve”. Taken together with Outside, both albums are

74  Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux arguably “essential” parts of “Bowie’s creative rebirth” (Pegg, 2011: 395). By creating and facing these two key simulacra, Bowie prepares himself for the authentication of self in an album that sets up his retirement from creating within the confines of the music industry, Hours8. In his final offering of the twentieth century, Bowie appears acutely aware that he is not offering a version of himself, but the authentic self, commenting on the world around him. He does not wish to embody a character or a simulacrum in his performance. He is not dressed in any form of costume, his hair is a natural brown rather than the Ziggy-esque neon orange sported for Earthling.

Figure 4.7  Bowie in “Dad’s clothes,” Q Magazine, October 1999: 8.

Turn Myself to Face Me  75 In the accompanying pictures he is wearing a range of jumpers. He looks like someone’s Dad—which, of course, he is—and for the first time in any of the Q interviews across the decade he makes reference to how this intensely personal experience influences his life. Indeed the entire interview shows a new side to Bowie. He speaks of his family, his parents and brother, his “Uncle Jim”, his son and his wife. For the first time the audience see a glimpse of the person behind the performer. The performance is still there; he still adopts voices for gravitas or comedy effect and he still agrees with the interviewer throughout, but he also reveals intimate details of the reality of his life and the people within it. When discussing his new material a new aspect to Bowie as performer is revealed. While the music—and as such the performance of it—is once again simulacral in nature, this time he is not trying to embody the person whom he is performing. Indeed he identifies, for the first time, the artistic process governing his artistic output of the last decade, and perhaps throughout his career. He psychologically tries to put himself into and embody the situation of the ‘others’ he creates: This album was me trying to capture the idea of songs for my generation. So what I had to do was sink into a situation psychologically that was less than happy in life, which in my case, is not true. They are not necessarily my mother, father and brother; it was the nuclear unit thing. Obviously I am totally aware of how people read stuff like this. (Q, October 1999: 90) This moment of revelation of authentic self may be fleeting. Bowie seems aware that, as Baudrillard would argue, in order to achieve immortality as an artist, he must “get out” of himself and evolve eternally. When the interviewer comments that he could have made an entire career around just one of his albums he quips sarcastically, “Even me! Ha ha ha! I could still be doing that. Ooh I wouldn’t half be unhappy”. In this final statement Bowie reveals something telling about all the changes, characters and performances. He may have offered several hyperreal simulations of ‘David Bowie’ to the audience, but this presentation is who he really is. Performing ‘the other’ is his authentic self. While, as these discussions show, Bowie had greater artistic freedom, the commercial pressures of the music business still had a significant effect on releases in the 1990s. Bowie’s back catalogue was repackaged and remastered throughout the decade for the commercial benefit of the record labels, much to his dismay. Ziggy Stardust and his legacy ­continued to haunt him with the release of greatest hits and retrospective packages. Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture was re-released in 1992

76  Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux shortly after the critical failure of Tin Machine. In 1994 and again in 2008 the Santa Monica ’72 gig was released in a variety of collectable formats including (in 2008) a 180 gram double LP set which included a Ziggy Stardust poster and remastered audio. Two key compilation/greatest hits packages were released during this period: a four-disc box set titled Sound + Vision (Rykodisc, 1989) and Changesbowie9 ­(Rykodisc/ EMI, 1990). The cover for the Changesbowie CD was a montage of images of Bowie ­throughout his career, though most of the images represent Ziggy Stardust and the other Ziggy-esque images from Diamond Dogs, Young Americans, and Scary Monsters. These repackages of the past pass through the second phase of Baudrillard’s image—they mask the absence of a basic ­reality—as in essence these personae or versions of Bowie no longer exist. During the period of musical silence before the release of The Next Day, this m ­ asking of absence by record companies through the reissue of new m ­ aterial became particularly popular with fans. These packages, ­including Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 (2010) and the deluxe Station to Station (2010, of which the Nassau gig is included), were embraced as if new releases with thousands of pre-orders and coverage across the music press.

Conclusion In evaluating Bowie’s hyperreal performances of the 1990s as played out in Q magazine some important questions are raised about the nature of his artistry in relation to celebrity culture. It could be claimed that Bowie’s adoption of various personae is not unique, with reinvention key to maintaining many stars’ relevance. However, in examining how Bowie moves from all encompassing fictional personae to a performance of a more authentic self, we can see how his reinvention works in a different way to readings of celebrity which see non-performed, but mediated, moments as indicators of the ‘real’ self. For much of the decade Bowie reveals authenticity through performance rather than through glimpses of his private realm. The question therefore becomes: were the 1990s’ versions of himself given to his audience actually authentic? Certainly the fact it does not appear to have had any meaningful impact on wider media or audience suggests it was not accepted as such. The moment he stopped giving these performed insights into his authentic self, this version was forgotten, creating a vacuum filled by the fortyyear-old Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. As t-shirts, mugs, handbags, earrings and even temporary tattoos fill high street retailers featuring this image and the Aladdin ‘flash’, it becomes the truth of Bowie again, even if this new consumer-driven audience does not fully grasp the original meaning or context of it. Taking Boorstin’s assessment of celebrity as

Turn Myself to Face Me  77 being a “definable and publicizable personality” (Boorstin, 1962 cited in Marshall, 1997: 11), in Bowie’s absence from the public eye Ziggy/ Aladdin have become identifiable and marketable once more. In this way, Bowie’s work runs the risk of taking on the very “ephemeral quality” that he, particularly in the 1990s, desperately tried to undo (Marshall, 1997: 11). Perhaps this is best evidenced by the coverage of the release of The Next Day in April 2013. Q issued a 30-page special which did not feature the new official photograph of Bowie but opted for the famous Brian Duffy photograph of Bowie as Aladdin Sane from 1973, demonstrating “mainstream media’s unwillingness … to allow Bowie to escape the characters he created” (Usher and Fremaux, 2013: 394). Despite the fact that it was the 1990s when they had greatest direct access to the star, they give every other decade a large glossy spread, and their w ­ riters dismissed this period (e.g. Forde, 2013: 70). Thus, Bowie’s attempts as demonstrated through his interviews “to be accepted for a version closer to reality … in order for his new material to be accepted as culturally ­resonate” (Usher and Fremaux, 2013: 394; see also Marshall, 1997; Meyers, 2009), clearly failed. It is perhaps Bowie’s own understanding of this failure which has led him to stay silent since the release of his new material. Dyer argues that media texts have a crucial role in the creation of celebrity ­authenticity but by not giving any interviews, Bowie has allowed his art—especially the videos for ‘The Next Day’, ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’ and ‘Valentine’s Day’—to provide the “source for the presentation of the epitome of … ­[sincerity and ­authenticity]” (Dyer, 1991: 135). He has learned a lesson from his ­interactions with the media in the 1990s, particularly that interviews in which he gives a sense of his authentic self do not resonate with his audience to the level of his complex personae of the 1970s. It was for that reason in 1993 Q superimposed the Aladdin Sane flash on his unmade-up face, changing the image from an ordinary Bowie in a suit, to the extraordinary figure of the 1970s. As such his self-imposed media blackout allows publications, and indeed individual audience members, to project the version they want him to be onto this new material. We can all superimpose an Aladdin Sane flash in our mind’s eye, if we choose. It is perhaps his savviest marketing move yet.

Notes 1.  The study is a detailed textual analysis of all Q Magazine’s original ­interviews with Bowie (1989–1999) and examines the artist’s interaction with music journalists. These issues have been taken from the lead author’s original ­ ­collection and checked against the magazine’s archive. It should be noted that this study aims to consider both Bowie’s own perspective, but also the critical observations of the interviewer when viewing his performance and interaction with them.

78  Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux 2.  Studies around authenticity in popular music and popular culture are n ­ umerous and more information can be found in key works by Dyer (1991), Frith, ­Goodwin and Grossberg (1993), Rubridge (1996), Marshall (1997), Auslander (1999), Moore (2002) and Vannini and Williams (2009). 3. In the 100th edition of Q, special issues editor Danny Kelly (1995) wrote: “This Bowie picture for the cover of Q was, when it arrived with us, just a rather nice contemporary portrait. We needed somehow to link it into the glories of David’s past. We had the idea of the cover of Aladdin Sane, and after much telephoning, discovered that a computer enhancement company called Jones Bloom had the very frontier technology we needed to convincingly paint David’s skin. I got a message back from Bowie himself saying that it was ‘cheeky’.” 4.  As noted by Bill Wyman (1991: Online), writing in Entertainment Weekly, Tin Machine (1989) originally only sold 200,000 copies. The album spent nine weeks on the UK charts peaking at Number 3, though in the US, it peaked at 28. By comparison, Tin Machine II (1991) peaked at 23 where it spent three weeks on the UK charts and peaking at 126 in the US (“Tin Machine”: Online). David Bowie’s official website cites that in total over two million units (including the first two albums and a limited edition live disc) have been sold (“About David Bowie”, 2014: Online). New York Times writer Jon Pareles (1989) focused on the rock elements of Tin Machine, commenting on how it “strips away clutter and artifice”. Deevoy (1989) describes the album as “raw”, “soul scouring” and “a raucous rock album”, though his review focuses more on Bowie’s nervousness and occasional disappearances during the playback than on the album itself. Reviewers were less ambivalent about Tin Machine II, as Shaar Murray (1991) felt the follow up did not meet the expectations of the first album and Terry Staunton in NME argued it could “hardly be hailed as a classic …” (Pattison, 2011: 146). Similarly, Wyman (1991: Online) writing again in Entertainment Weekly comments that the exercise is “a vain attempt to nullify his celebrity”. 5.  Black Tie White Noise saw Bowie return to the top spot in the UK charts in 1993, though the album only peaked at number 39 in the US (Uncut: Ultimate Music Guide: David Bowie, 2011: 148). 6.  The Buddha of Suburbia soundtrack peaked at number 87 in the UK charts and prompted critic Shaun Phillips, writing in 1993, to comment, “… there’s nothing here worth forgiving him for Tin Machine” (Uncut: Ultimate Music Guide: David Bowie, 2011: 150). Though in 2011, music journalist David Cavanagh noted in retrospect the importance of the soundtrack in influencing much of the approaches taken on Outside (1995) (Uncut: Ultimate Music Guide: David Bowie, 2011: 150). 7.  Outside (1995) peaked at number 8 in the UK and at number 21 in the US, while Earthling (1997) charted at number 6 in the UK and at number 39 in the US (Uncut: Ultimate Music Guide: David Bowie, 2011: 152, 154). 8.  Hours peaked at number 5 in the UK and at number 47 in the US (Uncut: ­Ultimate Music Guide: David Bowie, 2011: 162.) 9.  Changesbowie was not only a platinum selling disc, but it also peaked at n ­ umber 1 in the UK and at number 32 in the US (Uncut: Ultimate Music Guide: David Bowie, 2011: 174). Bowie returned to the number 1 spot in the UK again in 2013 with the release of The Next Day, his first studio album since 2003’s Reality.

Turn Myself to Face Me  79 References “About David Bowie”. Official David Bowie Website, 2014. http://www.davidbowie.com/bio (accessed 10 February 2014). Adorno, Theodor and Jay Bernstein. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge, 2001. Aston, Martin. “Dizbusting David Bowie hopes you like his newish direction”. Q Magazine, August 1997, 168. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication”. In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 126–134. Port Townsend: The New Press, 1983. Baudrillard, Jean and Nicholas Zurbrugg. Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact. ­London: Sage, 1997. Boorstin, Daniel. The Image. New York: Antheneum, 1962. Bowie, David. “The Diary of Nathan Adler or the Art-ritual Murder of Baby Grace. An occasionally on-going short story”. Q Magazine, January 1995a, 176–181. Bowie, David. “Internet conversation between David Bowie and Brian Eno”. Q ­Magazine, January 1995b, 182–183. Buckley, David. Strange Fascination: David Bowie The Definitive Story. London: Virgin Books, 1999. Cann, Kevin. Any Day Now: David Bowie The London Years (1947–1974). ­London: Adelita Ltd., 2010. Cavanagh, David. “Bowie at 50!” Q Magazine, February 1997, 52–59. Cockburn, David. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Basingstoke: ­Palgrave, 2001. Broackes, Victoria, Geoff Marsh, Martin Roth, Camille Paglia, Jon Savage, ­Howard Goodall, Christopher Breward. David Bowie is the subject. London: V & A ­Publishing, 2013. Deevoy, Adrian. “Ready to rock? David Bowie ‘back on course’ with Tin Machine”. Q Magazine, June 1989, 62–69. Deevoy, Adrian. “‘God, I remember this’: David Bowie, this is your life”. Q ­Magazine, May 1993, 74–84. Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy, 3rd ed. Translated by Donald Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. Doggett, Peter. The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s. London: Vintage, 2011. Du Noyer, Paul. “Put your hands together for … Ziggy Stardust! The Thin White Duke! The Laughing Gnome! David Bowie in the Q interview”. Q Magazine, April 1990, 63–70. Dyer, Richard. “A Star is Born and the Construction of Authenticity”. In Stardom: Industry of Desire, edited by Christine Gledhill, 132–140. London: Routledge, 1991.

80  Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux Fanning, Dave. “Planet Rock MTV Interview”. Exploring David Bowie. 1997. http:// exploringdavidbowie.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/planet-rock-interview-1997/ (accessed 15 August 2013). Forde, Eamonn. “Bowie Disasters: The Dame Busters”. Q Magazine, April 2013, 70. Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 1998. Frith, Simon, Andrew Goodwin, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader. London: Routledge, 1993. Goddard, Simon. Ziggyology. London: Ebury Press, 2013. Hollingworth, Roy. “Bowie Mad!” Melody Maker, 14 July 1973. Reprinted in Uncut: Ultimate Music Guide: David Bowie 7 (2011): 44–45. Jones, Allan. “Heroes and Villains”. Melody Maker, 29 October 1977. Reprinted in Uncut: Ultimate Music Guide: David Bowie 7 (2011): 71–74. Jones, Dylan. When Ziggy Played Guitar. London: Preface Publishing, 2012. Kelly, D., “Editorial,” Q Magazine, January (1995), p. 6. Longhurst, Brian. Popular Music and Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. McLeod, Ken. “Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music”. Popular Music 22 (3 2003): 337–355. Malins, Steve. “Looking good Davie! Feeling good Ig?” Q Magazine, April 1998, 82–83. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Meyers, Erin. “Can You Handle My Truth? Authenticity and the Celebrity Star Image”. Journal of Popular Culture 42 (5 2009): 890–918. Moore, Allan. “Authenticity as Authentication”. Popular Music 21 (2 2002): 209–223. Pareles, Jon. “And now, the no frills David Bowie”. New York Times, 4 June 1989. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/04/arts/recordings-and-now-the-no-frillsdavid-bowie.html (accessed 10 February 2014). Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Pattison, L. “Tin Machine I & II”. Uncut: Ultimate Music Guide: David Bowie 7 (2011): 146–147. Pegg, Nicholas. The Complete David Bowie. London: Titan Books, 2011. Quantick, David. “Now where did I put those tunes?” Q Magazine, October 1999, 88–94. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion, 2001. Rubridge, Sarah. “Does Authenticity Matter? The Case for and against Authenticity in the Performing Arts”. In Analysing Performance, edited by Patrick Campbell, 219–233. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Shaar Murray, Charles. “Are Tin Machine crap? Discuss”. Q Magazine, October 1991, 56–64. Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultures. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. “Tin Machine”. The Official UK Charts Company 2014. http://www.officialcharts. com/artist/_/tin%20machine/ (accessed 10 February 2014).

Turn Myself to Face Me  81 Trynka, Paul. Starman: David Bowie–The Definitive Biography. London: Sphere, 2011. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. 2nd ed. London: Sage Publications, 2013. Usher, Bethany and Stephanie Fremaux. “Who is he now: David Bowie and the Authentic Self”. Celebrity Studies 4 (3 2013): 393–396. Vannini, Phillip and J. Patrick Williams, eds. Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Wyman, Bill. “The man who fell to Earth”. Entertainment Weekly, 6 Sept 1991. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,315381,00.html (accessed 10 February 2014). Wyman, Bill. “Tin Machine II”. Entertainment Weekly, 6 Sept 1991. http://www. ew.com/ew/article/0,,315383,00.html (accessed 10 February 2014).

5 ‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’ David Bowie, Carl Jung and the Unconscious Tanja Stark

Figure 5.1  Art and image by Tanja Stark.

David Bowie inhabits Carl Jung’s world of archetypes, reading and speaking of the psychoanalyst with a passion. (Oursler, in Duponchelle 2013) The haunting figure of an intubated, dystopian and alienated creature inhabiting ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (1980) world of religious, sci-fi and industrial imagery, singing of Major Tom’s trajectory like some perpetually unconsummated rapture is a poignant image in David Bowie’s oeuvre. No longer worldly, not quite heavenly, but suspended in some purgatorial cursed space in between, it is hypnotic, erotic and somewhat psychotic. Yet contained within the cryptic layers of ‘Ashes to Ashes’, with its alluring convergence of iconography, symbols, sound and vision, lie essential thematic concerns that repeatedly permeate Bowie’s prodigious output and have intrinsic parallels

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  83 with ideas in Jungian psychology: a profound engagement with the Unconscious, a complex relationship with the Numinous1, tension between opposing polarities (the celestial and the chthonic, visceral and cerebral, sarx and pneuma2) and the ongoing spectre of a shadow that threatens to overwhelm and displace the ordered surface reality. Indeed, Jungian concepts are so inextricably woven throughout Bowie’s multi-decadal tableau of creativity that in Bowie’s synthesis of mythopoeic themes of the Unconscious with the zeitgeist of pop culture, together with his palpable struggle for meaning, catharsis and knowledge, Bowie has become a poignant contemporary representation of Jung’s ‘visionary artist’, potentially illuminating his deep resonance in popular cultural consciousness. This chapter begins by revealing evidence of Bowie’s long-term fascination with Carl Jung introduces some of Jung’s ideas and begins an exploration of some intriguing links between Bowie and Jung. Contrasting ideas found in Jung’s writings and his confrontation with the subterranean unconscious in the recently revealed Red Book (2009) with Bowie’s own creative expression uncovers significant parallels in thought and theme that illuminate core aspects of Bowie’s often cryptic, multilayered work. The territory is often conceptual and poetic barely touching the nuances inherent in Jungian psychology but nonetheless compellingly suggests that Jung has been a central influence upon (and compass for) Bowie as both men have navigated the mysterious, sometimes perilous, depths of the psyche. C. G. Jung the Foreman When Bowie famously sang of “Jung the foreman” on Aladdin Sane, with its iconic ‘lightning flash’ cover and word play on sanity, it seems the artist was heralding the pivotal resonance the psychiatrist’s ideas had upon his life. Forty years later, artist Tony Oursler, Bowie’s long-term friend and director of the ‘Where Are We Now?’ (2013) film clip, affirmed Bowie’s deep and abiding connection to Jung. “David Bowie inhabits Carl Jung’s world of archetypes, reading and speaking of the psychoanalyst with passion” revealed Oursler, who also accompanied Bowie to the first public exhibition of Jung’s Red Book in New York in 2009 (Duponchelle, 2013). Symbolic and specific references to Jung abound throughout Bowie’s career. Arguably beginning with his 1967 song ‘Shadow Man’ that poetically encapsulates a key Jungian concept, in 1987 Bowie tellingly described the ‘Glass Spiders’ of Never Let Me Down (1987) as “… Jungian figures, mother figures” around which he not only anchored a worldwide tour, but also created an enormous onstage effigy (Swayne, 1987). Bowie acted in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) a story by Jung’s close friend and proponent of Jungian ideas, Laurens Van der Post (Van der Post, 1976), in Labyrinth (1986), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), films with archetypally Jungian shadow struggles, and expressed interest in a proposed Derek Jarman film based on Jung’s book Aion (Matthews, 2009).

84  Tanja Stark So who is Carl Jung and why is Bowie fascinated by him? Born in 1875, this highly intelligent, intuitive and internally conflicted Swiss psychiatrist was fascinated by the mytho-spiritual dimensions of the psyche in the context of emotional health and psychological integration. Most popularly associated with the concepts of synchronicity, introversion, extroversion and with defining the psychological categories of sensation, intuition, feeling and thinking that underpin the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test in his book Psychological Types (Jung, 1971), Jung extensively researched religion and esoteric spirituality, the occult, alchemy, mythology and even the UFO phenomenon in his quest to understand human behavior and mental illness. Indeed it was Jung’s fascination with these subjects that contributed to his split with Sigmund Freud. A prolific writer, Jung’s theories are complex but at their core was an understanding of life as an ongoing process of Individuation, a psychological journey of emergence, transformation and centered integration of the psyche within a holistic Self through conscious awareness, engagement and balance with the energies of the Personal and Collective Unconscious. Jung held that subliminal essences and universal energies profoundly influenced the lives of individuals and societies and believed the recurring mythopoeic symbolism, imagery and narratives found across cultures in art, myth and religion drew from the powerful energies of this Collective Unconscious. Manifesting in ways such as dreams, visions, art, intuitions, spiritual experience and synchronicities, active attention to these expressions could provide pathways to greater integration and wholeness. In contrast, unhealthy repression, denial or unbalanced inflation of unconscious energies could result in pathology, illness, psychosis and psychological disintegration (Jung, 1967: 391–402; Jung, 1972: 203–210). For Jung, expressions of the Unconscious often took form as archetypal images: thematic ideas that pulsated through art, dream, myth and narrative, such as the Hero, the Savior, the Trickster and the Apocalypse. While archetypal expressions are unlimited, Jung placed recurring emphasis upon several primal images that emerged around the journey toward individuation that are evident in the work of Bowie: the Persona, the Anima/Animus, the Shadow and the Self (Jung, 1968). As archetypes contain both light and dark aspects in the way pharmakon can be medicine or poison, they can be creative and life developing or stagnating and toxic. Importantly, Jung noted over-identification with archetypes could be problematic, a significant observation, as will be seen later, in relation to Bowie’s cascading series of personae and roles. Jung also emphasized the centrality of ‘Coniunctio Oppositorum’—the conjunction of opposites—in the journey toward wholeness, believing synthesis of polarities could be psychologically transformational if inherent tensions could be creatively balanced 3. As Jung noted, “nothing promotes the growth of consciousness as inner confrontation of opposites” (Jung, 1967: 345)—a tension that abounds throughout Bowie’s writing.

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  85 Something in the Air: Bowie and the Unconscious Whether it’s fortunate or not I don’t know, but I’m absolutely and totally vulnerable by environment, and environment and circumstances affect my writing tremendously. To the point of absurdity sometimes. (Bowie cited in Jones, 1977) Amongst artists, Jung distinguished the ‘visionary artist’ as one whose creativity drew from primal impulses of the Unconscious (such as dreams), manifesting archetypal themes that resonate across cultures. Highly sensitive to energies within and around them, Jung believed these artists were acutely affected by emotional nuance and social turbulence, their art often expressing repressed energies and ideas that swirled beneath dominant ­paradigms. Jung wrote: … whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the ­conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current … the work in process becomes the poet’s fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe4 … [primordial images] are activated—one might say, ‘instinctively’—and come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists and seers. (Jung, 1933: 173) Yet while this could create deeply resonant art, the process was often ­overwhelmingly destabilizing for artists. Jung wrote: Every creative person … is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes … Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument … There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire. (Jung, 1933: 175) Bowie overtly identified with Jung’s view of the creative process. In 1999 he described himself as “quite Jungian” in his belief in the pervasive influence of the unconscious dream state upon life and acknowledged that his art reflected this synthesis between the unconscious and conscious, articulating Jung’s theoretical constructs and embodying the creative process of his ‘visionary artist’: Being imbued with a vividly active imagination, still, I have b ­ rilliantly Technicolor dreams. They’re very, very strong. The ‘what if?’ approach to life has always been such a part of my personal mythology, and it’s

86  Tanja Stark always been easy for me to fantasize a parallel existence … I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we’ve made of them, really. I’m quite ­Jungian about that. The dream state is a strong, active, potent force in our lives … the fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey. Combining the two, the place where the two worlds come together, has been important in some of the things I’ve written, yes. (Bowie in Roberts, 1999) Confirming what he had sung from the beginning, “Tell them I’m a dreaming kind of guy and I’m going to make my dream, tell them I will live my dream” (‘When I Live My Dream’, 1967), as Jung wrote, the gift had a price. ‘Time’ intimated how attachment to the ‘strong, active, potent force’ of the unconscious could be alienating: Breaking up is hard, but keeping dark is hateful, I had so many dreams, I had so many breakthroughs, But you, my love, were kind, but love has left you Dreamless, The door to dreams was closed … But all I had to give was the guilt for dreaming. (‘Time’, 1973) Both Bowie and Jung shared a pervading, nebulous sense of memories and ‘nostalgia’ outside present time. Jung spoke of a strange sense of having lived in the past: “[as a boy] I could not understand this identity I felt with the eighteenth century … I was overcome by an inexplicable nostalgia” (Jung, 1967:34). Bowie expressed a similar sentiment: “It’s odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about ‘old and other times’ as though I had a lot of years behind me” (Bowie in Concert LiveWire, 2002). Both Jung and Bowie were also intrigued by a strange familiarity around the future, Jung in his prophetic visions about a coming epoch, while Bowie described: … the sensibility that comes over is some feeling of nostalgia for a future. I’ve always been hung up on that; it creeps into everything I do, however far away I try to get from it … that’s obviously part of what I’m all about as an artist … The idea of having seen the future, of somewhere we’ve already been keeps coming back to me … I’ve often had that feeling very strongly with myself that … well, it’s like what Dylan said about the tunes are just in the air. (MacKinnon, 1980: 37) So it seems through this artistic openness to the Unconscious, Bowie cryptically carved his symbolic iconography, infusing primal archetypal concepts that permeate philosophy, esoteric spirituality and literature—timeless undercurrents and anxieties of existence—into the metaphorically futuristic tongue of sexuality, psychology and spiritualized science fiction evident in his music.

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  87 The Red Book: Dream Dystopia and Mystic Myth Jung himself was no stranger to the raw energies of the unconscious. Already an established therapist, during a period of personal and societal turbulence, Jung experienced an overwhelming flood of bizarre waking visions beginning in 1913 and continuing almost daily for many years. “I often had to cling to the table,” he wrote, “so as not to fall apart” (Corbett, 2009: 34). Yet Jung believed by confronting and engaging with these visions he could discover wisdom and psychological integration, documenting this journey in calligraphically-illustrated journals now known as the Red Book. While claiming this was the seminal experience upon which all his later work was drawn, Jung kept it unpublished during his lifetime for fear it “would look like madness” (Jung, 1967: 19). Finally published in 2009, the Red Book reveals Jung’s Dantean descent into the depths of the unconscious on a metaphorical soul quest. Throughout its pages Jung dialogues with a pantheon of mysterious archetypal figures who teach and torment him with strange visions and syncretic parables of darkness and light, the narrative weaving like a Shamanic mystery play through a psychedelic maze-world to final visions of personal enlightenment and gnosis5. And while Jung believed the process contained collective and personal archetypal images, he was emphatic that the content itself was unique to his own individuation process, and encouraged individuals to embark on their own process of engagement with the unconscious to discover their own myth (Jung, 2009: 216). Intriguingly, there seem to be a number of thematic convergences between Jung’s raw confrontation with the unconscious and Bowie’s oeuvre. While it is impossible to discern the extent to which Bowie’s expression is intentionally or subconsciously derivative of Jungian themes, or spontaneously and analogously synchronous, the answer might be a little of both, giving weight to Jung’s idea that the unconscious manifests in primal archetypal patterns and/or that the psyche of both men share some similar frameworks. Oursler, once again, seems to confirm the link6, tellingly hinting that Jung’s Red Book confrontation with the unconscious provides perspective on Bowie’s recent work (Duponchelle, 2013), while poet and essayist Norman Ball (2013) has written extensively on the inextricable wedding between these two men. This powerful association seems to have been evident, though largely overlooked, for decades. The following section explores some of these Jungian references and archetypal ideas, from Bowie’s manifestation of Jung’s persona ­archetype, shadow explorations, expression of the anima/animus and the integrated Self, to Bowie’s approach to the Numinous and his struggle to integrate opposites, as exemplified by ‘Ashes to Ashes’. At times linking these aspects within the context of modern neurology and ancient esoterica, in the following sections I suggest Bowie is ‘torn between the light

88  Tanja Stark and dark’, his multilayered, symbolic and complex dance with dark and ­mysterious chthonic energies simultaneously empowering and ­threatening to ­overwhelm in his creative quest for authenticity and wholeness. In this struggle, Bowie, the consummate dreamer, found a roadmap in the life of Jung. The Sound of Visions Jung the foreman prayed at work / Neither hands nor limbs would burst / It’s hard enough to keep formation with this fall out saturation / Cursing at the Astronette / Who stands in steel by his cabinet / He’s crashing out with Sylvian / … With snorting head he gazes to the shore / Once had raged a sea that raged no more. (‘Drive-In Saturday’, 1973) When Bowie sings of Jung in ‘Drive-In Saturday’ (1973) with its post-­ apocalyptic themes, the verses seem to contain a compellingly cryptic a­ llusion to Jung’s Red Book experiences, the therapist standing by his office cabinet facing a raging sea of visions finding it “hard enough to keep f­ ormation” and forced to “cling to a table” (as Jung confessed, above) in their ­saturating fall out. Jung’s recollection of the period, “My entire life consisted in e­ laborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me” (Jung, 2009: back cover) is certainly consistent with Bowie’s lyrics. This concept of Jung ‘clinging to the table’ in the face of a hallucinatory stream of images is also synchronistically reflected decades later in Bowie’s film clip for ‘Survive’ (1999), the singer clinging to a table as his grounded domestic reality merges with a space-like dreamworld and he begins to float strangely around his kitchen. Curiously, in a sublimely clever or incredibly synchronistic allusion in the context of Jung’s bizarre visions, the inclusion of “crashing out with Sylvian” could plausibly refer to the Sylvian fissure in the brain, a region discovered to produce hallucinogenic visions and ‘paranormal’ p ­ erceptions when ­ electrically stimulated and, presciently, in 2006, to ­ generate what ­ neurologists called an ‘illusory shadow person’ or doppelganger ­phenomenon; themselves highly charged and recurring Bowie archetypes (Penfield, 1955; Arzy et al., 2006).7  Bowie would also invoke Jung when discussing ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ (1971)—“… look out my window what do I see / a crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me / all the nightmares came today / and it looks as if they’re here to stay”—a strange visionary intrusion seemingly alluding to Bowie’s half-brother’s hallucinations … or, as Doggett (2011: 102) suggests, Bowie’s own. Jung advised patients with disturbing dreams and visions to express them in “beautifully bound journals” to help process their experience and free them from their power, suggesting:

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  89 It is of great help … to express their peculiar contents either in the form of writing or of drawing and painting. There are so many incomprehensible intuitions in such cases, phantasy fragments that rise from the unconscious, for which there is almost no suitable language. I let my patients find their own symbolic expressions, their ‘mythology’. (Jung, 2009: 216) Bowie seemed to internalise this advice, reflecting, “… according to Jung, to see cracks in the sky is not really quite on … I thought I’d write my problems out” (Doggett, 2011: 102). But where Jung used paper and kept his strange visions relatively private, Bowie, as an artist, intuitively recorded his own ‘Red Book’ in spiral grooves of vinyl, adorned the sounds and visions of his dreams and fears with glitter and dye and shared them with a youth hungering for new manifestations of old myths. Facinatingly, the nightmare inducing hallucinogenic hand reaching down from the cracked sky in Bowie’s lyrics darkly mirrors Michelangelo’s archetypal painting in the Sistine Chapel of the Creation of Adam with its crack in the sky and the hand of God reaching down to spark life into Adam, a metaphorical fusion of spirit (pnuema) and flesh (sarx), and the conscious and unconscious dimensions.

Figure 5.2  ‘All The Jung Dudes’. Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam centers around the iconic image of ‘a crack in the sky and [God’s] hand reaching down’ to spark life into Man.

Intriguingly, the American Medical Journal reported that the portrait of God appears to conform deliberately to the neuro-anatomical shape of the brain, its Sylvian fissure (associated with Jung in ‘Drive-In Saturday’) clearly ­evident, suggesting Michelangelo, a student of mystic esoterica, may have intentionally conflated theology and neurology with the spark of ­consciousness, and adding a further layer to the strange archetypal

90  Tanja Stark associations between Bowie, the brain and Jung’s idea of the spontaneous manifestation of the Collective Unconscious (Meshberger, 1990: 1837; Blech & Doliner, 2008). Changing Personas: Chameleons and Caricatures The resonances with Jung continue throughout Bowie’s life and work. Jung’s classic ‘persona’ archetype has been conceptually defining throughout Bowie’s career, often taking exaggerated theatrical forms. While Bowie himself is a creative persona of David Jones, the multiple (sub)personae from Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke to the more recent Reclusive ­Artist are a fusion of caricaturized masks and an underlying psyche that appear a mix of deliberate and unconscious creation, enabling a plethora of public and private projections, transference and countertransference to abound. Bowie’s frequent metamorphosis, both musically and visually, became part of the Bowie myth and gained him a popular reputation as rock’s C ­ hameleon, an archetypal image of camouflage and perpetual change.8 While Jung believed inner plurality was normal, indeed virtually integral to the visionary artist, extreme imbalance was psychologically p ­ roblematic. When a young Bowie intimated that his personae involved a d ­ issociative psychic splitting of his underlying identity, it suggested powerful personal complexes9 behind the creative masks. “… Offstage I’m a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It’s probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David”, he tellingly remarked (Saal, 1972). Jung believed all people have complexes; clusters of emotionally charged images, emotions and ideas “… derived from one or more a­ rchetypes, and characterized by a common emotional tone” that influence behaviours (Samuels, Shorter & Plaut, 1986: 34). He wrote “… there is no d ­ ifference in principle between a fragmentary personality and a complex … complexes are splinter psyches” (Jung, 1960: 97). In becoming conscious of our complexes, “… provided the ego can establish a viable relationship with a complex, a richer and more variegated personality emerges” (Samuels, Shorter & Plaut, 1986: 34). Yet Jung also warned that “… what is not so well known, but far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us. … The unity of consciousness is disrupted and the intentions of the will are impeded or made impossible” (Jung, 1960: 96). Powerful complexes split off as autonomous archetypes, like possessions, had: … a powerful inner coherence, it has its own wholeness and, in addition, a relatively high degree of autonomy, so that it is subject to the control of the conscious mind to only a limited extent, and therefore behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness. (Jung, 1960: 96)

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  91 So while Bowie’s chameleon-like procession of personae functioned as potent archetypal images within society (the subversive artist, m ­ ysterious outsider, androgynous alien, the illuminated prophet), as they took on a psychic life of their own, amplified by hubris, fans and media, it seems he was perpetually forced to manage, integrate or crucify these characters with their potentially self-fracturing and possessing energies that ­entangled him as they split off and dominated his psyche like autonomous archetypes. Bowie would later seem to affirm Jung’s caution around this imbalance: … that fucker [Ziggy] would not leave me alone for years … my whole personality was affected … It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity … I think I put myself very dangerously near the line. Not in a physical sense but definitively in a mental sense. (Bowie in Jones, 1977) All the Jung Dudes Jung himself was a man of contradictions, paradox and internal conflict cognizant of internal splits within himself (Jung, 1967: 45). Interestingly in one vision from the Red Book, Jung wrestles with multiplicity and his quest to resolve the psychic tension constant ‘changes’ bring to integration through the archetype of the chameleon: All your rebirths could ultimately make you sick… a chameleon, a caricature, one prone to changing colors, a crawling shimmering ­lizard … I recognized the chameleon and no longer want to crawl on the earth and change colors and be reborn; instead I want to exist from my own force, like the sun which gives light and does not suck light … (Jung, 2009: 277) Although the Red Book wasn’t revealed until 2009, Bowie synchronously reflected Jung’s visionary archetypes of himself as “chameleon” and “caricature” amongst the layers of 1971’s enigmatic ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ “… he’s chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature” (‘The Bewlay Brothers’, 1971). Consistent with Jung’s theory that the collective unconscious emerged in visions, dreams and hallucinations in the work of visionary artists, those words preceded “… my brother lays upon the rocks / He could be dead, He could be not / He could be You” again invoking Bowie’s half-brother’s hallucinations and seizures, and strange liminal spaces into which the unconscious can flood. Bowie acknowledged the song had “… layers of ghosts within it. It’s a palimpsest … I distinctly remember a sense of emotional invasion”,

92  Tanja Stark affirming its genesis in the mysterious realms of the unconscious (Bowie in Daily Mail, 2008). Jung’s visionary chameleon’s quest toward a ‘solar’ nature also reveals his interest in the esoteric and alchemic symbolism of the Sun/ Sol, a symbolism similarly reflected in the name of the Music Chameleon’s 1976 Tour and personal company, Isolar Enterprises. But while he may aspire to a solar nature, Bowie’s creative expression can only be fully understood by grasping his intense artistic wrestling with the energies of the shapeshifting shadow as it has manifested both in him, and in society. It is this struggle from projection and awareness, to inflation and possession, repression and integration that has Bowie and the shadow locked in a tumultuously hypnotic dance of Faustian conflation, catharsis and Jacobean control for decades, creating an energetic tension that permeates his creative work.

Shadow Man I ran across a monster who was sleeping by a tree, and I looked and frowned and the monster was me. (‘The Width of a Circle’, 1970) As the repressed, unconscious aspects of the psyche, Jung believed acknowledging and integrating the shadow was an immensely difficult, but crucial part of individuation as it could allow conscious awareness of (and therefore the ability to manage) dark primal impulses. But this was a risky process that presented real danger of the highly charged and potent shadow merging precariously with the ego during the descent into the shadow realm overwhelming the conscious aspects of the ­personality with dark and destructive forces of the unconscious (Jung, 1968: 123). The undeniable energy and raw authenticity associated with art borne from seeking truth within the depths of human experience saw Jung observe, “… in spite of its function as a reservoir for human d ­ arkness—or ­perhaps because of this—the shadow is the seat of creativity” (Jung, 1967: 262). Yet artists could find themselves in deeply vulnerable, p ­ recarious ­positions when immersed in energy so often imbued with psyche twisting ­permeations. ‘Shadow Man’10, an early Bowie song acknowledges this component of the psyche, recognizing its dual capacity to be “foe” or “friend”: Look in his eyes and see your reflection / Look to the stars and see his eyes / He’ll show you tomorrow, he’ll show you the sorrows / Of what you did today / You can call him foe, you can call him friend / You should call and see who answers / For he knows your eyes are drawn to the road ahead / And the shadow man is waiting round the bend / Oh, the shadow man oooo … It’s really you. (‘Shadow Man’, 1971)

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  93 The specter of shadow possession has been a potent thematic undercurrent, manifesting therianthropically11 as Diamond Dogs (1974) and the dangerously seductive Minotaur of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (1977) with its polarized duality that sought exorcising—“Someone else inside me / Someone could get skinned … / Someone fetch a priest / You can’t say no to the Beauty and the Beast”—or insanity inducing spirits on Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980): “She asked me to stay and I stole her room, she asked for my love and I gave her a dangerous mind … now she’s sleeping in the streets and she can’t socialize”. The ongoing struggle was sometimes too hard. “… I don’t care which shadow gets me … switch the channels, watch the police cars. I can’t read shit [reach it] anymore”, a war-weary Bowie would confess on ‘I Can’t Read’ (1989). Bowie’s surprise re-emergence in 2013 was pierced with a dark adult retelling of the original Bowie mythopoeic narrative that had begun so naively with the laughing gnome in 1967; possession by the repressed unconscious shadow that inspires creative passion yet ominously threatens to overwhelm and displace the ordered surface reality. When, in ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’ (2013) film clip a dull married couple’s lives are infested by daimonic celebrity doppelgangers (autonomous archetypes) dwelling in the house next door, possessing the wife and replacing domestic reality with eccentric orgiastic passions, it was virtually a poetic retelling of Jung’s warning on the danger of ignoring the repressed energy of an unconscious shadow: A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They may dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force. (Jung, 1967: 277) The disturbing ‘Valentine’s12 Day’ (2013) merged the personal with the collective, channeling the unconscious shadow of society’s darkest impulses, Bowie singing of a mass murderer viscerally relishing the slaughter of innocents, ominously revisiting 1970’s ‘Running Gun Blues’. The Next Day (2013) illustrated shadow possession in religious guise while ‘If You Can See Me’ (2013) suggested the collective disassociation of a society so possessed by the shadow spirits of greed and theft, it’s psychotically delusional in its hubris. In Bowie’s overt alliance with William Burroughs in the first Jimmy King portrait released after his long public absence, one wondered if Bowie had been thrashing about with his own ‘Ugly Spirit’ in a creative exorcism of sorts. Certainly Burroughs solution to “… the constant threat of possession … with the invader, the Ugly Spirit … maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out” (Burroughs, 1985: xxiii) finds parallel with Bowie’s invocation of Jung and the compulsion to

94  Tanja Stark ‘write my problems out’ as discussed earlier. But while its presence is never far from the surface, the shadow has not always held the upper hand.

I Will Be King and You Will Be Queen: Archetypal Anima and Alchemy As the inner feminine and masculine aspects of a man and woman, respectively, the Anima13 and Animus were, to Carl Jung, externally projected archetypal images seeking integration within the Self. Jung called this balanced union ‘Syzygy’, a Greek word also used to describe the alignment of celestial bodies, and male-female pairing of spiritual emanations in Gnosticism (Jung, 1951: 11–22), itself an interesting concept within the context of Bowie’s androgynous expressions and gnostic spiritual interests, hinting, perhaps, at Syzygy Stardust as futuristic alchemical theatre. The hermaphroditic construction also presciently foreshadows the double-headed mannequins of ‘Where Are We Now?’ (2013). Bowie’s love songs often manifest an archetypal longing for a conjunction transcending earthly constraints into the realm of the metaphysical. Within the pulsating surges of “Heroes” (1977) Bowie imagines a male and female momentarily conjoined as King and Queen, echoing the archetypal union of the Sun King and Moon Queen in the Rosarium Philosophorum, the alchemic Holy Wedding that so fascinated Jung (Jung, 1963) and seems to have inspired concepts in Bowie’s ‘Soul Love’ (1972). This fascination with the integration of opposites in Heiros Gamos is even more explicit in Bowie’s ‘Sex and the Church’ (1993) with its allusions to gnostic theology and alchemy, laden with symbolism around ‘The Mysteries’ (1993) of mystic union: … the union of Christ and his bride, the Christian / It’s all very puzzling / … All the great mystic religions / Put strong emphasis, on the redeeming spiritual qualities … a union between the flesh and the spirit / It’s sex and the church … freedom of spirit / And the joys of the flesh. (‘Sex and the Church’, 1993) Early on, Bowie articulated Jungian ideas around these archetypes, describing his awareness of conflating Anima with the Numinous in a 1976 TV interview: I have a vast capacity to love, but the one time I found I was falling in love it became obsessive to a point where the object of that affection was becoming overblown. It was no longer a real thing, it was becoming my search for some kind of mythological feeling that man is supposed to have, and probably the feeling that man eventually develops for, an awareness, of God … [Obsessional love satisfies] something that needs to be fulfilled in oneself. (Bowie on Dinah!, 1976)

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  95 It was a wise observation on the difference between external anima projection and internal integration. Jung had written that his archetypal concept of the Anima was a renaming of what the poet Carl Spitteler had called ‘My Lady Soul’ (Jung, 1968:13). Consciously or not, Bowie’s ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ (1973) laid bare the pull of her archetypal seductions.

The Self: The Man Who Souled the World In Jungian psychology the central archetype of the Self is understood as Wholeness, the integrated outcome of individuation and centered completeness through unification of the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche. Ego differentiation is generally the task of the first half of life while the return to a unifying Self usually occurs in the second. This is a difficult life work and the journey around Self can be seen in the questions that permeate Bowie’s art: how to reconcile life with death, manage the shadow, nurture an inner spiritual life in the face of redundant institutions and find a sense of hope in dystopian realities. It’s the process that matters, isn’t it? Rather than getting your information or redemption easily and directly you must go through this long stubborn painful trek. As with alchemy, the end result isn’t as important as the long process whereby all the inessential aspects of “you” have been stripped away … (Bowie in Penman, 1995) The 1970s’ titular track ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ is a deep and ambiguous expression of an intellectually libidinous pilgrim. The album is an intense dive into existential and illusory realities, spiritual and sensory exploration and dark social commentary wrapped in tripped out rock and roll. But it is the enigmatic title track that so hauntingly embodies the mysterious early search for authenticity. A possible Jungian interpretation of the song sees the protagonist on a journey of individuation when he encounters a powerful force of the Unconscious. Not quite grasping the full significance of what he has glimpsed “upon the stairs,” he remains partially repressed, splitting it off from himself, or minimizing its influence. After years of searching (ego differentiation of the first half of life), the significance of the enigma unfolds, the Personal merges with the Collective Unconscious (‘I’ becomes ‘we’) and the enormously mysterious influence of the unconscious is revealed, the pilgrim faced with integrating this into consciousness or remaining blind to its powerful influence. Thirty years later Bowie spoke of a later sense of integration that allowed the song to function as a prescient vision of his soul quest: I guess I wrote it because there was a part of myself that I was looking for. Maybe now that I feel more comfortable with the way that

96  Tanja Stark I live my life and my mental state (laughs) and my spiritual state whatever, maybe I feel there’s some kind of unity now. That song for me always exemplified kind of how you feel when you’re young, when you know that there’s a piece of yourself that you haven’t really put together yet. You have this great searching, this great need to find out who you really are. (Hobbs, BBC transcript, 1997)

Figure 5.3   Imagery from the ‘Where Are We Now?’ 2013 film clip contrasted with the Noble Empress from the Rosarium Philosophorum, a medieval alchemic work that intrigued Jung (1963).

Four decades later the melancholic reverie of 2013’s ‘Where Are We Now?’ is a poignant bookend to ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. Brimming with archetypal images around the Self, the Tony Oursler directed film clip opens focusing on a large diamond, a Jungian symbol of the integrated Self representing “… the union of extreme opposites of matter and spirit” (von Franz in Jung, 1964: 221). The curious double-headed mannequin reflects Jung’s archetypal anima/ animus Syzygy discussed earlier, the alchemical symbolism of the Holy Wedding and the hermaphroditic noble Empress in Rosarium Philosophorum, with wings formed by Berlin’s Victory Tower angel (see Figure 5.3). Against a projection of Bowie’s own Memories, Dreams and Reflections,14 the song culminates in the essential archetypal (and alchemically symbolic) elements that remain: Sun Rain Fire You, Me15 suggesting balanced wholeness in the process of individuation.

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  97 Approaching the Numinous … The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. (C.G. Jung in Stein 2014) … The one continuum [on Outside] that is throughout my writing is a real simple, spiritual search … and everything I’ve written is about “Who is my God? How does he show himself? What is my higher stage, my higher being?” (Bowie in Ill, 1997) Undoubtedly Bowie’s complex multilayered and conflicted relationship with spirituality, meaning and existence has been a pervasive theme in his creativity and a lifelong work in progress. In the mid-nineties Bowie claimed that: … there’s no doubting for me [spirituality has] been a recurrent qualification of my work from the day I started writing. A very early example, I suppose, is Space Oddity. A more obvious example would be Word On A Wing, More recently, the underlying thread of Black Tie White Noise tried to unify a sort of passion and the spiritual font from which it flowed: the wedding thing. (Bowie in Hollywood On Line, 1996) Eight years later he would affirm this sentiment: … I honestly believe that my initial questions haven’t changed at all. There are far fewer of them these days but they are really important. Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It’s because I’m not quite an atheist and it worries me. There’s that little bit that holds on … (DeCurtis, 2005) Cast in this light, Bowie’s iconic and recurring space imagery can legitimately be understood as new spiritual metaphors for age-old themes of alienation and enlightenment, archetypes of pilgrimage, tension and search, as above, so below; outer space as inner space; his cosmology of stars, suns and serious moonlight infused with rich layers of symbolism and contemporary re-imaginings of old mythologies. Yet Bowie’s work has always had overt and cryptic markers of a spiritual seeker, his grappling with the Numinous manifesting in riddlesome twists across half a century. Torn between the light and dark cornucopia of esoterica in ‘Quicksand’ (1971), Bowie prayed in ‘Loving the Alien’ (1984), descended into Dante’s Inferno in ‘The Width of a Circle’ (1970),

98  Tanja Stark implored the suicidal to believe in ‘Jump They Say’ (1993), counseled to “seek only peace” on ‘Sunday’ (2002), was “at odds with the Bible” on ‘Bus Stop’ (1989), pleaded to a silent God in ‘I Would Be Your Slave’ (2002), seemed paranoid at the alliance between Church and State in ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ (1997) and iconoclastically railed at corrupt Catholicism in ‘The Next Day’ (2013). Song after song speaks of faith and despair referencing a pantheon of theologies from Kabbalah, Buddhism and Theosophy to Pentecostalism and paganism, woven together in an intensely consuming and tangled mix of spirit and flesh. Bowie was indeed ‘writing out his problems’ with the Numinous, processing these psycho-spiritual questions through music. On writing Heathen, Bowie would reflect: … I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music. I wanted to bring about a personal cultural restoration, using everything I knew without returning to the past. I wanted to feel the weight and depth of the years. All my experiences, all the questions, all the fear, all the spiritual isolation … (Bowie in Livewire, 2002) Later he quipped “… Tibetan Buddhism appealed to me at that time. I thought, ‘There’s salvation.’ It didn’t really work. Then I went through Nietzsche, Satanism, Christianity … pottery, and ended up singing. It’s been a long road” (Bowie on ‘Ellen’, 2004). Yet there has always been an enduring, pervasive interest with the psychology of mind and spirit percolating around gnostic, alchemic and hermetic concepts that so interested Jung. Speaking around Earthling, Bowie expressed the centrality of his drive to integrate opposites and find spiritual balance in the face of death: … [there is] this abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism or a kind of Gnosticism. I keep going backwards and forwards between the two things, because they mean a lot in my life … I have no empathy with any organised religions. What I need is to find a balance, spiritually, with the way I live and my demise. And that period of time from today until my demise is the only thing that fascinates me. (Cavanagh, 1997: 52) Bowie knew from experience how dangerous imbalance can be. Like Mr. Newton watching a wall of televisions in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bowie’s highly sensitive antennae perpetually tuned to the zeitgeist could leave him perilously vulnerable to the destabilizing energies of the unconscious. When an emaciated, fragile Bowie empathized with a fly drowning in milk, “… That’s kind of how I felt—a

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  99 foreign body and I couldn’t help but soak it up, you know” (Cracked Actor, BBC Films, 1975), it was a vivid analogy of the visionary artist’s bittersweet gift that would bring him precariously close to the edge in a pivotal period marked by apparent psychotic implosion around the Station to Station years. His rational psyche subsumed by the dopaminergic excess of cocaine abuse and unbounded esoteric spiritual and occult obsessions, Bowie would reflect, “I was out of my mind, totally crazed. The main thing I was functioning on was mythology” (Sandford, 1996: 158). This unrestrained acquiescence to the unconscious allowed the Shadow to overwhelm in the persona of the Thin White Duke with all his mytho-aryan hubris and was a toxic mix to his disintegrated and vulnerable psyche. So while the creative expression of this period is imbued with powerful archetypal energies exploring polarities of the eternal and the ephemeral, the shadow merger destructively subverted this into psychologically dark and dangerous territory, a risk, as discussed earlier, Jung knew faced all visionary artists. Yet within those depths a numinous light also emerged. “A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps …” wrote Jung (1968: 123), an admonishment Bowie appeared to manifest in ‘Word on a Wing’ (1975) “… and I don’t stand in my own light, Lord, Lord, my prayer flies like a word on a wing / And I’m trying hard to fit among your scheme of things …”. The song spoke of a glowing vision flowing from the unconscious into his ­conscious life. That this was a profoundly numinous experience for Bowie, a ­spiritually ­enantriodromic counterpoint to the darkness, functioning as a ­psychological salvation can be seen in a significant interview he gave four years later: Word On A Wing I can’t talk about. There were days of such psychological terror when making [The Man who fell to Earth] that I nearly started to approach my reborn, born again thing. It was the first time I’d really seriously thought about Christ and God in any depth and Word On A Wing was a protection. It did come as a complete revolt … The passion in the song was genuine. It was also around that time that I started thinking about wearing this (fingers small silver cross hanging on his chest) again … now almost a leftover from that period … But at the time I really needed this. Hmmm (laughs), we’re getting into heavy waters … but yes, the song was something I needed to produce from within myself to safeguard myself against some of the situations that I felt were happening … (MacKinnon, 1980) So while profound numinous experiences can be genuinely transformational, Jung was aware the intensity of the process ran the risk of sending the psyche spinning wildly between polarities from dark to light, and the

100  Tanja Stark important work of balanced integration and individuation must continue (Stein, 2006). Interestingly, at the time of the interview Bowie was promoting Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980), an album profoundly cognizant of this tension between disintegrated polarities and the powerful, often frighteningly dark energies of the unconscious. ‘Ashes to Ashes’, together with its earlier, and according to Bowie, spiritually themed counterpart ‘Space Oddity’, provides a graphic illustration of this concept. Strung out in Heavens High “I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the Earth bathed in a gloriously blue light … and I myself was floating in space”, Jung (1967: 289) wrote of a numinous vision during a near death experience. Paralleling Major Tom in ‘Space Oddity’, “… here am I sitting in my tin can, far above the world, planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do”, the synchronistic imagery again suggests archetypal convergence. But if Bowie’s psychonaut16 seems blissful, it is because he is oblivious he has lost touch with ground control, drifting into space severed from sustaining realities, at the mercy of the unconscious. Vulnerable to the chaos that will emerge in ‘Ashes to Ashes’, ‘Space Oddity’ is a deeply symbolic song that elicits primal recognition of personal and collective anxieties around fracture and disintegration, with Major Tom symbolically personifying the split between the celestial and terrestrial, spirit and flesh, sanity and psychosis, and society’s increasing disconnection both from the sacred and the grounding of the Earth. The psychic tension around the integration of opposites becomes extreme in ‘Ashes to Ashes’, giving creative form to Jung’s prophetic tone: You yourself are a conflict that rages in and against itself in order to melt its incompatible substances. … in the fire of suffering … crucified between the opposites and delivered up to the torture until the reconciling third takes shape. (Jung, 1992: 375) With a title echoing the Christian funeral rite and the alchemic process of calcination (the reduction of a substance by heat or fire to ashes) signaling its metaphorically spiritual tenor, Major Tom has awoken to the mental torture of psycho-spiritual alienation. ‘Strung out in heavens high hitting an all-time low’, between harsh externalities and internal complexities, medieval mystic St John’s Dark Night of the Soul manifested in the shrieking silence of space. The lyrics despair at relativist, biological determinism and impotent polarity—‘I’ve never done good things, I’ve never done bad things, I’ve never done anything out of the blue’—while the beloved anima/wife of ‘Space Oddity’ has become a scolding Mother archetype. Screaming for an

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  101 axe to break through this nihilistic, frigid space he begs for the grounding of Earth, despite ‘little green’ demons waiting there too. The film clip shows Bowie in several guises. A hypnotic whiteface clown, an archetypal Trickster perhaps, wades in the sea of the unconscious (recalling Jung’s raging sea in ‘Drive-In Saturday’) later flanked by religious figures, as a bulldozer, a symbol of industrial progress, threatens to crush numinous ritual into the ashes of modernity. Later he is an alien(ated) man suspended and entangled in a mass of twisted organic fibres and tubes resembling an alien brain, then a Madman alone in a padded room. A terrifying psychotic convergence, Major Tom has become conscious of the powers of the unconscious and the horrors of the shadow within him and society, strung out between opposing polarities, both prophet and victim, desperately seeking psychological reconciliation. As Jung wrote: … full parity of the opposites … leads to a suspension of the will, for the will can no longer operate when every motive has an equally strong counter motive. Since life cannot tolerate a standstill, a damming up of vital energy results, and this would lead to an unsupportable condition did not the tension of opposites produce a new, uniting function that transcends them. (Jung, 1971: 824) The symbols of psychic tension emerge in Jung’s Red Book visions, suggesting primal resonance of an archetypal imagery around (dis)integration. Yet in Jung we see the emergence of the transcendent function that is borne from the struggle. Crucified between opposites, in the Nox Toxtia vision (Jung, 2009: 300) Jung describes being frighteningly strung out between heavens high and the low earth, conjoined between blazing fires. But unlike Major Tom terrifyingly adrift, Jung remained simultaneously rooted in the earth and hooked upon the sky seeking balanced integration of the polarized Self. Later hanging in the Tree of Life17 tormented by the devil during the agonizing process of reconciling opposites, Jung (2009: 324–325) holds this tension until transformational, transcendent unity emerges. It is tempting to imagine Jung prefigured Major Tom when writing of a man “… uprooted and hovering above earth, succumbing to exaggeration and irreality”(sic), driven insane as a result of being possessed by nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts without grounding in real life”. Instead it was Frederick Nietzsche, another influential figure in Bowie’s writing (Jung, 1967: 189). Lacerating Entangled Brains Allusions to tortured, entangled psyches consistently permeate Bowie’s albums, the tension between the cerebral and the visceral belying an enduring underlying anxiety around the trauma experienced by his immediate

102  Tanja Stark family and his own existential questions. There is an unforgettable apex in Bowie’s dark anthemic ballad, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ (1972) where he cries “All the knives seem to lacerate your brain, I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain … you’re not alone”. It’s a moment of empathy that promises deliverance from the agony of internal torture. Decades later we hear this anguish again: In red-eyed pain I’m knocking on your door again, my crazy brain in tangles pleading for your gentle voice, those storms keep pounding through my head and heart, I pray you’ll soothe my sorry soul. (‘Days’, 2002) Indeed over two dozen songs contain a specific reference to the brain or mind, often hostile, fragmented and associated with violence and destruction— something Jung would describe as a strong (and justifiable) complex. In his own practice Jung believed word association tests could help identify the presence of complexes with pauses and inflections indicating emotionally charged words with which issues were associated (Petchkovsky et al., 2013). During an interview around Never Let Me Down Jools Holland once co-opted Bowie into an impromptu word association test (Holland, 1987). “Cor, bloody hell, who you bringing on this, Jung? Ha ha Jung! C. G. Jung!” Bowie laughingly replied, revealing his familiarity with this concept. Deliberately or not, in this lighthearted exchange Bowie smoothly responded to all words offered, with two exceptions: ‘USA’, to which he paused and said “chasm”, and “David Bowie” followed by a long pause to which he responded “… lost”. Subterranean Labyrinths and the Chthonic Underground Jung’s own cerebral anxiety emerges in a Red Book vision where he describes himself entangled in a strange twisted mass of organic roots and fibres he realises is his own brain (recalling the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ image of Bowie suspended in an organic brain-like cave). Met by gnomelike Cabiri from the subterranean depths, Jung is presented with a ‘­Flashing Sword’ they have forged to lacerate his brain and sever him from the ­ entrapment, but he rails against their suicidal instruction. Yet the Cabiri,  who are also part of this entanglement insist on this ­destruction. Finally slicing through his brain, Jung gains balance and self-mastery ­submitting his analytical mind to the creative wisdom of the depths (Jung, 2009: 314). The mythological spirits of the subterranean Underworld held great symbolism for Jung, embodying the fertile juices of the Unconsciousness with their capacity for wisdom; and he cautioned against dismissing them

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  103 lightly. It is significant in this context that across the years Bowie creatively manifested his own subterranean creatures of the underworld, “hanging out with your dwarf men” on the mysterious ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ (1971), and “gnomes” and “dwarves” on the free association lyrics of ‘Little Wonder’ (1997). The following examples poignantly illustrate Jung’s observations and reflect once again a central Bowie narrative. Instinctually theatrical, Bowie’s expression of subliminal energies was not bounded by the intellectual self-constraint of Jung and his earliest creative work reveals a foreboding aspect around the unbounded Unconscious, ironically illustrated in his own Cabiri-esque encounter from the underworld in 1967’s whimsical ‘The Laughing Gnome’. Followed home by a gnome, the narrator feeds and sends him off, only for him to weirdly reappear later with a doppelganger.18 Co-opting these twins’ fertile creativity for financial gain, the young protagonist seems oblivious to the potentially subversive energies of unrestrained Unconscious invasion and his ability to sanely coexist with these uninvited entities now infesting his chimneystack19 (a now blocked interior vent) who taunt him “… hee hee hee, I’m the laughing gnome, you can’t catch me” about their slippery ungraspable nature. Jung was not so naïve: … when one analyses [sic] the psychology of a neurosis one discovers a complex, a content of the unconscious, that does not behave as other contents do, coming or going at our command but obeys its own laws, in other words it is independent or as we say, autonomous. It behaves exactly like a goblin that is always eluding our grasp. (Jung in Diamond, 1999: 100) In contrast, when Bowie portrayed the dark yet beguiling Goblin King in the movie Labyrinth (1986)—an archetypal quest into the shadowy depths of the Unconscious—it’s dangers were palpably and seductively clear. The film clip to Bowie’s soundtrack Underground (1986) is a classic Nekyia tale, its gospel sounding “Daddy, Daddy, get me out of here” mirroring Christ’s “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, while, “wanna live underground” reveals the temptation to remain in this subterranean world underlying reality. Significantly, the way out of this movie labyrinth lay in consciously confronting the shadow, rather than being hypnotically subsumed by its dark goblin energy. It was a journey Jung understood intrinsically, prefiguring this archetypal movie writing of his Red Book visions: … in order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me “underground” I knew I had to let myself plummet down into them … only by extreme effort was I finally able to escape from the labyrinth. (Jung, 1967: 178)

104  Tanja Stark Flashing Swords and Bowie Knives Conceptually speaking, if Jung’s Cabiri are a symbolic personification of chthonic forces of the Unconscious paralleling Jung’s vision, perhaps these same fertile energies that gave David Jones his imagination and mental entanglements also provided him with his own ‘Flashing Sword’ in the form of a ‘Bowie’ knife, a creative identity allowing both engagement and expression of the unconscious and the ability to destroy his psychological ‘brain’ entanglements through art. This metaphorical convergence becomes all the more intriguing as research suggests the ‘Flashing Sword’ handed to Jung by the visionary Cabiri is actually an obscure Kabbalah concept associated with the Mezla Lightning Flash of Creation that zigzags from station to station of the mystic Tree of Life (Stavish, 2007: 91) conjuring a multitude of associations with Bowie, from Aladdin Sane’s iconic ‘zigzag’ Lightning Flash (on the album that cites Jung) to Bowie’s drawing of the Tree of Life on the back cover of Station to Station. In this vein, the surrealist invocation ‘Zane Zane Zane’ on both All the Madmen (1970) and Buddha of Suburbia (1993) is likely a reference to the Sword of Zain associated with unity, duality, sol/luna and heiros gamos (Web of Qabalah, 2014). These cryptic links again recall Michelangelo’s archetypal painting Creation of Adam and its convergence, according to Blech and Doliner (2008), with mystic Kabbalah, science and consciousness and the visionary links described in this paper, between Bowie’s ‘Jung’ songs and the Sylvian fissure.20 Keeping with the visionary ‘flashing sword’/Bowie knife metaphor, shades of the subterranean Cabiric wisdom to destroy the intellectually entangled brain to enable creative and spiritual liberation are found in Seven Years in Tibet (1997) with its lyrics that sing of a mystic spirituality facilitated by the violent destruction of the conscious brain: “Are you Ok, you’ve been shot in the head and I’m holding your brains the old woman said … I praise to you Nothing ever goes away”.21 Indeed, after the years of struggle, 1999’s Hours … album similarly stands out in Bowie’s oeuvre as reflecting Jungian ideas of balance, portraying a tangible equanimity in its reverie that speaks so often of the unconscious dream world: ‘Something in the Air’, ‘If I’m Dreaming My Life’, ‘Seven’, ‘New Angels of Promise’, ‘The Dreamers’. Even the album’s interior artwork contains a ‘mandala’ of unified duality, a balanced circular image Jung felt symbolic of the Self (Jung, 1967: 196), lying between the cover iconography of an ethereal mythopoeic Bowie cradling his Earthling self, and on the reverse, a dark Shadow trinity, black serpent at their feet, beginning to break down. Laden with spiritual symbolism around the cosmic interactions of light and dark, its imagery recalls Jung’s archetypal release from the crushing grip of a black serpent in the Red Book (Jung, 2009: 251). Would that it were always so poetically balanced. In contrast to ‘Where Are We Now?’ and its Jungian themes of the integrated Self which heralded Bowie’s return in 2013, the final song on The Next Day album is the

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  105 spiritually tormented and ‘disintegrated’ Möbius strip of ‘Heat’, a song seemingly wrestling again with the gnostic prison of matter, mystic perception, prescience, (self) deception and identity: “… My father ran the prison, I can only love you by hating him more, That’s not the truth … And I tell myself, I don’t know who I am … But I am a seer, I am a liar” (‘Heat’, 2013). Entangled in another psyche twisting ‘hellish’ knot, imprisoned between polarities, the song echoes themes explored throughout this chapter—Bowie’s complex spiritual relationship with the Numinous, the Shadow, Persona, and the Self. And, as if to underline his enduring dance with the mysterious force of the Unconscious, Bowie opens the song drawing from Mishima’s novel Spring Snow, “Then we saw Mishima’s dog, trapped between the rocks … The

Figure 5.4   Artwork and image by Tanja Stark.

106  Tanja Stark peacock in the snow”, a novel that sees the protagonist wrestling with prophetic dreams, omens and the specter of Unconscious invasion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the passage this lyric draws from—“… he saw a flock of peacocks settle suddenly on the snow … ‘I’m too involved in my dream-world’, he thought … ‘They’ve spilled over into reality, they’re a flood that’s sweeping me away’” (Mishima, 2010: 149)—has deep echoes of Jung’s description of his ­overwhelming flood of Red Book visions “… that burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me” (Jung, 2009: backcover) that Bowie had sung of forty years earlier. The Last of the Dreamers This chapter explores the relationship between David Bowie, Carl Jung and the Unconscious, revealing a compelling connection evident in the way Bowie has been spontaneously and deliberately expressing, articulating and synthesizing Jungian ideas and archetypes throughout his career. Jung’s ideas appear to have resonated strongly with Bowie as he creatively processed the complex world of the psyche exploring numinous dimensions, and wrestling with tension, conflict and paradox through archetype and caricature, metaphor and myth. Encapsulating Jung’s idea of a Visionary Artist, Bowie’s creative expression appears to have drawn intensely from the Unconscious in creating his own metaphorical ‘space’ cosmology in music that infuses modern anxieties with ancient and contemporary symbolism. In manifesting these archetypal themes, from the Shadow, the Anima/Animus, the Persona and the Self, with the tension between opposites, Bowie’s art reflects a raw struggle for authenticity in the process of individuation. While this has often come at great cost to his own psyche, throughout the process his work has evoked primal motifs that resonate deeply with his audience, consciously and instinctually. Jung implored individuals to ‘find your myth’. David Jones searched for his and not only found one, he creatively embodied it for our time. Notes 1. The metaphysical, sacred, spiritual and/or transcendent dimension. See Stein (2006). 2. Celestial and Chthonic: the heavens and the underworld; Sarx and Pneuma (Greek): flesh (matter) and spirit. 3. “My soul flies erratically on the wings of what I would imagine is a feeble bipolarism ... something akin to that brushes past me ...” (Bowie in Livewire, 2002). 4.  Perhaps, it was not Bowie who created Major Tom, but Major Tom who created Bowie. 5.  Gnosis: Greek for knowledge, associated with the revelation of hidden wisdom and mystery.

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  107 6.  From the original French interview that appeared in La Figaro. 7.  Electromagnetic stimulation of the left temporo-parietal junction of a patient with epilepsy caused an effect similar to the doppelgänger phenomenon. 8.  Despite Bowie’s stated discomfort with this term, his record company released a compilation album entitled Chameleon in 1979. 9.  Jung believed word association tests could indicate the presence of complexes; pauses and inflections hinting at words with which they were associated (­Petchkovsky et al., 2013). 10. An early reference to the Jungian Shadow archetype that ironically converges with the 2006 neuroscience paper “Induction of an illusionary Shadow Person” suggesting stimulation around the Sylvian fissure could produce a doppelganger effect. 11. Human/animal metamorphosis or shapeshifting, associated in mythology and folklore with magical powers and often dark, possessing energies, i.e. werewolves. 12. A surprising name given Bowie’s (and Jung’s) overt interest in Gnosticism. Valentinius was a Gnostic teacher from Alexandria, the name of Bowie’s ­ ­daughter. 13.  Jung speaks of his concept of Anima as a renaming of what poet Carl Spitteler termed “his Lady Soul”. 14. ‘Memories, Dreams and Reflections’: Jung’s semi-autobiography. 15.  ‘Psychonaut’: a sailor of the mind (Blom, 2010: 434). 16.  The Tree of Life: a Kabbalah concept Bowie draws on the cover of Station to Station (1976). 17. Sylvian fissure stimulation, again converging neurobiology with mystic ­phenomenon. 18.  Perhaps foreshadowing of a darker chimney-phile, the reptilian, narcissistic ‘The Jean Genie’ (1972). 19.  In Jungian psychology, the emergence of a Wise Old Woman archetype speaks of late stage individuation, the film clip incorporating Minotaur (shadow), ­Kirlian photograph of his cross (energy and transcendence), and Buddhist (equanimity) symbols.

References Arzy, Shahar, Margitta Seeck, Stephanie Ortigue, Laurent Spinelli, and Olaf Blanke. “Induction of an Illusory Shadow Person.” Nature 443 (2006): 287. Ball, Norm. Red Book Red Sail. January 2013. http://redbookredsail.wordpress. com/ (accessed 10 February 2014). Blech, Benjamin and Roy Doliner. The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008. Blom, Jan Dirk. A Dictionary of Hallucinations. New York: Springer, 2010. Bowie, David. “Heat”. The Next Day. ISO/Columbia, 2013. Bowie, David. “I went to buy some shoes and I came back with Life On Mars”, Daily Mail UK, 28 June 2008. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1030121/ DAVID-BOWIE-I-went-buy-shoes--I-came-Life-On-Mars.html#ixzz2d9nRs8cl (accessed 10 February 2014).

108  Tanja Stark Bowie, David. TV Interview by Ellen DeGeneres. Ellen, NBC TV, 2004. Bowie, David. “Days”. Heathen. ISO Records, 2002. Bowie, David. “Rock’s Heathen Speaks”. Interview by ConcertLiveWire, 16 June 2002. http://www.concertlivewire.com/interviews/bowie.htm (accessed 10 ­February 2014). Bowie, David. “Shadow Man”, Unreleased bootleg demo 1971, re-recorded ­Heathen. ISO Records, 2002. Bowie, David. “Sex and the Church”. The Buddha of Suburbia Soundtrack. Virgin/ EMI, 1993. Bowie, David. TV Interview by Jools Holland. The Tube, April 1987. http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=_R0XlLydNS8 (accessed 10 February 2014). Bowie, David. TV Interview by Dinah Shore. Dinah! CBS TV, February 1976. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvftdfvh2w4 (accessed 10 February 2014). Bowie, David. “Time”. Aladdin Sane. RCA, 1973. Bowie, David. “Drive-In Saturday”. Hunky Dory. RCA, 1973. Bowie, David. “Oh! You Pretty Things”. Hunky Dory. RCA, 1973. Bowie, David. “The Bewlay Brothers”. Hunky Dory. RCA, 1971. Bowie, David. “The Man Who Sold the World”. The Man Who Sold the World. Mercury Records, 1970. Bowie, David. “The Width of a Circle”. The Man Who Sold the World. Mercury Records, 1970. Bowie, David. “When I live My Dream”. David Bowie. Deram, 1967. Burroughs, William. Queer. New York: Penguin, 1985. Cavanagh, David. “ChangesFiftyBowie”. Q Magazine, February 1997, 52–59. http://www.bowiewonderworld.com/press/press90.htm#000297 (accessed 10 February 2014). Corbett, Sara. “Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious”. New York Times, 16 September 2009, MM34. Cracked Actor. Directed by Alan Yentob. 1975. Omnibus Productions. London: BBC. DeCurtis, Anthony. “I’m not quite an Atheist and it Worries Me”, Beliefnet.com, July 2005. http://www.beliefnet.com/Entertainment/2005/07/Im-Not-Quite-­An-­AtheistAnd-It-Worries-Me.aspx (accessed 10 February 2014). Diamond, Stephen. “Reading the Red Book—How C.G. Jung Salvaged his Soul”. Psychology Today, 25 February 2011. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ evil-deeds/201102/reading-the-red-book-how-cg-jung-salvagd-his-soul (accessed 10 February 2014). Diamond, Stephen. Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity. New York: State University of New York Press, 1999. Doggett, Peter. The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s. London: Random House, 2011. Duponchelle, Valerie. “David Bowie: les secrets du clip surprise de Tony Oursler”. Le Figaro, 10 January 2013. http://www.lefigaro.fr/musique/2013/01/10/0300620130110ARTFIG00447-david-bowie-les-secrets-du-clip-surprise-de-tony-oursler. php (accessed 10 February 2014). Froese, Tom, Alexander Woodward, and Takeshi Ikegami. “Turing instabilities in biology, culture, and consciousness? On the enactive origins of symbolic material culture”. Adaptive Behavior 21 (3, 2013): 199–214. http://froese.files.

‘Crashing Out with Sylvian’  109 wordpress.com/2013/06/froese-et-al-13-turing-instabilities-in-biology-culture-andconsciousness-on-the-enactive-origins-of-symbolic-material-culture.pdf (accessed 10 February 2014). Hobbs, Marianne. “ChangesNowBowie”. BBC Radio 1, 8 January 1997. Transcribed by G. Wallace in TeenageWildlife.com. http://www.teenagewildlife.com/ Appearances/Radio/1997/0108/radio1-transcript.html (accessed 10 February 2014). Hollywood Online. “David Bowie Live!”. Hollywood Online, 1996. http://www. bowiewonderworld.com/chats/dbchat0794.htm (accessed 22 December 2014). Ill, Paul. “The search starts with a simple abundance of enthusiasm”, Music Paper, March 1997. http://www.algonet.se/~bassman/articles/97/mp.html (accessed 10 February 2014). Jones, Allan. “Goodbye to Ziggy and All That”. Melody Maker, 29 October 1977. http://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/articles/771029-melodymaker.html (accessed 10 February 2014). Jung, Carl Gustav. “On the importance of the unconscious in psychopathology”. Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Vol. 3. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972. Jung, Carl Gustav. “Psychological Types”. Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Vol. 6. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971. Jung, Carl Gustav. “Archetypes of the collective unconscious”. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9. Part 1. 2nd ed. Princeton University Press, 1968. Jung, Carl Gustav. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Random House, 1967. Jung, Carl Gustav. “Alchemical Studies”. Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Translated by Richard Francis Carrington Hull. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967. Jung, Carl Gustav. Collected works of C. G. Jung. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Jung, Carl Gustav., “Letter to Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, 20 August 1945” in C.G. Jung Letters, Volume 1 by Jung, C.G.; Adler, G. and Jaffé, A., eds.; Hull, R.F.C., trans., Princeton University Press, 1992. Jung, Carl Gustav. “Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy”. Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Vol 14. London: Routledge, 1963. https://archive.org/details/collectedworksof92cgju (accessed 11 November 2013). Jung, Carl Gustav. “Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche”. Collected Works of C. G.Jung Vol. 8. Translated by Richard France Carrington Hull. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. http://michaelsudduth.com/wp-content/ uploads/2013/03/116077287-Collected-Works-of-C-G-Jung-Vol-08-the-Structureand-Dynamics-of-the-Psyche-Syncronicity.pdf (accessed 8August 2014). Jung, Carl Gustav. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1933. (1955 ed.). Jung, Carl Gustav. “The Syzygy: Anima and Animus”. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol 9. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951. http://archive.org/details/ collectedworksof92cgju (accessed 17 December 2013). Jung, Carl Gustav and Sonu Shamdasani, eds. Liber Novus—The Red Book. New York: Philemon Series and W.W. Norton & Co., 2009.

110  Tanja Stark Jung, Carl Gustav and Marie-Louise von Franz. Man and His Symbols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964. MacKinnon, Angus. “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be”. New Music Express, 13 September 1980. http://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/articles/800913-nme.html (accessed 22 December 2014). Matthews, Philip. “Second Sight—Bowie, Jarman and Neutron”. Second Sight, August 2009. http://secondstogo.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/bowie-jarman-and-neutron. html (accessed 10 February 2014). McLean, Adam. “A Commentary on the Rosarium philosophorum—The Rosary of the Philosophers”. The Alchemy Website 1980. http://www.levity.com/alchemy/ roscom.html (accessed 29 November 2013). Meshberger, Frank. Lynn. “An Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy”. Journal of the American Medical Association 264 (October 1990): 1837–41. Mishima, Yukio. Spring Snow. New York: Random House, 2010. Penfield, Wilder and Marshall Faulk Jr. “The insula. Further observations on its function’, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery”. Brain 78 (1955): 445–471. Penman, I. “The Resurrection of Saint Dave”. Esquire Magazine, October, 1995. Petchkovsky, Leon, Michael Petchkovsky, Phillip Morris, Paul Dickson, Danielle Montgomery, Jonathan Dwyer, and Patrick Burnett. “fMRI responses to Jung’s Word Association Test: implications for theory, treatment and research”. Journal of Analytical Psychology 58 (3, 2013): 409. Phoenix, Robert. “In Bowie’s Head—A conversation with the consummate dreamer”. GettingIt.com, Oct 1999. http://www.robertphoenix.com/content/bowie-revisited/ (accessed 10 February 2014). Roberts, Chris. “I’m Hungry for Reality”. Uncut Magazine, October 1999. http:// www.uncut.co.uk/david-bowie/david-bowie-im-hungry-for-reality-part-4-feature (accessed 10 February 2014). Saal, Hubert. “The Stardust Kid”. Newsweek, 9 October 1972. http://www.5years. com/tsk.htm (accessed 26 April 2013). Samuels, Andrew, Bani Shorter, and Fred Plaut. A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis. New York: Routledge, 1986. Sandford, Christopher. Bowie: Loving the Alien. London: Little Brown, 1996. Stavish, Mark. Kabbalah for Health and Wellness. USA: Llewellyn Publications, 2007. Stein, Murray. “On the Importance of Numinous Experience in the Alchemy of Individuation.” MurrayStein.com, 2006. http://www.murraystein.com/articles.shtml (accessed 22 December 2014). Swayne, Karen. “Hello I’m David Bowie and You’re Not”. No.1 Magazine, April 1987. http://www.algonet.se/~bassman/articles/87/no1m.html (accessed 19 November 2013). Van der Post, Laurens. Jung and the story of our time. New York: Vintage Books, 1976. Web of Qabalah Website. “The Path of Zain”. 2013. http://www.webofqabalah. com/id42.html (accessed 10 February 2014).

6 Dear Dr. Freud—David Bowie Hits the Couch A psychoanalytic approach to some of his personae Ana Leorne Introduction In this chapter, I explore the implications of David Bowie’s creation of alteregos, from messiah rock star Ziggy Stardust to the Nietzsche influenced Thin White Duke, analysing them through the lens of some of the most prominent psychoanalytic theories, including the Freudian theory of perversions, the psychoanalytical duality of ‘Eros’ and ‘Thanatos’ as the two basic drives of an individual’s personality, and Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’ which emphasises its importance in the development of the Self. By seeking a better understanding of each of Bowie’s personae, I intend to emphasise their importance in David Bowie’s career and connect them with Bowie’s need for creating a mechanism of self-defence that would allow him to forge a successful path and become a highly influential artist. I argue that these personae were absolutely necessary for him to express himself the way he did, working as a tool of the Self during the first half of the 1970s. Freud and the Theory of Perversions In Cinq Leçons Sur la Psychanalyse, Freud talks about the psychoanalytic theory of perversions as first appearing during an individual’s childhood, arguing that “all humans are innately perverse” (Freud, 2001: 57) and that these so-called perversions simply evolve throughout life. He also speaks about the two basic drives that control an individual’s behaviour towards life: Eros (life) and Thanatos1 (the death drive). According to Freud, everything we do throughout our life is based on the principle of desire and the subsequent need of fulfilling that same desire; the several combinations between these two main drives originate our objects of desire, and our instinct is to pursue them in order to obtain full pleasure. When the subject is unable to cope with his/her drives and therefore denies their existence, they are pushed into the subconscious where sooner or later they surface as a neurosis. This occurs when a drive which is not accepted by the Super-Ego channels itself through some other form. The positive way of coping with a socially non-accepted perversion is expressing it through Art—and that is the basic Freudian explanation for so many hidden meanings in masterpieces.

112  Ana Leorne When it comes to applying such ideas to David Bowie, it might be argued that a strange combination of Eros and Thanatos is observable not only in his music, but also in the creation of the multiple personae that he uses as filters to the outside world, allowing him to cope with people and/or situations without having to fully expose himself. These personae are not only different in their core, but also contain distinct mixtures—if one can metaphorically address it as a chemical compound—of the basic drives of Life and Death, resulting in a more or less poisonous cape or cover for the individual. The comfort of not having to expose either himself or his basic instincts of desire, which he does by assuming a different artistic identity that may work in its core as an object of transference for his Id, is achieved indirectly. As a result it is highly questionable if the impulses transformed through sublimation are his own or some others that surfaced while he was creating his alter egos (e.g., Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, Thin White Duke, and even minor characters like Cracked Actor or Halloween Jack). So the question this chapter seeks to address is if the unavoidable psychological exhaustion that comes with the constant changing of identity (i.e., with the adoption of different personae) is worth this over-saturation of Bowie’s Ego (that overdoes his work of balancing the Id and the Super-Ego)2, or if the purging process he designed for himself has been strictly followed step by step, and we are the ones underestimating the power of a carefully built Ego when operating in its fullness. Either way, we can observe each of the three Bowie personae presented in this chapter (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and Thin White Duke) as a unique combination of Eros and Thanatos, of Life and Death. Each one represents a different view of Freud’s theory of perversions,3 and the way these are coped with through the process of creation; the childhood rule of egotism, self-centring and desire of mastery is illustrated by Ziggy’s wish of immortality as a Rock ‘n’ Roll Messiah, while Aladdin Sane’s Fort-Da game showed an unexpected ending with obvious consequences,4 and the Über-Controlling Thin White Duke played the icy Führer while writing a passionate letter to Europe. The path made by Bowie between 1972 and 1976 would be enough to fascinate a room full of psychoanalysts. Here we only take a look at its most prominent aspects, seeking a deeper understanding of how they evolved throughout Bowie’s career, and how much they influenced it on both artistic and personal levels. Ziggy Stardust and the Dorian Gray Syndrome David was 30 this year [1977]. It’s significant, he feels no resentment now of the passing time: in his early 20s, he reflects, the very thought of growing older appalled him (it was an horrendous thought). Now he accepts with equanimity the responsibilities of maturity, and even the eventuality of death. (Jones, 1977)

Dear Dr. Freud—David Bowie Hits the Couch   113 The idea of a surviving image of oneself, permanently young, capable and talented, is the central idea of Oscar Wilde’s story ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (1891). Traces of what is now commonly termed the Dorian Gray syndrome5—the desire to outdo ageing and death—can be observed in the Radio City Music Hall show Bowie gave as Ziggy Stardust, on 14 February 1973, when David collapsed on the floor, exhausted. As Jones points out, “Mike Garson abandoned his piano and rushed towards him. In the audience, all was confusion. A nurse appeared on stage. Bowie’s clothes were loosened, his feet were lifted from the ground” (Thompson, 1987: 71). The grand scenario prepared for Ziggy’s death at the Hammersmith Odeon actually felt a bit like the opposite; somehow it seemed that it was the man himself that had actually ‘died’ and not the mask. The obsession with youth and immortality was a constant in Bowie’s early career, and the fact that he himself gave up a part of his own life—his personal side—to be immortalised through Art (his own), makes him the perfect example of someone affected by Dorian Gray syndrome as he was seeking, in his own way, immortality. But while the regular patient experiences an alienation from the self in this process, Bowie’s relationship with Ziggy was much more ‘conscious’. Ziggy Stardust was constructed in a full conscious level leading to approaching each aspect of the fragmentation carefully in order to absorb it as a whole, instead of dealing with it as a mere projectional mirror of his own drives. Of course, Bowie eventually lost control of Ziggy, mostly due to heavy pressure from the media and the fans in general to ‘be’ Ziggy Stardust (instead of simply playing the role). In the Alan Yentob BBC documentary Cracked Actor, Bowie talks about this obsession and declares that even years after having “killed” the character, it still haunted him. The basic concept on which Ziggy’s persona was built may be explained in relatively simple terms. As Bowie biographer Peter Doggett puts it, the whole idea was based on the conceptual statement that, instead of “pursuing fame, as he had in the past, Bowie would act as if he was already famous beyond dispute” (Doggett, 2011: 3). This is very much connected to Danto’s theory of the Artworld that addresses the institutional definition of Art by contextualising it socially, and therefore passing an object of Art as ‘true’ or ‘valid’ when it is integrated in the above-mentioned complex socio-cultural system. But Ziggy wasn’t proclaimed by anyone else other than Bowie, making it oddly more ‘valid’ by the simple fact that it/he couldn’t be questioned as an idea. There was no one to be questioned about it but the persona itself. And so the illusion begins, an outer-space creature that could become anything and nothing, an apparent blank canvas that lasted for about twelve months and took Bowie to the limits of his own psyche by becoming less and less unable to ‘undress’ Ziggy whenever he wanted to do so. This can be seen as especially dangerous if we consider that Ziggy carried a great Death driving force within his own nature (i.e., a self-destruction instinct that led to his implosion at the Hammersmith Odeon), and that same force was

114  Ana Leorne threatening to become superior to its instinct of creation, which was the primary goal for the ‘invention’ of Ziggy. This way we can observe the balance between Eros and Thanatos within Ziggy becoming less and less positive as the persona took over the individual. As Bowie explained during an interview to Rolling Stone in 1974, Ziggy started, to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starman. He takes himself up to incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song ‘Rock ‘n’ roll suicide’. (Bowie cited in Copetas, 1974) Semi-prophet and semi-god, Ziggy tells his own story with the assertiveness of someone who’s studied it very carefully before, whither he was only rehearsing for the people that would come to hear him or simply reassuring himself of his own role in these last five years of the Earth. Whatever the case, Ziggy’s narrative is very similar to a patient who has been through several hours of psychoanalytic therapy and has been asked how it felt to be the definite answer to the kids’ growing thirst of a replacement for Rock ’n’ Roll, i.e., of a new, cutting-edge approach to music. On the other hand, Ziggy’s passion for fatality towards his own music is highly superficial. The true sharing comes when Ziggy sacrifices himself to “make the Infinites real” (as he himself explains during the 1974 Copetas Rolling Stone interview), turning him into another person from Oscar Wilde’s writing—this time the ‘Happy Prince’ (1888). The only valuable gold is that which is used to enrich others; this concept can be seen as a metaphor to Bowie’s ability to put a part of himself—or his alter ego—in his performances, while his Ego was symbiotically fed by the sharing of his artistic essence with others. And eventually, the unavoidable happens. Unable to cope with its existence anymore, Bowie kills the persona with whom he created a whole world—not to say ‘universe’, speaking Ziggy’s language—the centre of a concept that put him on the map of twentieth-century music idols. But is the need for change the only valuable reason for Bowie having ‘given up’ on Ziggy? One can say that it was neither the pressure of the character nor the unsettlement he felt towards his Art that led Bowie to kill Ziggy Stardust that night on the Odeon stage. Probably it was simply because Ziggy had served its/his purpose, it had brought Bowie the acknowledgement he had been looking for since the release of his single ‘The Laughing Gnome’ in 1967 thereby working more as a tool than as a mask.6 David Bowie eventually threw Ziggy Stardust away, getting rid of what was now past and had only served as a bridge to the next phase.

Dear Dr. Freud—David Bowie Hits the Couch   115 The Fertility of Aladdin Sane If Ziggy was cool and cocky, Aladdin was jittery and paranoid. [...] Aladdin Sane is peopled with degenerates, whores, druggies and masturbators. Schizophrenic again, Bowie made it all a little bit Dada and a little bit panto. The image was Ziggy still, only louder, faster, bigger, louder. (Roberts, 2003: 64) The rough delicacy of the Aladdin Sane period is, paradoxically, heavily European (i.e., much more related to experimental jazz in ballads like the title track, and relying on a more visceral approach to Glam Rock than R&B-based Rock ’n’ Roll itself), given that this period is often referred to as “Ziggy Goes to America” (Bowie called it so himself when talking to ­broadcaster and writer Paul Gambaccini during his BBC Radio program The David Bowie Story, first aired in 1993). Best seen perhaps as more an evolution of Ziggy than a new persona itself, Aladdin Sane reflects ­Bowie’s ease with receiving praise for his idol status and a self-centredness that would lead to higher horizons fuelled by new, more or less toxic experiences. This was to be a period of excesses before falling into the strictness of the Thin White Duke who was to follow Aladdin Sane. Everything was an ­experiment during this period and the assertiveness with which Bowie ­presented ­himself now was often confused with egotism and ‘quick-­stardom’ fever (in his 2002 review of the album’s 30th Anniversary edition, BBC writer Rob Webb called Aladdin Sane “a chameleon lost, for one glorious moment, in his own camouflage”). The success of Ziggy Stardust made it easier for Bowie to try on new styles, in order to maintain his own evolving style, which was based on changing all the time. During an interview with Circus Magazine in 1976, Bowie himself pointed out that my whole thing, of course, has always been changes. My vehicle has been changes. I think that’s what I’m best known for, and that is what I’ve been trying to say. And over the last year, it gladdens me to think that I was right. That, no, I didn’t have a style. That my style is changes. (Bowie cited in Edmonds, 1976) The reason it can be somehow tricky to talk about Bowie’s intention of creating a persona during the Aladdin Sane period is because Bowie’s focus in creating a background character, a credible persona with a strong story that supported a whole concept, became less and less of a priority to him. The Ziggy period had worked as a trigger for his creative fertility and Bowie was now on a roll, generating new songs with greater frequency. With all the touring, recording, and unavoidable personal issues—his marriage with Angela (Angie) Bowie (1970) wasn’t going through a good phase, and he was beginning to get suspicious of his manager Defries’ intentions regarding

116  Ana Leorne Bowie’s relationship with publishing label MainMan—the need for a justification for what he was doing through an intricate, carefully thought out background concept, just didn’t seem to be a priority to him. So the Aladdin persona ended up more as an evolution of Ziggy, only more daring. Ziggy represented the pureness with being associated with the universe and the stars, while Aladdin Sane was much more an alien corrupted by the earthly sins. He was faster, louder, and more assured of himself than ever, as echoed by Mick Rock: “Aladdin Sane, visually, was just a continuation of Ziggy. Souped-up, but the hairdo remained the same. [...] Aladdin was Ziggy Mk II, with slightly wilder clothes and make-up” (as quoted in Roberts, 2003: 65). Although Mick Rock sees the essence of Ziggy Stardust within Aladdin Sane’s visuals, the latter establishes itself as Ziggy without the metaphorical veil that hides the pulsion of Death, of which we had the first glimpse with Ziggy’s destruction (we can even argue that Ziggy was killed by Aladdin Sane instead of Bowie, removing any “holes” in the character-evolution line). The infamous7 summer of 1974 was marked by paranoia, drug addiction and anxiety. As observed by fellow rock star Iggy Pop, who was part of the scene with Bowie, “everybody was in trouble in LA then” (Trynka, 2012: 235). Now a frequent user of the strong pharmaceutical cocaine Merck, recent conflicts around the ownership of his recording label also affected him badly.8 This, compounded by a lack of sleep and his famous diet of milk and green peppers, drove Bowie into an almost permanent paranoid state and, as Hughes points out, because “he had been emasculated. [...] He really was rootless and alien” (Hughes, 2012: 237). In Über Coca (1884), Freud’s famous study on cocaine and its contribution to modern medicine and psychoanalysis, Merck is described as the ultimate substitute for the South-American cocaine, its qualities enhanced by a pharmaceutical pureness not found in nature, and therefore perfected by human intervention. Among the many therapeutic uses of Merck cocaine, Freud mentions its stimulating properties—both physical and psychological—and its virtues9 when compared to morphine or alcohol, mentioning the almost non-­ observed side effects and the drug’s contribution to modern psychoanalysis in the treatment of anxiety and depression.10 David Bowie was now a lost child, deprived from the father figure who had taken care of him and taken him by the hand through the tricky world of stardom.11 Seeing himself abandoned by the people he had learned to trust the most, Bowie was holding onto everything that could bring back the feeling of ‘belonging’. He became suddenly interested in the occult and the ideas of writer and ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley (when Bowie moved to Hollywood, he started to have contact with the pagan religion of Thelema,12 famous for having many VIP faces among its followers; this eventually raised Bowie’s interest in the subject, and he began to investigate its theories further). Given Thelema’s strong connections to both religion and philosophy that could work as a source of inspiration for upcoming writing, in fact it only worsened his condition. Eventually Bowie’s edgy sanity was just holding onto this new-found religion like the ultimate truth,

Dear Dr. Freud—David Bowie Hits the Couch   117 propelling him into a spiral of fear and paranoia. Linked with the traces of psychosis enhanced by the huge amounts of Merck he was taking back then, this spurred him to form a personality that had more to do with the alien within him than the Earthling he was. The result was he became extremely paranoid and somehow detached from reality, a destructive drive from within acting as if his pulsions were now fully ruled by a Thanatos impulse, now completely out of control. Meanwhile, Bowie’s obsession with UFOs and life on other ­planets took his latent desire for escaping to a whole new level. Somehow, his quest for perfection seemed to combine both a sudden fascination with Nazi ­imagery (“Adolf Hitler was an old, favourite topic for debate”, Bruno Stein told Creem magazine [cited in Trynka, 2012: 229]) and with out-of-­ this-world life and intelligence. This would actually make him, in many ways, the perfect candidate for Newton’s role in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Bowie’s subconscious was desperately seeking something or ­someone that wouldn’t let him down like people recently seemed to—the Defries’ label ownership situation; the increasingly strained relationship with his wife Angie; the seeming lack of dependable close friends—and very soon he ­realised that only in perfection and absolute control would he be able to fight the demons in his mind that kept him struck with fear of everything and everyone. This drive for perfection can be defined as Freud’s concept of Ego-Ideal, first mentioned on his 1914 essay On Narcissism, which is often referred to as a precursor of the Super-Ego. In Freud’s On ­Narcissism: An Introduction, León Grinberg distinguishes the normal egoideal from the pathological ego-ideal, explaining that the first “determines the values and ideals to which the individual aspires”, while the latter is “tyrannical and ­persecutory, imposing extremely high and unattainable objectives” (­Grinberg, 2012: 105). By the time David Bowie turned to the ­Übermenschen theories as rules to live by, it had become pretty obvious that the balance between himself and his personae had fallen in the second category. Purging the Disposable: Thin White Duke It’s interesting how this all started. At the time I did Ziggy Stardust, all I had was a small cult audience in England from Hunky Dory. I think it was out of curiosity that I began wondering what it would be like to be a rock & roll star. So basically, I wrote a script and played it out as Ziggy Stardust onstage and on record. I mean it when I say I didn’t like all those albums—Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups, Diamond Dogs, David Live. It wasn’t a matter of liking them, it was ‘Did they work or not?’ Yes, they worked. They kept the trip going. Now, I’m all through with rock & roll. Finished. I’ve rocked my roll. It was great fun while it lasted but I won’t do it again. (Bowie cited in Crowe, 1976)

118  Ana Leorne The Thin White Duke may be viewed as the cruelest persona Bowie has ever created. He would later admit the “nastiness” of this character himself in several interviews: “[The Thin White Duke] was the most scary of the lot, because he was the result of all those years of putting characters together. He was an ogre for me” (Bowie cited in White, 1978). He behaves like an anti-Cupid with his peculiar view towards romance, making fun of any gesture of warmth: “I’m terribly emotional. I’m everything. I’m spiteful, I’m tedious, then warm and loving and such great company ... debonair and charming and a horror. I go off at the mouth and get very tyrannical and then again I’m very philosophical, with my heads [sic] in the clouds”, he said of himself during an interview with Robinson for the New Musical Express in 1976. While Ziggy pretended to be h ­ ollow by behaving like a born superstar although he was burning with an inner passion that came from the urgency of spreading the word before the end of the Earth (Bowie would later discuss the fragility of Ziggy’s ­attitude towards fame during an interview with Robert Hilburn for M ­ elody Maker in February 1976, saying that “the Aladdin Sane album was Z ­ iggy’s ­viewpoint about ‘Oh, God, I actually have made it and it’s really crazy and I’m not sure what to make of this ...’”), the Thin White Duke is completely the opposite. He too sings about love, loss and emotion with a profound intensity, but he feels nothing. In evoking this persona, it is as if Bowie is creating a defence mechanism for his own vulnerability and towards his own songs. ‘The Thin White Duke’ archetype is one of the most feared patients of psychoanalysis, an intricate junction of Carl Jung’s types of Self, ­Persona and Father,13 resulting from his coldness and apparent “normality”, ­building a mighty cape around him, and making it almost impossible for the t­ herapist to pass through. A way in might be found by probing or dismantling the carefully built lifestyle and impeccable, immutable routine he has chosen for himself. If one could change his habits, turn his schedule upside down, destroy the cocaine-based diet that keeps him a proverbial block of ice, facing his vulnerability may result in him slowly falling to pieces. But it is not through destroying a persona that one can truly get involved and communicate with it. The challenge is to catch the aristocratic structures and sound bites of this so-called ‘Aryan Superman’ and throw them back at him, creating an emotional feedback that may fold in on itself (a possible approach to Ivanov’s theory of inversion, that suggests “a replacement of negative emotions by positive” [Ivanov, 2003]).14 The Interview as Therapy It is interesting to consider the multiple interviews David Bowie gave through this time as a window into his psyche if not as a light form of psychoanalytic therapy in itself. Take, for instance, his refusal to be photographed while being interviewed, on which he commented: ‘I never allow it.

Dear Dr. Freud—David Bowie Hits the Couch   119 Never. I find it most distracting’ (Bowie cited in MacKinnon, 1980: 37). It is also notable that he only agreed to give interviews once in a while, when he was in the mood for pouring out his thoughts (or commentary on his persona at that specific time) or not, a process very similar to what happens with a therapy session. In this scenario, the journalist then transits from the role of ­controller to controllee, for it is Bowie who truly sets the rules and ­transforms the whole experience into the most basic form of analysis, ­turning the conversation into anything he wants it to be. The interview David Bowie gave to Cameron Crowe in 1975—published in Rolling Stone in February 1976—illustrates, amongst the paranoia and craziness that characterised the “LA period”, how Bowie was determined not to trust anyone, nor count on anything to obtain his purposes. This, of course, led him to use ‘others’ in order to reach his goals—be they real ­people or simply his personae. That is clear when he talks about his most recent albums and states that their only purpose was to make ‘it’ work—that he himself was never meant to like them or not. This is one of the first signs of the ‘purge’ that was about to happen in Bowie’s psyche. Soon he would be throwing away everything that was unnecessary, educating himself to the Nietzschean philosophy and therefore striving to be perfect. Everything else was now disposable. This harsh view of himself led Bowie to pursue new routes in his music, to reinvent himself and to take hold of his own life and business. He was no longer the Golden Child from MainMan. He was now a grown-up ‘humanalien’ ready to take over the world, unmerciful and fearing nothing. Ex-Beatle John Lennon was briefly a companion for Bowie during 1975 and had remained an advisor and close friend. Lennon was going through management problems with Allen Klein so may inadvertently have established himself as an anchor for Bowie. In some way, at this time the song ‘Fame’ actually worked as a catharsis for Bowie. This composition, shared with Lennon and in which the ex-Beatle sings backing vocals—the famous “Fame!” behind the main verse—may have said almost everything that was passing through Bowie’s mind at that moment regarding his sudden loss of a father figure. The song’s chart success (it became Bowie’s biggest selling single in the United States to that date, reaching number 1 on the Billboard chart) helped to spread Bowie’s views towards the fame concept itself (“Fame, (fame) makes a man take things over / Fame, (fame) lets him loose, hard to swallow”) into a creative behaviour rather than a destructive one. By the time 1976 arrived, the clothes were clean, the moves were slick, and the pose was structured to the very millimetre. The Thin White Duke was grace, strength, power, fragility all wrapped into a very attractive ­persona with a less bright though no less interesting metaphorical bow. While Ziggy self-proclaimed himself not as God, but as a Messiah, as the carrier of ‘The Message’, the Thin White Duke was ‘The Message’ itself, a humanoid unable to feel or love, but singing about it as if he was dying from it every second (see for example, Bowie’s heartfelt approach to the classic song ‘Wild Is The Wind’ that closes the Station To Station album).

120  Ana Leorne Nietzsche, Destruction of the Ego and Returning to Europe The Thin White Duke’s impulse for being hard on himself and hard on the world reminds us of Freud’s discussion of masochism as a form of sadism against the Self, which can be interpreted as a way of destructing his Ego (Thanatos is the main drive at work regarding this specific perversion). He then purges himself, getting rid of the easily disposable elements and growing stronger as he throws away every ethereal emotion: “I’d like to do something that’s actively concerned with trying to clear up the mess”, Bowie would comment about his attitude towards music during this period in an article published in NME in 1975. He communicates through his art because he feels obliged, like a leader on duty to his people. Yet the Thin White Duke ends up being a twisted version of Ziggy, the Rock ’n’ Roll Messiah. The Thin White Duke, too, is a chosen one, but instead of announcing the end of the world in five years, he acts as if it is already here and only the strong ones survive, as pronounced in the Übermenschen and Master Race theories that so much influenced Bowie during this period: “Christ, everything is a media manipulation”, Bowie said in an Playboy Interview in 1976. I’d love to enter politics. I will one day. I’d adore to be Prime Minister. And yes, I believe very strongly in Fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a rightwing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible. (cited in Crowe, 1976) On the other hand, Bowie’s sudden turn to this Nietzschean character (for just like Nietzsche’s Superman, Bowie’s Thin White Duke was based on the prototype of a superior human being, a concept that had been previously appropriated by right wing policies in Nazi Germany to describe the “Aryan race”) can also be read as the imminent returning to Europe. He is reported to have stated that “[Station to Station] was like a plea to come back to Europe to me”, suggesting a reading of this album as a love letter to the Old Continent (as quoted by Sandford, 1997: 149). In sum, the apparent coldness and wicked nature of the Thin White Duke character works as a cape, a protection from the intensity of what he sings and that reminds him so much of home. Significantly, by bringing back the Berlin imagery before the actual established Berlin era, Station to Station breathes Eurocentrism and prophesies the beginning of a new era, a return to the roots without the rose-tinted glasses that he carried when he first left his safety zone.15 As Gillman puts it in Alias David Bowie, the ambiguity of Station to Station’s verse “The European cannon is here” (cannon/canon) works as a prediction of his late farewell to America, reinforcing the growing need that Bowie had to return to the Old World, to what he was, instead of what he

Dear Dr. Freud—David Bowie Hits the Couch   121 had become with all the masks he created throughout the years (Gillman, 1986). There is more than a need for escaping in Station to Station. It is a love declaration to Europe, with all its qualities and flaws, a premonition that his peace of mind would be hiding somewhere underneath a stone more than 300 years old, a thirst for history and, in a very Freudian way, a return to the womb.16 Conclusion: The Diagnosis I’ve always felt like a vehicle for something else, but then I’ve never really sorted out what that was. (Bowie cited in Miles, 1984: 23) The fact that Bowie ceased to seek new personae through which to channel his music denounces an evolution regarding his own self-esteem when it comes to exposing himself on stage, on record, to the world. But in Bowie’s case, the creation of characters was built not only to serve as a mask that protected his real Self from public opinion—which could be very cruel—but also as a tool that allowed him to experiment without social and psychological filters. In his 1978 Crawdaddy! interview, Bowie referred to Ziggy as a combination of Archetypal Prima Donna and Messiah Rock Star. That went through a lot of the characters–the arrogance and the ultra-ego quality. I left it to them to take on the repressed ego qualities that I had in me, that I would have loved to produce in my real persona. (Bowie cited in White, 1978) By becoming someone else, Bowie was able to see the world and talk/sing about it through a different point of view, projecting things that he never would have as David Bowie—or even as David Jones. As Lavigne puts it, “pleasure makes us escape from ourselves, go beyond our limits. Pain, on the other hand, makes reality manifest itself [...], forcing us to look at ­ourselves and our failures” (Lavigne, 1953: 67). This can be interpreted as Bowie’s stage personae being what made him escape from his previous attempts to reach musical success, encouraging him to go beyond his own self. After having tried to reach stardom for years since the early 1960s and ­failing miserably, David Bowie had to reinvent himself musically and as an individual in order to reach, if not create (and indeed to rule), a new, ­cutting-edge music scene, defining the ideal of what Pop music was to become in the 1970s. As someone who had arrived too late to the ­hippie-flower-culture scene, Bowie simply had to be the one defining the next step aesthetically in order to prevent himself from never ‘fitting in’. After Space Oddity’s Major Tom (his first character ever), Bowie needed to create a whole new persona that wouldn’t carry the heavy luggage of having tried (and failed) so many

122  Ana Leorne times, especially given the relative success of The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory which illustrated to him he was about to find the right path. And amongst influences of Andy Warhol’s (one of the most important North-American visual artists of the twentieth century) characters (the play Pork is often quoted as a major influence on Bowie’s theatrical side),17 Iggy Pop, early idols, and an evolution from the recently born-again Space era, Ziggy Stardust was born. And during many years, Ziggy haunted Bowie night and day, even after the character’s death at the Hammersmith Odeon, making him question himself many times about how much of Bowie was Ziggy. In turn this would raise the question if, in doing so, he hadn’t killed a part of himself on stage that same night. All of this leads to the Dorian Gray fantasy that would become a pertinent question for the years that followed. In the 1996 BBC documentary Dancing in the Street, Bowie stated: If you asked me at the time what it was I was trying to do, I had simply no idea. All I knew it was, and I sound like a parrot saying this but it’s true, [was] this otherness, this other world, an alternative reality, one that I really want to embrace. I wanted anything but the place I came from (Dancing in the Street, Episode 7). Multiple Personae: A Mild Form of Schizophrenia? The reason Ziggy and the subsequent personae—major figures like the Thin White Duke or simply brief evolutions like Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack or the alienesque Cracked Actor—kept working for Bowie is because he always put a part of his innermost drives into them. As Freud once explained, “a pulsion can never become an object of the individual’s conscience—only the idea that represents that same pulsion. [...] Even within the unconscious, a pulsion can only be represented by an idea” (Valabrega, 1967: 172). If we read Bowie’s basic drives of Life (Eros) and Death (Thanatos) as surfacing through masks (i.e., objects, representations of ideas), we easily understand that the personae are a representation of what kept pushing him further in the early 1970s, allowing every drive to surface (due to shields carefully built) that would protect him from falling down and becoming disappointed with himself or the world. What Bowie may not have predicted was the role his own emotions would play in the whole creative process and invention of personae. As much as Bowie tried to detach himself from the parallel universe he was creating, his personae frequently overtook him off-stage. In turn, this led to some rather major confusions when it came to coping with fame, stardom and fans. His preoccupation with his half-brother Terry’s psychiatric condition, and with his family’s genetic predisposal to it, adds a twist to Bowie’s relationship between his personae and himself, frequently leading to the paranoia. Afraid of actually being genetically predisposed to schizophrenia, this fear would reach its peak during his cocaine addiction phase, both because of the

Dear Dr. Freud—David Bowie Hits the Couch   123 chemical’s nature itself and because of the fragility of his status as a musician and as an individual during that particular time. It could be argued from a psychoanalytical perspective that for many years, Bowie lived a reality of himself as ‘other’, embracing his own images as the actual reality and himself as the projection. While an identification with the image of oneself is a vital step in an individual’s psychological evolution,18 it can become quite dangerous when one takes the projection as being the ultimate truth, gradually detaching oneself from what caused the so-called projection (the subject). By annulling the latter, the once healthy multiplicity of the individual’s “oneness” is perverted and can lead to ­serious psychological conditions that include the aforementioned schizophrenia, as maintained by Hinshelwood in his 2004 book Suffering I­ nsanity: ­Psychoanalytic Essays on Psychosis, where he integrates and compares Winnicott’s and Lacan’s approaches on the construction of the self. The core concept when citing the need for Bowie to create all his alteregos is probably as a self-defence mechanism. This is valid for coping not only with the new world and reality he was now beginning to deal with, but also with himself as an individual, a restless, bright mind in search of new artistic horizons and self-fulfilment, and as a creator who seeks a better understanding for his own actions and ends up building tools to help him with the whole process. The Ziggy Stardust persona was a trigger for Bowie to embrace the immense diversity of perspectives he held captive in himself; and through the subsequent creation (and destruction) of the personae that followed, he learned how to deal with his own Art and the way to communicate it, until he no longer needed a cape to do so. In the 2002 TV documentary The Story of David Bowie, he stated: I haven’t adopted characters on stage since the Thin White Duke period at the Station to Station in 1976. […] I sorta of … I almost exorcized that out of my system with the Low-“Heroes”-Lodger sequence. […] I felt … reviewing things with Eno at that period I felt I really didn’t need characters to sing my songs for me, that actually I could do it quite well on my own. And it was a confidence boost doing that (The Story of David Bowie). After the Thin White Duke, in Freudian terms, Bowie’s subconscious may be interpreted as having been transformed by himself in so many ways that it now had the ability to understand the need it once had of creating alteregos, accepting that same need as part of a self-awareness process, a peculiar system of coping with concepts such as stardom and fandom whose basic structure changes on a daily basis became part of who he was. David Bowie accepted his constant mutability as being his own, and not of some persona he had created, and sooner or later would have to abandon, in order to ­preserve his sanity. This release makes us metaphorically imagine him ­smiling, getting up from the couch, shaking the analyst’s hand and ­leaving the office for one last time—to continue his self-discovery on his own.

124  Ana Leorne Notes 1.  The ‘death drive’ was named Thanatos by post-Freudian theorists. 2.  Id, Ego and Super-Ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined by Sigmund Freud in the essay The Ego and the Id (first published in 1923 by Internationaler Psycho-Analytischer Verlag–Vienna). The Id refers to the basic, instinctual impulses of the individual, while the Super Ego plays a critical and moralising role, and the Ego mediates both by trying to obtain a reasonable ­balance. The Pleasure Principle, to which the two main drives of Eros and ­Thanatos are related, is the basis for the impulsive Id. 3. See Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1905. 4.  The Fort-Da game was first addressed by Sigmund Freud, based on him having watched his own grandson playing with a ball of wool, that he threw out of his sight murmuring the word “Fort” and pulled back saying “Da”. Freud soon realised that, by throwing the ball, which symbolised his mother, he passed from the state of abandonment to a state where he “abandoned” his mother, and that it was a way for the child to cope with his mother’s absence. The parallel made here refers to the issues between Bowie and Defries in 1975. 5. Although not fully recognised in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of ­Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), it is addressed by Brosig et al., in their 2001 paper The Dorian Gray Syndrome. Hair Growth Restorers and other “Fountains of Youth”. 6. In L’Homme Masqué, La Nature Voilé, Alain Didier-Weill explains the ­relationship between the mask and the masked man as the Pleasure P ­ rinciple and what exists beyond the mentioned principle (usually libido’s obscure drive Thanatos). Here we can assume that Bowie’s relationship with Ziggy was equally established both in the need of a “voile” (veil) to hide his previous ­identity (that can therefore be read as a destructive one, for it prevented him to achieve s­ uccess) as in the search of an entity he could use as a tool to obtain that same success. 7.  This was the first summer Bowie spent in Los Angeles, marking the beginning of a period (about which he would later comment) where he was “exposed to a general LA-ism which, quite frankly, I can’t cope with. It’s the most vile pisspot in the world” (as quoted by Shaar Murray, in an interview Bowie gave to the New Musical Express in 1977 called “David Bowie: Who Was That (Un) masked Man?”) 8.  Bowie and his publishing label MainMan came to blows when Bowie d ­ iscovered he didn’t own a part of the label he recorded on, which he understood was under his part ownership. It turns out that MainMan and Defries (Bowie’s ­manager) owned his work and essentially him. For further reading on this period of ­conflict, see Paul Trynka’s biography Starman. 9. “As I refer later on this essay, it seems highly likely that the continuous use of cocaine, although in moderate dosage, isn’t harmful to the human body”—free translation from Freud’s (1884) text Über Coca. 10. In Über Coca (1887) Freud mentions the various therapeutic uses of cocaine, among them in treating digestive disorders and asthma, as a stimulant, or as a valuable helper in dealing with morphine and alcohol addictions (and subsequent withdrawal). 11. It’s inevitable to refer the values of identification with the father figure and ­isolation of the child in order to protect his/her innocence from Freud’s Oedipus

Dear Dr. Freud—David Bowie Hits the Couch   125 Complex; the dynamics of affection contained within this process are referenced by Freud as being the “nucleus of the neurosis itself” (Horney 1961: 101) 12.  Thelema is a philosophical law adopted by some religious organisations, its main developer being the British writer Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) and its law “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will.” 13.  The extrapolation of Bowie’s Thin White Duke persona as an archetype derives freely from Post-Freudian psychiatrist Carl Jung’s theories regarding the use and identification of archetypes during psychotherapy, as referred to in his book Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1955: 90). Jung announced a series of archetypes as models of people, personalities or behaviours emerging from what he called the collective unconscious. The Self and the Persona are part of the four major archetypes, but he announced a series of others (minor, not static), insisting that many archetypes could combine at different times. 14. From Displacement, transfer, inversion, sublimation—stages of the united ­process, essay based on Ivanov’s article Psychology, dreams, reflexes (2003). 15.  It is important to note, however, that Bowie headed to Berlin after this period and NOT to England, turning this reading into more of a need to escape from where he was than an urge to return to the exact same place where it all had begun. 16. As Guntrip puts it in his book Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self, Freud linked the desire of “return to the womb” to the most primary forms of the Oedipus’ Complex, “an erotic wish all of a piece with the oedipal ­incestuous desire for the mother” (Guntrip, 1992: 52). 17.  Perone talks about Warhol’s influence in Bowie’s early years in his book The Words and Music of David Bowie: “[In Hunky Dory] Bowie makes reference to Warhol’s paintings, silk screens, films, and live performances. [He] was aware of the famous paintings […], but he was also familiar with the voyeuristic side of Warhol’s film and live-performance pieces, having seen a production of Andy Warhol’s Pork in London. It was this production that inspired the song ‘Andy Warhol’” (Perone, 2007: 24). 18.  Jacques Lacan talks about the stage during which the child faces the mirror— and eventually realises that what he/she sees is also him/her—as primordial to the creation of abstract thinking, by allowing the individual to “unfold” himself and becoming aware of the existence of the image. This is frequently referred to as Le Stade du Miroir (“Mirror Stage”).

References Brosig, Burkhard, Jörg Kupfer, Volker Niemeier and Uwe Gieler. “The ‘Dorian Gray Syndrome’: psychodynamic need for hair growth restorers and other ‘Fountains of Youth’”. International Journal of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics 39 (7, 2001): 279–283. Copetas, Craig. “Beat Godfather meets Glitter Mainman”, Rolling Stone Magazine, 28 February 1974. In The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat ­Generation and the CounterCulture, edited by Helen George-Warren, 193–202. London: Bloomsbury 1999. Crowe, Cameron. “Ground Control to Davy Jones”, Rolling Stone Magazine, 12 February 1976. http://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/articles/760212-rollingstone. html (accessed December 19 2014).

126  Ana Leorne Dancing in the Street, Episode 7: Hang On to Yourself, BBC documentary series, 1996. Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld”. The Journal of Philosophy Vol 61 (19, 1964): ­571–584. Didier-Weill, Alain. L’Homme Masqué, La Nature Voilée. 2008. http://www.insistance.org/news/56/72/Lâ-homme-masque-la-nature-voilee/d,detail_article.html (accessed 9 January 2014). Doggett, Peter. The Man Who Sold The World—David Bowie and the Sixties. London: Bodley Head, 2011. Edmonds, Ben. “Bowie Meets the Press: Plastic Man or Godhead of the Seventies?” Circus Magazine, April 1976. https://exploringdavidbowie.wordpress.com/ 2013/02/05/bowie-meets-the-press-plastic-man-or-godhead-of-the-seventies/ (accessed ­December 19 2014). Freud, Sigmund, Cinq Leçons Sur la Psychanalyse, 3rd ed. Paris: Petite Bibliothéque Payot, 2001.  Freud, Sigmund. Über Coca, 1884. Portuguese translation. http://www.appoa.com. br/uploads/arquivos/revistas/revisita26_-_uber_coca.pdf (accessed 19 July 2012). Gillman, Peter and Leni Gillman. Alias David Bowie. London: New English Library Ltd., 1986. Grinberg, Leon. “Letter To Sigmund Freud”. In Freud‘s “On Narcissism: An Introduction, 2nd ed., edited by Peter Fonagy, Ethel Spector Person and Joseph Sandler, 95–107. London: Karnac, 2012. Guntrip, Harry. Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self. London: Karnac Books, 1992. Hilburn, Robert. “Bowie: Now I’m a Businessman”. Melody Maker, 28 February 1976. http://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/articles/760228-melodymaker.html (accessed 5 August 2014). Hinshelwood, Robert D. Suffering Insanity: Psychoanalytic Essays on Psychosis. East Sussex: Brunner Routledge, 2004. Horney, Karen. A Personalidade Neurótica do Nosso Tempo. Portuguese edition. Lisboa: Editorial Minotauro, 1961. Hughes, Glenn. Starman: David Bowie—The Definitive Biography. London: Sphere, 2012. Ivanov, Vladamir. Psychology, dreams, reflexes. 2003. http://psy.tom.ru/eng/displacement.html (accessed 16 January 2014). Jones, Allan. “Goodbye to Ziggy and All That”. Melody Maker, 29 October 1977. http://www.bowiewonderworld.com/press/press70.htm#291077 (accessed 5 August 2014). Jung, Carl. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. London: Routledge, 1955. Lacan, Jacques. Les Quatre Concepts Fondamentaux de la Psychanalyse. Paris: ­Éditions du Seuil, 1973. Lavigne, Jacques. L’Inquiètude Humaine. Paris: Édtions Montaigne, 1953. MacKinnon, Angus. “The Future Isn’t What it Used to Be”. New Musical Express (September 1980): 37. Miles, Barry. Bowie In His Own Words. London: Omnibus Press, 1984. Murray, Charles. “David Bowie: Who Was That (Un)masked Man?” New Musical Express, 12 November 1977. http://exploringdavidbowie.com/2013/02/06/whowas-that-unmasked-man/ (accessed 5 August 2013).

Dear Dr. Freud—David Bowie Hits the Couch   127 O’Grady, Anthony. “Watch out mate! Hitler’s on his way back”. New Musical Express, August 1975. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/davidbowie-watch-out-mate-hitlers-on-his-way-back (accessed 5 August 2014). Perone, James. The Words and Music of David Bowie. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2007. Roberts, Chris. “Gimme Your Hands”. Uncut Magazine (70, 2003): 42–66. Robinson, Lisa. “The First Synthetic Rock Star”. New Musical Express, March 1976. http://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/articles/760300-nme.html (accessed 5 August 2014). Sandford, Christopher. Bowie: Loving the Alien. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1997. The Story of David Bowie, video documentary by The Amp, Much More Music, July 2002. Thompson, Dave. David Bowie: Moonage Daydream. London: Plexus Publishing Limited, 1987. Trynka, Paul, Starman: David Bowie – The Definitive Biography, London: Sphere, 2012. Valabrega, Jean-Paul. Le Désir et la Perversion. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967. Webb, Rob, “David Bowie Aladdin Sane – 30th Anniversary Edition Review”, 2002: http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/hcf9 (last accessed on December 19th 2014). White, Timothy. “Turn and Face The Strange”. Crawdaddy! Magazine, February 1978. http://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/articles/780200-crawdaddy.html (accessed December 19 2014).

7 Moss Garden David Bowie and Japonism in fashion in the 1970s Helene Marie Thian

Introduction The story of the influence of Japonism1 on the persona of David Bowie-asZiggy Stardust in the early 1970s begins with the growth of interest in L ­ ondon in Japanese culture in the postwar period, a phenomenon akin to the gradual growth of moss in a Japanese garden such as Saihō-ji (Moss Temple) which Bowie reportedly visited and which later inspired him to compose the musical work ‘Moss Garden’ (O’Leary, 2009a). Japanese cultural influence in London in the 1970s took a firm hold on the British consciousness and on Bowie, who served as a lightning rod for the incorporation of the cultural esthetic of Japan, the former enemy of the allies, into the sartorial code for the West, while broadening the possibilities of Western self-presentation for all sexes to include a heretofore unseen brand of Japonism in fashion. Bowie’s brand of Japonism in his Ziggy Stardust costuming and stage show can be traced directly to the powerful dynamic in the mid-1960s between Bowie and mime and dance artist Lindsay Kemp, who had a lifelong connection to Japanese culture, and the subsequent influence of Kabuki2 theatricality gleaned from fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto’s ‘Rock Fashion’ (Yamamoto, 1974) shows in Tokyo, London and Paris. By incorporating Japanese-inflected notions of dress in his Ziggy Stardust stage costuming, including the evocation of the onnagata3 (men who play w ­ omen’s roles in the Kabuki theatre), Bowie not only singlehandedly repositioned the definition of the male body in Western dress by incarnating on stage as a kind of Japanese Androgyne, or Japonism-inspired hermaphrodite, but also presented sartorial proposals for the Westerner based on the theme of ­Orientalism in dress (Ashmore, 2006; Koda & Martin, 1994). As a ­British man wearing costuming and hair and makeup propositions referencing Japanese theatricality, Bowie may be viewed as symbolically representing the establishment of the peace between Japan and the West in the postwar period, while also ushering in the era of globalisation in dress (Paulicelli & Clark, 2008) with its attendant utilisation of the art of bricolage (Goodrum, 2005). In examining the phenomena of Japanese cultural presence in the UK in the postwar period, the Japanese influences on British performance artist Lindsay Kemp (who became Bowie’s dance and mime teacher in the

Moss Garden  129 Swinging Sixties in London), and the work of Kansai Yamamoto in London (the first Japanese fashion designer to present in 1971 a fashion show in the city), a clear picture emerges of how Japonism in fashion made its debut on the rock music stage by way of Bowie’s costuming and staging in his Ziggy Stardust incarnation. The materials for analysing Japonism’s influence on Bowie in the early 1970s are concerned primarily with the visual dimension of fashion. As a result, Pink’s critical visual methodology is deployed here (Pink, 2006).4 The criteria for a critical visual methodology include considering the social conditions and effects of images and the primacy of reflexivity, or the position of the viewer and critic. While there are two films on David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane incarnations in the early 1970s in which he appears in Kansai ­costuming—Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by D. B. Pennebaker (1973) and Cracked Actor by Alan Yentob (1975)—it is the still photographs of Bowie wearing the designs that provide plain evidence of a clear statement of the phenomenon of Japonism in fashion in London in that era. As a photographer brings his own vantage point, complete with representational (‘denotative’) and symbolic (‘connotative’) meanings (van Leeuwen & Jewitt, 2001: 117), the black and white portrait photographs of Bowie as Ziggy Stardust by J­apanese photographer ­Masayoshi Sukita conjure a stark contrast in the black and white images in 1960s and 1970s Japanese photobooks as analyzed by Kaneko (2009) and Tucker (2003). Bowie began collaborating with photographer Sukita from the time of their encounter in London in 1972, continuing to the present with the book Speed of Life (Bowie & Sukita, 2011), and the photographer had a strong influence on the framing of, in Japanese terms, the captured image of Bowie as Ziggy Stardust. Sukita’s images of the androgynous Bowie are replete with connotations of Otherness, underscoring that sexuality is the site at which “notions of otherness and the exotic/erotic are often conflated” (Doanne, 1991:217 in Rose, 2003; Hall, 1997). While exploring this sartorial staging of ‘Otherness’ and androgyny through Japanese inspired design and aesthetics forms an important part of this chapter, another distinct objective here is to provide evidence of how Lindsay Kemp specifically ignited Bowie’s interest in Japonism. In addition to visual culture analysis, oral history presents the opportunity for eyewitness accounts of past events to enliven the historical narrative. “The inconsistency of memory” (Batty, 2009:111) is an issue that arises when obtaining an oral history some years after the occurrence of events. In this respect, a personal account of past events is not considered an exact recounting but rather an interpretation or personal vantage-point construct with regard to past events (Atkinson, 1998). In order to ascertain the extent of the influence of the Japanese theatre and culture on performance artist Lindsay Kemp, who became renowned for his signature performance piece titled Onnagata and who appeared in a BBC4 documentary (2012) on Bowie to briefly discuss his Japanese-inflected inculcation of his young mime and dance pupil in the

130  Helene Marie Thian mid-1960s prior to the collaboration with Kansai, I conducted a personal interview with Kemp. It is important to note that there is no mention of the Japanese aspects of Kemp’s work in a photographic study of his performance style (Wilms, 1987) and only a brief discussion of his onnagata role and its Japanese theatre origins for his production of Flowers, as inspired by Genet (Royce, 2004). Thus the oral history of Kemp, presented through this interview, provides an eyewitness account of a particular and indispensible contribution to the birth of Japonism in fashion in London via Kansai and Bowie. Crucially, Kemp’s influence on Bowie in the period (Kemp, 2012; O’Leary, 2009b; Watts, 1972) may be interpreted as providing the missing link between David Bowie and Kansai Yamamoto in London in the early 1970s, even while acknowledging Kemp’s oral history can be considered a personal and subjective narrative. But perhaps “what matters most is that the life story can be deemed trustworthy, more than true. The subjective reality is, after all, what we are seeking in a life story” (Atkinson, 1998: 60). Japan in London in the 1960s and 1970s Although Japan and Britain, and the Allies, were engaged in conflict in the World War II period, approximately twenty-five years later in ‘the ­Swinging ’60s’ of London, exoticism, including the incorporation of Oriental and Asian motifs in fashion wear, was not only acceptable but celebrated (Ashmore, 2006), and Japanese culture and heritage gained an increasingly visible presence. There were V&A Museum exhibitions on Japanese art in 1961 on artist Kuniyoshi, in 1973 on Japanese prints, and in 1974 on the artist Onisaburo (James, 1998). ‘The Aesthetic Movement and the Cult of Japan’ exhibition at the Fine Art Society in New Bond Street in 1972 reminded Londoners of the extremely important influence of Japonism in the late nineteenth-century on the Aesthetic Movement in England. The first appearance of a Bunraku (puppet troupe) in performance in 1968 and of Kabuki classical dance-drama theatre in June of 1972 at Sadler’s Wells brought the performing arts of Japan to London audiences in the postwar period. Artist Yoko Ono “first came to London in 1966” (Devlin, 1971:100–104) and became an overnight sensation with works such as ‘Cut Piece,’ a performance piece in which people cut her clothing as she sat on stage. Musician Tsutomu Yamashita presented his Red Buddha show at the Roundhouse in 1973. Sir Peter Daubeny, the man responsible for first presenting Japanese Noh (musical drama) theatre in London, published My World of Theatre in 1971. Ian McKellen formed the Actors Company in 1972 and staged its world premiere not far from London in Cambridge with the samurai (noble warrior) intrigue play The Three Arrows set in ­thirteenth-century Japan (UK Vogue, 15 October 1972). And in the mid-1960s, performance artist Lindsay Kemp was teaching budding rock singer and musician David Bowie the art of Japanese-inflected dance and theatre and paving the ground for Bowie’s incorporation of Japonism-inspired ­proposals for the rock music stage (Kemp, 2012).

Moss Garden  131 Influence of Japanese Theatre-Inspired Performer Lindsay Kemp on Bowie Before David Bowie met Kansai Yamamoto and wore his designs, he had dabbled in things Japanese by studying dance and mime, and then performing, with Japanese theatre-influenced performance artist Lindsay Kemp. Bowie met Kemp in London in 1967 (O’Leary, 2009b) and began taking dance lessons with him the next day at the London Dance Center: Of course my dance was absolutely influenced by Japanese dance, and I was particularly influenced by Japanese contemporary music, like [Toru] Takemitsu. So we used to dance my version of Japanese dance to contemporary music. So David was part of those classes … (Kemp, 2012) Bowie’s interest in the exotic East is evidenced by his Buddhist practice at a monastery in Scotland in 1969 (Smith, 2007) and he was ‘instrumental’ in the monastery’s establishment in Dumfries (Watts, 1972). Bowie stated in 1972 that he may have indeed become a monk but that his meeting and subsequent work with Kemp “… was as magical as Buddhism, and I completely sold out and became a city creature … that’s when my interest in image really blossomed” (Watts, 1972). Bowie was asked by Kemp to perform and write songs for his new production Pierrot in Turquoise (1967), which Bowie was keen to point out was the colour indicative of the Buddhist symbol of eternity (O’Leary, 2009b). It can be reasonably conjectured due to his fascination with the world of Buddhism and the East that Bowie was drawn to work with Kemp, whose own high esteem for Japanese theatre, dance and music was so apparent. This passionate interest was a lifelong matter for Kemp, having grown up in the household of a sailor for the British Navy who had traveled to Japan and brought back numerous mementos of his trip there, including woodblock prints of Kabuki classical dance-drama actors that adorned the walls of the Kemp home (Kemp, 2012). The accoutrements of Japanese dressing, including the fan, the kimono robe and the parasol, became part and parcel of the props utilised in performances by Kemp, with the role of the onnagata (male actors who impersonate women) of the Kabuki theatre becoming a signature influence for the performance artist. Kemp’s predeceased sister Norma, Figure 7.1, had been presented with these items by their father and upon her death Kemp inherited them, along with something much more, as he states here: “Not only did I inherit the kimono but I inherited, I think, the gestures that went with the kimono, and the spirit that came to me when wearing the kimono” (Kemp, 2012). This deeply embodied knowledge of the way of the onnagata and Japanese theatricality, as inculcated by Kemp in Bowie, would later evidence in Bowie’s 1970s’ incarnation as Ziggy Stardust.

132  Helene Marie Thian

Figure 7.1  Norma Kemp, sister of Lindsay Kemp. Inscription reads ‘Love to Daddy from Norma’. Courtesy of Lindsay Kemp.

Kemp recalls being riveted by things Japanese in the public arena as early as the late 1950s (Kemp, 2012). In the 1960s in London, Kemp had the good fortune to receive an entrée to the viewing of Japanese films at the Japanese Embassy, including documentaries on Kabuki and its makeup styling, and a silent film of 1923 called A Page of Madness, the melodrama of the silent Japanese cinema, making such an impact that it informed all of his subsequent work (Kemp, 2012). Another influence on Kemp which caused him to lean further in the direction of a Japanese-inspired performance style prior to meeting Bowie were the ‘World Theatre Seasons’ presentations of impresario Sir Peter Daubeny, at the Aldwych Theatre in London (Kemp, 2012), which from the beginning of the 1960s included Japanese theatre performances by Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku troupes (Daubeny, 1971). Kemp remembers showing Bowie ‘a lot of books about Kabuki ­performance’ and talking about the makeup utilised in the Kabuki theatre

Moss Garden  133 (Kemp, 2012). He distinctly remembers teaching Bowie the Japanese-inflected gestures in his classes and talking about the movement with him. He was interested, you know. I think he knew nothing about the Japanese theatre before he met me, and he knew a lot about the Japanese theatre when he left me. He became very fascinated by it. … He seemed to love Bunraku, particularly, and Noh. (Kemp, 2012) While costumes and makeup utilised in the Kabuki are important in achieving the image of femininity and the glamorous allure of the onnagata (male actors playing female roles), it is gesture and body language which are key, with the walking style of toes in and knees together conveying a “female-like expression” (Japan Arts Council, 2007). Shoulder blades are pulled downward and together to create the image of slope-shouldered females. Thus the physical movements of the Kabuki actor create a more realistically feminine appearance than if the female movements were copied exactly (Japan Arts Council, 2007). Kemp, the performance artist and mime, took readily to imitating these Kabuki movements and taught them to Bowie, who also became enamored with the Bunraku and Noh theatre forms: I taught him that onnagata walk, sliding that foot and lifting the heel, and so on … I don’t know how much of the Japanese movements he incorporated into his shows, but I choreographed his movement for Ziggy Stardust. (Kemp, 2012) Kemp asserts that he taught Bowie “to exaggerate with his body as well as his voice, and the importance of looking as well as sounding beautiful” (Brown, 1974). The Japanese theatre gestures taught by Kemp to Bowie brought to life the Kansai-costumed character of Ziggy Stardust, marking it as a creative outgrowth of Japanese cultural influence in London in the 1960s. Costume Designs of Kansai Yamamoto for David Bowie in the Early 1970s After studying with Kemp and appearing in theatrical productions from 1967 to 1969 (O’Leary, 2009b), and becoming part of Kemp’s troupe known as Feathers ‘for eighteen months’ according to Bowie himself (­Popswop Annual, 1972), Bowie toyed with androgynous ­self-­presentation. Prior to meeting designer Kansai Yamamoto, Bowie had worn a Mr. Fish-designed dress and sported long tresses for a Pre-Raphaelite look (Jones, 1987) on the cover of his The Man Who Sold the World album of 1971. As Kansai maintained his designs were for either sex

134  Helene Marie Thian (Harvey, 1996–2007), the Japanese notion of androgynous dress seemed tailor-made for Bowie. Riveted by a Masayoshi Sukita photograph in a 1971 edition of Honey magazine, which featured a model sporting a spiky, bright red hairdo (­Harvey, 1996–2007), Bowie appropriated that coiffure for his Ziggy ­Stardust look. It was a modified version of a Lion Dance wig used in the Kabuki theatre, and Kansai was later credited by Bowie himself as ‘one ­hundred percent responsible for the Ziggy haircut and colour, by the by’ (Bowie in Rock, 2001:12). Staging Kansai in London and Tokyo on 12 May 1971 at the Great Gear Trading Company at 85 King’s Road (Gorman, 2006; Kansai in London and Tokyo, 1971), Kansai utilised Kabuki stage techniques, such as bukkaeri (the art of transforming a character on stage to reveal the true identity) with kuroko (black clad stagehands) pulling down the upper part of a costume in front of the audience so that the top of what is worn beneath matched the pulled down garment (Yamamoto, 2008). The show featured music of the Kabuki known as Ohayashi ­(Yamamoto, 2008). The designer sold his apparel at a shop in Fulham known as B ­ oston-151 ­(Gorman, 2006) and, according to various sources (Harvey, 1996–2007; Yamamoto, 1974; Gorman, 2006), Bowie purchased the ‘Woodland C ­ reatures’ outfit, a red leather, rabbit-print jumpsuit presented in the designer’s London fashion show (Kansai Y ­ amamoto Tokyo/London 1971 excerpt, 2008). In the summer of 1972, MainMan, the management company for Bowie, then approached Kansai by way of stylist Yasuko Takahashi, who eventually became the wardrobe assistant to Bowie, requesting he apply his Japanese sensibility to designing costumes for Bowie’s second tour of the US, and a further nine costumes for the 1973 UK and 1974 Aladdin Sane tours ­(Gorman, 2006; Yamamoto, 1974). ­Effusive over a Kansai ‘kimono coat’ gifted to him during his US tour, Bowie was reported to be a Japanophile in Melody Maker in 1973. Bowie can’t wait to get to Japan, what with all that kabuki mime and theatre. “I think it’s the only place, besides England, where I could live,” he says, enthusing over the coat. Tonight he will wear it in the act. (Watts, 1973: 4)

Japanese design references in the costuming of Kansai for Bowie ‘Woodland Creatures’ is a costume evocative of the image of the Year of the Rabbit in the Japanese astrological calendar and Tsukimi, or ‘Moon Viewing’, in September each year in Japan (Kikuko, 2014). According to Shinto religion’s lore, the rabbit resides in the moon and is considered a servant of the Moon God, ‘tsuki-yomi’ (Herbert, 2010), visible on certain full moon nights in September if one gazes long enough at it. The evocation of a mysterious creature residing in the nighttime sky, which disappears from view with the vanishing of this satellite every morning,

Moss Garden  135 is an appropriate one for Bowie who changed his costumes on stage for the Ziggy Stardust shows, demonstrating the ever-changing nature of the persona, “a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual” (Jung, 1953: 190). The pine tree motif on a kimono tunic for Bowie by Kansai is a symbol of longevity in Japan, deeply rooted in history and evoking the theatrical as it is always found painted on the backdrop of Noh theatre stages. Motifs such as the pine tree, cherry blossoms, wisteria, irises, snow-covered bamboo and plum blossoms date from the Heian Era (AD 794–1185), reflecting a long tradition of fascination with the natural world translated into design (Milne-Tyte, 2003). The pine trees on this Kansai apparel for Bowie, therefore, have as much to do with implanting the significance of Japanese historical and theatrical symbols in the mind of the London audience as they are a design motif for a Bowie costume. The significance of supersensible reality in Japanese culture is automatically communicated to the viewer of the ensemble decorated with this motif, if only at an unconscious level, due to the fact that pine trees on Noh theatre stages represented the presence of gods or kami (Isozaki in Ashton, 1993: 57), thereby also suggesting the presence of gods in Bowie’s sphere. A white “shortie kimono and fish-belly white tights” (Green, 1973) as well as a white cape emblazoned with kanji, or Japanese pictographic characters, recall the realm of the dead and ghostly in traditional Kabuki theatre plays such as Okiku and white burial garb of Buddhist rituals dating from the Edo period of 1603 to 1858 (Iwasaka & Toelken, 1994), with corpses sheathed in white kimono inscribed with Buddhist sutras or kyokatabira (Davies & Ikeno, 2002). In the Shinto religion, white is the color of ritual purity worn by priests (Schumacher, 2013). The whiteness of the kimono tunic and cape for Bowie therefore suggests associations with the otherworldly, perfect for the Ziggy Stardust character, an alien from outer space. Furthermore, the whiteness of the kimono and cape echoes the white makeup of geisha (traditional female entertainers) and onnagata (males playing female roles) of the Kabuki. Noh theatre costumes, called ‘sculptures in silk’, are noted for their voluminous shape, one style of which is referred to as ‘Ousodemono’, or broad-sleeved outer garments with open cuffs (Milne-Tyte, 2003). Thick materials utilised in the construction of Noh costumes provide strong but simple silhouettes, emphasising lines and angles and disguising the outline of the body (Noma, 1974: 53). This ‘stiff, angular effect’ creates the right costuming for the representation of ghosts and visions and a certain stylised form of beauty (Noma, 1974: 58–59). According to Gorman, ­Kansai designed costumes for Bowie specifically “influenced by Japan’s traditional Noh theatre” for the final Ziggy Stardust tour of the UK in June/ July 1973 (Gorman, 2006: 121). The Kansai version of a sculpture in silk for Bowie became a sculpture in black plastic, obscuring the lines of the

136  Helene Marie Thian body, in the “Rites of Spring” outfit, with the addition of a ‘tear away’ inner lining of bright red material, or hikinuki, allowing an outfit beneath to be revealed instantly (Atsuki Kokoro pamphlet, 2008). Training in mime and Japanese theatrical gestures with Lindsay Kemp prepared Bowie for wearing the costume. The silhouette for “Rites of Spring” as it is known, but which Kansai actually called “Tokyo Pop (Kabuki) Jumpsuit”, was inspired by a drawing done by illustrator Antonio Lopez (1943–1987), a friend of the designer, the costume stitched in a zigzag manner with a sewing machine to emphasise the lines on it (Atsuki Kokoro pamphlet, 2008). Its impact was profound: The image of David in this costume and the whole musical universe he created in Radio City Music Hall, New York, has been chiseled in my brain with unfading vividness. (Yamamoto, 2008) Other Japanese-inspired fashion includes the multicolored, knitwear leotards by Kansai for Bowie, which almost seem to imitate the look of yakuza (Japanese organised crime gang) tattoos or horizontal widestriped swimwear designs for women in the Meiji Era (1868–1912) though in reality these were inspired by layered patterns from kimono textiles (Atsuki Kokoro pamphlet, 2008). Multicolored, metallic yarn designs with areas of flesh exposed became so popular among Bowie followers that sewing patterns for the garment were published in Rock Scene (Harvey, 1996–2007) and also in Elle France magazines (Atsuki Kokoro pamphlet, 2008). Okobo are the wooden clogs worn by oiran, or courtesans, of old Japan (Okobo, 2004) and are similar to the chopine or wooden platform shoes of Europe in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries (Koda, 2000). Kansai’s version of okobo for Bowie included red plastic boots with thick rubber soles. The platform shoe becomes synonymous with Glam Rock in the 1970s and the Japanese-inspired version by Kansai for Bowie foreshadowed the trend, especially as Bowie is considered an originator of that music genre (Hoskyns, 1998). Bowie’s Japanese Fashion for the West The Western rock stage became a new context in which traditional ­Japanese design elements, such as colors and motifs, flourished following their incorporation into costume designs for Bowie by Kansai. Due to the influence of their usage on a London rock music stage in the early 1970s, Kansai costume offerings for Bowie, even if deemed an outgrowth of a traditional Japanese cultural construct for apparel design, are representative of hybridisation and evolution, transforming the traditional

Moss Garden  137 Japanese theatre costume and kimono. Although the kimono appears not to have changed form for centuries, it has in fact undergone change in form over time (­Gluckman & Takeda, 1992), and the kimono-inspired proposal by ­Kansai for Bowie revealed a change in manner of usage for the ­traditional garment. The appropriation of traditional Japanese design elements for usage in a ­Western sociocultural context and for out of the ordinary p ­ urposes—a rock star’s stage costumes—represents a major step in ­Japanese design history by injecting the Japanese design esthetic in a powerful way into the force field of Western fashion design in the twentieth century. As Maynard has pointed out, the ‘ethnic dress’ of non-Western cultures has been affected by the impact of the West on those cultures, and vice-versa (Maynard, 2004: 85). In wearing Japonism-­ inspired ­self-beautification proposals on the rock music stage, along with Kabuki theatre makeup, Bowie reshaped the boundaries of Western fashion to include a bold and direct translation of Japonism-in-fashion. It is essential nonetheless to note that the Japonism in fashion which Kansai proposed for the rock stage costumes of Bowie was the exact opposite of what ­Martin terms the “cerebral, spiritual, aestheticised Japan (as ­represented by contemporary designers Issey Miyake or Rei Kawakubo)” (Martin, 1997). The Rapprochement A very important aspect of Bowie’s Japonism in fashion for the rock stage can be defined as a kind of symbolic rapprochement between Britain and Japan in the postwar period. The Bowie costumes by Kansai revealed a high degree of novelty of expression, but were also, if only subtly, ­controversial due to open reference to the design esthetic of Japan, a former World War II enemy of the West. Bowie as the bisexual, androgynous alien Ziggy Stardust, borrowed costume and stage techniques born of the alien culture of Japan in order to put a flourish on the declaration of ­Otherness, alienation and non-conformity for the benefit of his fans known as ­Bowie-ites ­(Hebdige, 1979: 88) who also seemed to feel like alienated, disaffected outsiders. Bowie’s Ziggy “dignified Japanese culture” and instigated a fascination with the East more broadly, and his interest in “all things ­Japanese was [also] crucial in defining the Aladdin Sane era” ­(Buckley, 2005: 112–113). Bowie performed as the Japanese-costumed Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane in 1973 and 1974 in London, the same city in which Kansai was able to stage the first Japanese designer fashion show to great acclaim in 1971: … One can probably say that there is now a London clan in the Japanese fashion world. … there has been an emotional reaction to the offering of “Kansai in London and Tokyo” by young Kansai Yamamoto

138  Helene Marie Thian in 1971 … and by associating with British rockers such as T. Rex and David Bowie, there has been a mending of relations between London and Japan. (Mishima, 1973: 126) The rapprochement between the UK and Japan was, in some sense, in the making not just since 1945 and the end of World War II but for over one hundred years. On 5 July 1861, in Japan a group of samurai who were most likely wearing hakama, or pants that appear to be a skirt, Figure 7.2, attacked the British Legation, resulting in two deaths (Satow, 2006). In ­Figure 7.3, Bowie is wearing a hakama-type design in satin and sequins by Kansai called ‘Space Samurai’. The adaptation of samurai-inspired dress by a Japanese designer for the stage costuming of a British rock star in the early 1970s places the dress of ages past, along with its attendant associations, into a completely new and celebratory context, decommissioning in a sense the warring spirit automatically associated with samurai dress history.

Figure 7.2.  Ukiyo-e (woodblock print) of a samurai by Jisaemon Arimura, 1860. Source: National Diet Library, Tokyo.

Moss Garden  139

Figure 7.3  Bowie wears hakama outfit ‘Space Samurai’ by Kansai. Bowie and Kansai photographed by Masayoshi Sukita, April 1973. Photo courtesy of Masayoshi Sukita.

Japanese Androgyne The costumes and Japanese esthetic of self-beautification sported by Bowie served as a cross-cultural, anti-binary gender system statement due to the influence of the Kabuki theatre, which has for hundreds of years featured an androgynous character of the onnagata, or a woman’s role played by a male actor. Since 1629, all roles in the Kabuki theatre of Japan have been played by men, including those of women, requiring actors to specialise in the art of playing women. Mezur analyzes the allure of the onnagata by emphasising that the ‘mystique’ of gender ambiguity creates a strikingly sensual image without gender definition, one in which gender ambiguity and the male body underneath work in tandem to create an iconic image of beauty (Mezur, 2005: 33). In June of 1973, Kansai commented on his inspiration for the Japanese version of androgynous clothing designed for Bowie: He has an unusual face, don’t you think? He’s neither man nor woman. If you see what I mean; which suited me as a designer because most of my clothes are for either sex. (Gorman, 2006: 121)

140  Helene Marie Thian The gender ambiguity inherent in the role of the onnagata permeates the gender-ambiguous costume propositions for Bowie, as if the designer channeled the imperatives of the Japanese theatrical role’s costuming. Cementing the connection between Bowie’s gender-ambiguous stage persona and the historical wellspring of androgynous, Japanese costuming grounding K ­ ansai’s design work for Bowie, is the fact that famed onnagata ­Tambasaburo Bando taught Bowie about the application of Kabuki makeup in order to create the aura of femininity masking masculinity. As Bowie stated, “I braved the world of Kabuki makeup. The cupid lips made it back to the USA along with cherry-coloured cheeks” (Bowie & Sukita, 2011: 95). In an article entitled ‘David Bowie’s Makeup Dos and Don’ts’, the singer describes the tools of the trade as white rice powder from “Tokyo’s Woolworth’s equivalent”, noting that “little Japanese brushes that the Makeup Centre has for applying powders and paints are much better than anything you can find in Japan!” (Music Scene, 1973). As Bowie’s pale face uncannily and naturally resembled a Noh theatre mask, it may be no coincidence that the British press in the early 1970s reported that Kansai had been requested to design the costumes for Bowie’s 1973 UK tour based on Noh plays (Kinder, 2001). The whiteness of the Noh mask accentuates the image of the otherworldly, and Noh plays often portray the liminal. Whiteness is a theme in the makeup and costuming of Bowie and can be traced back to Bowie’s work with mime Lindsay Kemp. Kemp recalls, “when I saw the onnagata for the first time, I recognised myself as a not too distant cousin, it was a signature identity, and I saw myself reflected in their whiteness” (Kemp, 2012). Bowie affirmed the influence of the onnagata and Kemp, emphasising that he wanted to bring mime into a traditional Western setting and rivet the audience with “a very stylised, a very Japanese style of movement” (Mendelssohn, 1971). Inspired by the stage theatrics of the Kabuki theatre, Kansai first featured the quick, on-stage change of costume known as hayagawari for his 1971 Kansai in London and Tokyo fashion show although he was not the first creative in Japan to utilise the technique for performance off of the Kabuki stage. In 1957, Gutai Group artist Atsuko Tanaka peeled off layer after layer of clothing in rapid succession on stage in Japan for the film Stage Clothes, demonstrating the constantly changing nature of persona and its dressing and narrating the dilemma “… about how fashion, gender and ideas about femininity transform and imprison women” (Stevens, 2004), which appears to foreshadow Bowie’s own message about fashion, gender and the liberation of the male body from prescribed dress norms. To recreate the Kabuki theatre’s hayagawari technique on stage for Bowie performances, Kansai created a full-length, white cape festooned with Japanese pictographic characters, or kanji, as designed by Kansai for Bowie, or, 出火吐暴威’, which spells the name of the singer phonetically, or ‘De Bi Tō Bō I’, roughly translating as ‘Fiery vomiting and venting in a menacing manner’ (Transl., Thian), or ‘one who spits out words in a fiery manner’ (Harvey, 1996–2007). Assistants pull the cape away from the singer on stage, a move one would see in

Moss Garden  141 the Kabuki by black-clad stagehands known as kuroko, and Bowie stands clad either in a revealing knitted leotard or jumpsuit, distinctly spotlighting the androgynous body of the performer. The fundoshi is a type of loincloth worn by Japanese men in festivals and by sumo wrestlers. Photographs by Tamotsu Yato in 1967 of nationalistic, openly homosexual writer Yukio Mishima clad in fundoshi paint the picture of an archetypal Japanese masculinity heavily flavoured with homoeroticism. Bowie donned a red sequined fundoshi in 1973 at the height of the era of his collaboration with Kansai and his stage interaction with Mick Ronson put the emphasis on the homoerotic masculinity of samurai culture (Watanabe & Iwata, 1989). Nanshoku shunga (homoerotic Japanese woodblock prints) depicted male actors playing onnagata and wakashu-gata (adolescent boy roles) much sought after for sexual favors by patrons of both sexes (Leupp, 1997). The gender-blurring nature of the onstage roles, and that of the actors who played the parts, made for the appeal. When Bowie appeared on stage in 1972 as the androgynous character Ziggy Stardust who had sex appeal for both sexes, the gender-blurring role of the onnagata inculcated by way of Kemp’s schooling and Kansai’s clothing was obvious. Japanese-inflected notions of androgynous dress by Kansai for Bowie repositioned the definition of the masculine body. The naturally thin and sinewy physique of Bowie in fundoshi is not unrelated to the image of the mountain dwelling ascetic and survivalist-cum-hermit, or Yamabushi, and the Kodo drummers who lead Spartan lifestyles on Sado Island. Clothed in the “neither/nor” stage costumes by Kansai, Bowie could also metamorphose into the androgynous character of the onnagata in the Kabuki. This ability to portray through his physical vehicle both an ideal Japanese masculine archetype or ideal androgynous character of the Japanese theatre reveals a talent for creating characterisations in the style of method actors in line with Butler’s theory of performativity,5 but is related to a psychic reality able to translate through his physical vehicle the appearance of androgyny or the homoerotic masculine. The Kansai costumes for David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane from 1972 to 1974 reveal a distinct orientation the designer termed at the time as the making of ‘unisex’, or gender-blurring, apparel. In the Takarazuka, a Japanese all-woman theatrical troupe that began performing publicly in 1913, actresses playing the male parts, or otokoyaku, represent the ideal man. Explaining the idea behind the Takarazuka ethos of ‘gender as performance’, Robertson notes, “Clothing is the means to, and even the substance of, the character’s commutable gender …” (Robertson, 1998: 74). Kansai created for Bowie a kimono-inspired tunic cut as a mini-dress with matching stocking-like, silky boots. The mini-dress showcases Bowie’s legs and is meant to reinforce the aura of androgyny. … The fascination of Bowie’s monosexuality deeply affected me. It wasn’t because of the clothes or because of the poses. It was because

142  Helene Marie Thian one could see the drama of the human spirit and fascinating music, both of which had gone beyond sexuality. (Yamamoto, 1974: 175–6) A coniunctio oppositorium, or union of the opposites (Garry & El-Shamry, 2005: 481), between East and West and masculine and feminine archetypes manifests by way of Bowie’s on-stage demonstration of the passionate play of opposites utilising Japanese-inspired apparel designs, makeup and hair propositions with an androgynous gloss. Japanese costume history, theatrical staging and the androgynous theatre role of the onnagata collectively constitute a symbolic Moss Garden in which Bowie dynamically reenacted the coniunctio oppositorium. Conclusion Bowie’s gravitation to things Japanese conspired to firmly ensconce the phenomena of Japonism in fashion in the London gestalt in the postwar era. Arguably one of the greatest performing artists and icons of the twentieth century, Bowie acted as a lightning rod for Japonism in Western popular culture dress, repositioning the image of the masculine body through incorporation of onnagata costuming into his Ziggy Stardust stage wear. Achieving a kind of peace on a symbolic level between Japan and the Allies, Bowie’s Japan-inspired adornment and stage presentation, initially inspired by Kemp and later brought to new heights with Kansai, surpassed protestations of war and anti-imperialism, as was common in the mid-1960s in the UK and US (McKay, 2005; Harrison, 2000), by provocatively suggesting that the West actually incorporate Japaneseness (Benedict, 2006) into its dress esthetic and by extension, the individual’s intrapsychic reality. Bowie’s lyrics from the song ‘Ziggy Stardust’ succinctly reflect this adoption of Orientalism in dress (Koda & Martin, 1994) in the form of Japanese ­self-beautification proposals for the persona of Ziggy, who sang, “Screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo. Like some cat from Japan”. (Bowie, 1972) Notes 1.  Japonism refers to the influence of Japanese art, fashion, culture and aesthetics on Western culture, from the seventeenth century onward, reaching particular heights in France and other parts of Europe in nineteenth-century artistic productions. 2.  Kabuki is the traditional, musical theatre form in Japan with a lively presentation style akin to opera and providing entertainment for the masses, as opposed to Noh theatre, with its slower cadence catering to the aristocratic set. See Samuel L. Leiter’s Kabuki Theatre, History and Performance (2002) and Kunio Komparu The Noh Theatre: Principles and Perspectives (1983). For a thorough analysis of Kabuki costuming, see Shaver’s Kabuki Costume (1966).

Moss Garden  143 3.  Onnagata debuted on the Kabuki stage in the seventeenth century due to a ban on women actresses, who were often involved in prostitution (Leiter, 2002), with the upshot that ‘… in Japanese theatre one is entertained by androgyny’ (Anderson, 2011:240). See Joseph L. Anderson’s Enter a Samurai: Kawakami Otojiro and Japanese Theatre in the West, Volume 2 (2011). 4. The visual anthropological approach takes into account that the relationship between researcher and image is critical (Pink, 2006), and in line with Rose’s work on ‘reflexivity’ in the examination of images, namely, that the meaning of images arises by way of a negotiation between image and researcher (Rose, 2012). Due to this author’s lengthy residency in Japan and familiarity with ­Japanese culture, Pink’s and Rose’s approaches have been of assistance in understanding that the subjective standpoint in analysis of images is not to be discounted. 5.  Butler’s theory of performativity put forth the hypothesis that gender is a matter of repeated performance rather than assignation at birth based on genitalia. See Undoing Gender (Butler, 2004).

References Anderson, Joseph L. Enter a Samurai: Kawakami Otojiro and Japanese Theatre in the West, Volume 2. Tucson: Wheatmark, 2011. Ashmore, Sonia. “Far Out and Way In [London as Fashion Cosmopolis 1945– 1979]”. In Fashion’s World Cities, edited by Christopher Breward and David Gilbert. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006. Ashton, Dore. Noguchi East and West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Atkinson, Robert. The Life Story Interview. Thousand Oaks and London: Sage ­Publications, 1998. Batty, Elaine. “Reflections on the use of oral history techniques in social research”. People, Place & Policy Online 3 (2, 2009): 109–121. http://extra.shu.ac.uk/ ppp-online/reflections-on-the-use-of-oral-history-techniques-in-social-research/ (accessed 18 July 2014). Benedict, Ruth. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. New York: Mariner Books, 2006. Bowie, David. Ziggy Stardust, RCA Victor, 1972. Bowie, David and Masayoshi Sukita. Speed of Life. Guildford: Genesis Publications, 2011. Brown, Mick. “Lindsay Kemp: The Man Who Taught Bowie his Moves”. Crawdaddy! Magazine September, 1974. http://www.bowiewonderworld.com/ press/70/7409lkemp.htm (accessed 8 January 2014). Buckley, David. Strange Fascination: David Bowie, The Definitive Story. London: Virgin Books, 2005. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. City of Kyoto. Okobo (Wooden Clogs), 2014. http://www.city.kyoto.jp/koho/eng/ preview/37.html Kyoto City Web. (accessed 19 December 2014). Daubeny, Peter. My World of Theatre. London: Cape, 1971. Davies, Roger and Osamu Ikeno. The Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, Inc., 2002.

144  Helene Marie Thian Doane, Mary Ann. (1991) Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Devlin, Polly. “Yoko Ono”. UK Vogue, December, 1971, 100–104. Edo-Tokyo Museum. Atsuki Kokoro—Passionate Heart—Kansai Genki-ism. ­Exhibition pamphlet, 2008. Garry, Jane and Hasan El-Shamry, eds. Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature: A Handbook. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2005. Gluckman, Dale Carolyn and Sharon Sadako Takeda. When Art Became Fashion: Kosode in Edo-Period Japan. Los Angeles: Weatherhill and the Los Angeles County Museum, 1992. Goodrum, Alison. The National Fabric: Fashion, Britishness, Globalization (Dress, Body, Culture). Oxford: Berg, 2005. Gorman, Paul. The Look: Adventures in Rock & Pop Fashion. London: Adelita, 2006. Green, Richard. “Bowie on the Road”. Music Scene, July, 1973. http://www.5years. com/msjul73.htm (accessed 8 January 2014). Hall, Stuart. (ed.) Representation [Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices]. London: Sage Publications, 1997. Harrison, Benjamin. “Roots of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement”. In The United States and the Vietnam War: the Vietnam Antiwar movement, edited by Walter L. Hixson, 99–111. Oxford: Taylor & Francis, 2000. Harvey, Michael. The Ziggy Stardust Companion, 1996–2007. http://www.5years. com (accessed 8 January 2014). Hebdige, Dick. Subculture the Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge, 1979. Herbert, Jean. Shinto: At the Fountainhead of Japan. London: Routledge, 2010. Hoskyns, Barney. Glam! Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Rock Revolution. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Iwasaka, Michiko and Barre Toelken. Ghosts and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994. James, Elizabeth, ed. The V & A Museum A Bibliography and Exhibition Chronology, 1852–1996. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998. Japan Arts Council. “Onnagata”. Kabuki means, 2007. http://www2.ntj.jac.go.jp/ unesco/kabuki/en/1/1_02.html (accessed 8 January 2014). Jones, Mablen. Getting It On (The Clothing of Rock ‘n Roll). New York: Abbeville Press, 1987. Jung, Carl. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 7. London: Routledge, 1953. Kaneko, Ryuichi. Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 70s. New York: Aperture, 2009. Kansai in London and Tokyo 1971/excerpt. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=DiXOkD52UJY (accessed 8 January 2014). Kemp, Lindsay. Interview with Helene M. Thian, 26 August 2012. Kikuko. “Tsukimi (Moon Viewing)”. Love Nagoya; Know Nagoya. 2014. http:// kikuko-nagoya.com/html/tsukimi.html (accessed 8 January 2014). Kinder, Paul. “Frequently Asked Questions … David Bowie”. 2001. http://www. bowiewonderworld.com/faq.htm (accessed 8 January 2014). Koda, Harold. The Chopine. New York: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/chop/hd_ chop.htm (accessed 8 January 2014).

Moss Garden  145 Koda, Harold and Richard Martin. Orientalism: Visions of the East in Western Dress. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994. Komparu, Kunio. The Noh Theatre: Principles and Perspectives. Warren: Floating World Editions, 1983. Leiter, Samuel L. Kabuki Theatre, History and Performance. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002. Leupp, Gary. Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. McKay, George. “The social and (counter)cultural 1960s in the USA, transatlantically”. In Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s, edited by Jonathan Harris and Christoph Grunenberg, 35–62. ­Liverpool: Liverpool University Press and Tate Liverpool, 2005. Martin, Richard. “Kansai Yamamoto”. Fashion Encyclopedia, 1997. http://www. fashionencyclopedia.com/Vi-Z/Yamamoto-Kansai.html#b (accessed 8 January 2014). Maynard, Margaret. Dress and Globalisation. Manchester and New York: ­Manchester University Press, 2004. Mendelssohn, John. “David Bowie? Pantomime Rock?” Rolling Stone, April, 1971. http://iaspm-us.net/rocks-backpages-rewind-john-mendelsohn-davidbowie-­ pantomime-rock-rolling-stone-1-april-1971/ (accessed 8 January 2014). Mezur, Katherine. Beautiful boys, outlaw bodies: devising Kabuki female-likeness. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Milne-Tyte, Ashley. Sculpture in Silk: Costumes from Japan’s Noh Theater. New York: Art Capital Group, Inc., 2003. Mishima, Akira. (1973) ‘Rokku, Rokkushi, Doruggu, Shi’ (‘Rock, Roxy, Drug, Death’) in High Fashion, 1 February: 126. Museum of Osaka University. Stage Clothes. (1957). (16mm-film on DVD. 4:15 min.) In Reflecting Fashion: Kunst und Mode seit der Moderne exhibition at Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, Austria, 15 June-23 September 2012. Music Scene. “David Bowie’s Makeup Dos and Don’ts”. Music Scene, November 1973. http://www.bowiewonderworld.com/press/70/7311makeup.htm (accessed 17 January 2014). Noma, Seiroku. Japanese Costume and Textile Arts. New York and Tokyo: ­Weatherhill/Heibonsha, 1974. O’Leary, Chris. “Moss Garden”. Pushing Ahead of the Dame: David Bowie Song by Song, 2009a. http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/moss-garden/ (accessed 17 January 2014). O’Leary, Chris. “The Mime Songs”. Pushing Ahead of the Dame: David Bowie Song by Song, 2009b. http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/tag/lindsay-kemp/ (accessed 8 January 2014). Paulicelli, Eugenia and Hazel Clark, eds. The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity and Globalization. London: Routledge, 2008. Pink, Sarah. The future of visual anthropology [Engaging the Senses]. London: ­Routledge, 2006. Popsword Annual. “Zowie! Its Bowie!” Popswop Annual, December 1972. http:// www.5years.com/zib.htm (accessed 8 January 2014). Robertson, Jennifer. Takarazuka [Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan]. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.

146  Helene Marie Thian Rock, Mick. Blood and Glitter: glam rock, an eyewitness account. London: Vision On, 2001. Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies. London: Sage, 2012. Royce, Anya. Anthropology of the Performing Arts: Artistry Virtuousity and Interpretation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004. Satow, Ernest M. A Diplomat in Japan. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Classics, 2006. Schumacher, Mark. “Becoming a Shintō Priest or Priestess”. Japanese Buddhist Statuary, 1995–2013. http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/shinto-priesthood.html (accessed 8 January 2014). Shaver, Ruth. Kabuki Costume. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1966. Singer, Jane. Androgyny: The Opposites Within. York Beach: Nicolas-Hays, 2000. Smith, Claire. “True Path from Tibet to Eskdalemuir”. The Scotsman, 3 March 2007. http://www.scotsman.com/news/true-path-from-tibet-to-eskdalemuir-1-684559 (accessed 8 January 2014). Stevens, Mark. “Everything is Illuminated”. New York, 4 October 2004. http:// nymag.com/nymetro/arts/art/reviews/9937/ (accessed 10 January 2014). Tottori-Inaba Tourist Network Council. Legend of the White Rabbit of Inaba, 2014. http://www.tottori-inaba.jp/new-tokusyu/kinanse-campaign/ (accessed 8 January 2014). Tucker, Anne. The History of Japanese Photography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. UK Vogue (1972) London: Condé-Nast. 15 October: 29. van Leeuwen, Theo and Carey Jewitt. Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Sage, 2001. Watanabe, Tsuneo and Jun’ichi Iwata. The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality. London: GMP, 1989. Watts, Michael. “Oh You Pretty Thing”. Melody Maker, 22 January 1972. http:// www.bowiewonderworld.com/press/press70.htm#220172 (accessed 8 January 2014). Watts, Michael. “Stranger in a Strange Land”. Melody Maker, 24 February 1973, 4. Wilms, Anno. Lindsay Kemp and Company. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1987. Yamamoto, Kansai. Atsuki Kokoro. (Passionate Heart) Tokyo: PHP Interface, 2008. Yamamoto, Kansai. スーパーファッション (Super Fashion). Tokyo: Kodansha, 1974.

8 The “China Girl” Problem Reconsidering David Bowie in the 1980s Shelton Waldrep

Introduction Reassessing David Bowie’s cultural production in the 1980s has always been a difficult task. From the commercialisation of his work in children’s film and nostalgia projects (Labyrinth and Absolute Beginners, 1986, for example) to his disastrous self-absorption in some of his late-1980s albums (Never Let Me Down, 1987), the decade is one that many Bowie fans tend to avoid because of the seemingly weak work he produced after the string of artistic successes in the 1970s. Yet there are significant accomplishments for Bowie in the 1980s, whether it is the short mini-movie, Jazzin’ for Blue Jean (dir. Julien Temple, 1984), or a handful of underrated songs such as his remake of ‘Neighborhood Threat’ with Iggy Pop, or his nuclear horror show, ‘Time Will Crawl’.1 This essay will attempt to rectify the difference between the realities of the 1980s with Bowie’s artistic desires for them. In looking at the music on his albums at that time and at his exploration of what Edward Said calls “the Oriental”2 during his Serious Moonlight tour and his starring role in Nagisa Oshima’s film of the same year, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, I hope to show that Bowie’s work in this decade frequently references his great work in the 1970s and throws an interestingly complex light on it, given it contains subtleties that are lost under the bombast and economies of scale that were sweeping him toward a future he claims to have abhorred.3 This essay, then, will take up his work after the long seventies, when Bowie’s bouts with commercial fame in the 1980s seemed to produce a striated body of work with which we are only now able to come to terms. I call attention to Bowie’s attempt to fuse what he had learned in the seventies about avant-garde art and theatre with the dictates of a more popular style that he experienced on the album Let’s Dance (1983). ‘China Girl’ is a good example of the contradictory way that Bowie was being pulled both toward the past and the future in the 1980s, in this case, attempting a new version of an old song by expanding it into a major theme for a concert tour, music video, and film role. His ‘cover’ of his own co-written song, in other words, was a complicated

148  Shelton Waldrep homage that raised a number of questions for Bowie about how to move forward and build upon his own rich artistic legacy. “Smiling Through This Darkness”: The 1980s Perhaps the most significant question to ask about Bowie’s work in the 1980s is how to approach Let’s Dance, the 1983 album that did the most to redefine Bowie’s career, for better or worse.4 Depending upon how one looks at the album, it is either a cliff that Bowie walks off never to return (scrambling desperately to, in the 1990s, or maybe even as late as Heathen in 2002), or it is, arguably, the embarkation point for a great adventure that allowed him to change his audience and finally become the larger-than-life superman he had always dreamed about. In either case, it is hard not to see the album as connected to the 1970s and Bowie’s now central role in the music of that decade, especially as he defined its rejection of the 1960s. For Bowie seemingly to turn against that decade seems unconscionable, especially if it resulted in his defining the 1980s as something new and, ultimately, so very different from the art-rock ambience and general experimentation of his work in the 1970s, especially as the direction he went in was steadily moving away from the high water mark of the Berlin period. At the time of the release of Let’s Dance, however, it was difficult to see any grand plan for the album on Bowie’s part or to imagine the album as a blueprint for anything. The only context for it was an immediate one—that of Scary Monsters, which, though released in 1980, was clearly a seventies album, one that self-consciously brought that decade to a satisfying close. While some would see it as Bowie’s first eighties album, its signature single, ‘Ashes to Ashes’, revisits Major Tom from ‘Space Oddity’ (1969) and hence casts a backward glance from the vantage point of 1980 over the length of his seventies output.5 The album is also determinedly aesthetic in its construction, echoing the early glam and later avant-garde styles of his most productive decade. While much about Let’s Dance sounded strikingly different, that difference could at first be taken for its own kind of experimentation—the bold, clean sound; a blues guitar put with dance ­ numbers; spare, frequently opaque lyrics; songs seemingly lacking intros and outros, simply appearing then disappearing, all middle ground. Almost everything that we had grown to expect of Bowie seemed to be missing. The startling change seemed connected to his record label move from RCA to EMI in another attempt to reinvent himself. The new sound of the album was difficult to process because it was apparently so different from anything he had done before. In some ways, this very change was very Bowie-like, yet the sound was one that Bowie fans had not come to expect. Even now, it is difficult to know if Bowie was at the time consciously ‘selling out’ or trying to connect to his seventies output, especially Scary Monsters, to try to extend it into a wholly new direction. To some extent, Bowie seems to have been

The “China Girl” Problem  149 placing many of his themes from the seventies into a new sonic landscape. The fit was often awkward and Bowie was to find, in his magnificent concert tour to promote the album, Serious Moonlight, that his back catalogue of songs often represented a body of work that simply did not fit with his new hits. The HBO television special that was created to document the tour includes a few songs from the album plus carefully chosen hits from the past but excludes the work from Low (1977) and elsewhere that would pad out the full concert. Once past “Heroes”, ‘Young Americans’, and cuts from Ziggy Stardust (1972), Bowie treads into territory that would undercut the seeming 1980s-ness of Let’s Dance. The full concert video shows the concert as much less audience-friendly than one might suppose. Songs like “Heroes”, ‘Young Americans’ and ‘Station to Station’ have often been misinterpreted by audiences as being less dark than they actually are, and Bowie certainly let audiences think what they will about those songs and others, though he tends to avoid the cloying tendency he showed in the 1987 tour where he purposefully recast, even misrepresented, “Heroes” as a love song and ‘Let’s Dance’ as just a song about a party. “Modern love, walks on by”: Let’s Dance In 1983, the album thus seemed as though it reached back to the interconnected thematics of his seventies albums, almost all of which were, to varying degrees, concept albums. The first song, ‘Modern Love’, was the most experimental on the album, with co-producer Nile Rodgers’ scraping guitar riff opening the album with a jarring feel followed by Bowie’s spoken-word semi-intro. The ambiguity of the lyric, “it’s not really words, it’s just the power to charm”, seemed both a reference to his former aesthetic self—rock music as a theatre of effects—as well as to the romantic theme of the album, the abandonment (perhaps) to surface beauty and “sway”. Slowly the album gives itself over to the latter rather than the former, though perhaps not on purpose. The straightforward politics of Lodger and Scary Monsters reappear on ‘Ricochet’. Gender bending comes into play in the cover of Metro’s ‘Criminal World’. Yet those former elements don’t work as well as before, in part because they don’t jive with the sound, aren’t reducible to the spare sonics of Rodgers’ production, and seem, for the first time in Bowie’s oeuvre, not to be genuinely felt. Still, his old nature haunts the title song, ‘Let’s Dance’, especially in the snarled, directionless singing, which seems to undercut the romantic potential of the song, which is neither a luscious ballad nor a deconstruction of false ideology that the accompanying music video would suggest.6 His own cerebral thinking, in other words, screws up ‘Let’s Dance’, which is anything but a dance song. The title, however, isn’t quite ironic enough (à la “Heroes”). What wins out on the album is a new romantic point of view that is tied to a nominal narrative that straight young people could relate to, especially males: falling in love while being

150  Shelton Waldrep suspicious of it (‘Modern Love’); wooing the “girl” (‘Let’s Dance’7; ‘China Girl’, ‘Without You’); growing bored, suspicious, or distracted by the girl (‘Cat People (Putting out Fire)’, ‘Shake It’, and even ‘Criminal World’). Only ‘Ricochet’ doesn’t fit this pattern of teen love and angst over love. Yet the lyrics of the album overall, while remaining distractingly obscure or noncommittal, give the surface illusion of connectedness. ‘Modern love’ links to the “serious moonlight” of ‘Let’s Dance’ to the “love that never bends” of ‘Cat People’. “I duck and I sway” of ‘Shake It’ connects to the cover, of Bowie boxing, and to the “sway through the dance floor” of ‘Let’s Dance’. “Colour lights up your face” on ‘Let’s Dance’, and on ‘Criminal World’, “the girls are like baby-faced boys”. The red shoes of ‘Let’s Dance’ seem to reappear as the “eyes of red” in ‘Cat People’. The serious moonlight comes in again in the “colder than the moon” of ‘Cat People’ and the “full moon” of ‘Shake It’. The “white of my eyes” of ‘China Girl’ seems to get referenced again when Bowie sings “I look into my eyes” in ‘Without You’, which also makes reference to there being “no smoke without fire”, which then links back to ‘Cat People’ in the line, “I’ve been putting out fire with gasoline”. Depending upon how you look at it, the album seems to contain either very few images (eyes, the moon, fire, dancing/boxing, women/girls, and love), or an elliptical structure that attempts to replay these bits toward some kind of end, some sort of productive ambiguity. But what exactly that story is, other than the eternal one of falling in love, is never clear. The real key seems to be the “serious moonlight”: the attempt to make the theme of love and romance something more, to connect it to some sort of political agenda. The pivot for this issue doesn’t seem to be the political posturing of ‘Ricochet’ but the postcolonial complexity of his remake of ‘China Girl’, which continues the theme of the Orient that appears in “Heroes” (“I’m under Japanese influence and my honour’s at stake”), Lodger (“spent some nights in old Kyoto sleeping on the matted ground”) and Scary Monsters (“Jap girls in synthesis”), and seems to carry over into his work in the 1980s with Nagisa Oshima on Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and in the Serious Moonlight tour itself, which visited parts of Asia (Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong) for the first time for a tour of this size. Bowie’s relationship with Asia, while that of a fan, is problematic, as evidenced by his remake of the Iggy Pop song. The original verse that Bowie penned with Pop was far more personal, as Iggy sang about his relationship with his Vietnamese girlfriend, Kuelan Nguyen.8 At the point in the song where she supposedly croons to him to “just you shut your mouth”, she prefaces it with “Oh, Jimmy”, a reference to Pop’s real name, James Osterberg. In this original version, Pop’s dialogue with the ‘China girl’ seems real and even touching, as though the listener has access to an intimacy shared between two lovers. The song is built up of layers of guitars that shimmer and flush with the same depth of feeling that the song lyrics try to convey. Bowie’s ‘cover’ version, by contrast, seems to emphasise the notion of the stereotyped or clichéd Chinese woman by stressing its artificiality, its

The “China Girl” Problem  151 fiction, something you can hear in the gentle parody of the pentatonic scale in the song’s opening notes.9 Bowie’s video for the song, therefore, contains numerous references to classic movies, from the make-out session on the beach lifted from the film From Here to Eternity (1953), to Bowie’s running into town to reunite with the China girl while melodramatically pulling at his collar. Bowie is supposed to signify the man with the blue eyes, the Westerner who “wants to rule the world”, but Bowie reduces the male character in the song to a cinematic type. Despite the exaggeration of the roles that the two characters represent, Bowie means for the relationship itself to be genuine; that is, the China girl is supposed to be the object of his love, an early instance of the sort of interracial couple that Bowie would eventually inhabit as more than just a cliché.10 When the video was originally made, in 1983, it was therefore a sincere attempt on Bowie’s part to counter racism.11 Bowie had explored the area of the Australian Outback in a Range Rover in 1978 and returned down under to create two videos with pithy anti-racist messages and spoke in interviews at the time of what he saw as the rampant racism of rural Australia, often describing ‘separate but equal’ conditions much akin to the American South prior to Civil Rights legislation when Black and White people would not be served together in the same bar or restaurant. His video for ‘Let’s Dance’, filmed in Sydney, Australia, was a pointed rebuke to that country’s then racist practices. The video purposefully films Aboriginal and White Australians dancing together and has, as its titular plot, an allegory about the dangers of capitalism that stars young Aboriginal actors. Bowie was attempting something similar with ‘China Girl’, where he and director David Mallet cast New Zealand model Geeling Ng, whom Bowie met as a waitress, in the female lead. Filmed in Sydney’s Chinatown during February and March of 1983, the video’s message was supposed to be fairly straightforward and won Bowie the MTV Best Male Video of the year. Even though Bowie’s video seems to emphasise the line in the song “I feel a-tragic like I’m Marlon Brando” to call the falsity of the whole racial construct into question—that they are clearly and self-consciously playing two roles as actors—the video, by playing so close to clichés about Asian women, creates its own group of potentially racist issues. Though Bowie may mean to parody what people say about ‘China girls’, the video seems, by so clearly endearing the stereotypes, to be in danger of supporting them by not critiquing them enough, or by making the critique too subtle. The stereotype of the ‘China girl’ itself is a dangerous one to play with, one that has numerous potential pitfalls that include, but are not limited to, the reduction of women from numerous separate races to one pan-Asian identity (hence, Pop’s Vietnamese girlfriend and Bowie’s Vietnamese actress are both called ‘Chinese’); the reduction of Asian women to the hyper-feminine, as though they are doubly-marked as female (hence, Bowie and Pop’s use of ‘girl’); the further objectification of the Asian woman as something to be protected, a fragile sub-First-World colonial subject to be given “television”, though it may “ruin everything you

152  Shelton Waldrep are”. Criticism of the song’s lyrics, in other words, points up the song’s, and the video’s, potential datedness. The Orientalised subject of the song seems to reference conflicting historical notions of Asia. China was not, at the time of the song’s composition, the world power that it is today and Japan, the apex of the technology of “television”, was hardly in need of colonial protection.12 By shifting the song’s intention from personal romance to something like politics or ideological critique, Bowie opened the text to multiple interpretations, but also destabilised meaning in the song, creating possibilities that he was perhaps not able fully to anticipate or control. “Loud as Thunder”: ‘China Girl’ The best-known critique of Bowie’s video comes from Ellie M. Hisama’s 2000 essay “Postcolonialism on the Make: The Music of John ­Mellencamp, David Bowie, and John Zorn”. Hisama places Bowie’s video in relation to the schlock-pop of Mellencamp and the more avant-garde stylings of Zorn, both of whom have also penned songs about the objectification of Asian women that emphasise them as demure fetishised objects, effectively eliding sexual desire with race. Hisama understands that Bowie attempts to do something different here, that he does not want to reduce the putative China girl to a sex object but, though Bowie’s song could be read “as a brilliant piece of irony” (Hisama, 2000: 335), she also thinks that the song fails convincingly to represent the China girl as having any agency. As Hisama notes: Despite the narrator’s claim that she has the power to get him to shut up, the china girl is never permitted to speak in her own voice—the first and only time she gets the opportunity to say anything, she mouths her line while Bowie delivers it in a monotone. (Hisama, 2000: 335) Ultimately, Hisama includes Bowie’s version of the song in a long list of ­“Asiophilia” in which men enter into relationships with Asian women precisely because they seem more like ‘real’ women, the essence of heterosexuality, finally somehow purer and less adulterated than women of other cultures (Hisama, 2000: 341). In this sense, Bowie’s video shows the Asian woman transgressing simply by being seen as an equal to Bowie, a subject within a romantic pairing. As Hisama notes, the close-knit community of female Asians living in the West means that taking a White male lover is a kind of transgression, at one time an illegal one (Hisama, 2000: 341). Bowie’s video makes clear that this aspect of the attraction between the lovers is central to their relationship. Bowie seems here to be replaying a transgressive effect he used on the album Scary Monsters where he had female poet Michi Hirota belt out a Japanese translation of the lyrics of ‘It’s No Game’ like a drunken Samurai soldier. Yet ‘China Girl’ does not

The “China Girl” Problem  153 have the same kick, despite the video’s attempt to suggest it should. Hisama’s critique of Bowie finally rests on what she sees as his homogenisation of the China girl, refusing to give her specificity or individuality. The point of the song, however, may well be that she is a type—just as the speaker of the song is—though one could make the argument that this distinction is not enough since they are not equals to begin with. Bowie’s version of the song de-individualises the China girl in order to play up the political and cultural meaning of the song, but again, strays into such dangerous territory that Bowie risks being misunderstood. Still, the music video goes further than the song does to make the China girl tougher, more complex, and less of a cliché than does the text of the song. ‘China Girl’ was not Bowie’s only interest in representations of the Orient with which he was engaged in 1983. Asia became a general motif for ­Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour of the same year as the album. The tour, which sold over two and a half million tickets in almost one hundred separate venues, placed Bowie and his backing band and singers in an unspecified Asian port (possibly Singapore), a setting that comes through most clearly when Bowie performs ‘China Girl’, the second biggest single of the album, which gets an elaborate treatment here. The song begins with Bowie’s band sporting a mélange of Asian styles—a dashiki here, a pith helmet there—while his backup singers casually play cards and pass the time.13 Bowie saunters out with the coat of his pastel zoot suit flung over his shoulder. His song to his China girl seems low-key and romantic and part of a narrative that suggests the song is both sentimental and seductive, possibly connected to a bigger story to which we are not privy. Bowie appears suave and captivating, essentially himself rather than the character in the video, though he gives one of his most elaborate physical performances, at one point miming a couple in the middle of an embrace, a clear reference to his own music video.14 At this point in the performance Bowie seems to want to remind the audience of the song’s filmic or mythic origins, that it is a song about simulacra, if you will, at least in his version. The setting at a port on a wharf also suggests the implicit implications in the song of some sort of liminal space, a zone, like the wharves of London in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), where cultures can come into contact and interact. Meaning becomes unstable in the watery atmosphere of racial and sexual blurring. Ports are the means to get to other places and the points where other places can get to you. British Empire spread through naval power, but coasts are also vulnerable to ‘reverse empire’, to the people who have been conquered coming back to the heart of empire to intermingle and affect the body politic. Bowie’s stage performance suggests such a meeting, a moment when a White man and an Asian woman connect in some sort of British colonial port city bathed in the light of romance, a serious moonlight. Bowie drives this point home in the introduction and filler he filmed for HBO when the network aired its truncated version of the concert later released in its entirety in 1984 (and on DVD in 2006) in which Bowie and his band wander around an Asian port city like tourists from afar, wearing sunglasses, shopping.

154  Shelton Waldrep Bowie buys a grasshopper in a tiny cage, a Chinese symbol for good luck. In Japan, the moon is believed to coax grasshoppers to make their music.

Orientalising the Self When Bowie’s music video for ‘China Girl’ first aired, what was perhaps most surprising about it was the starkly heterosexual nature of the persona that Bowie had created. Not only was it romantic and seemingly, at first glance, very mainstream, but the video presented Bowie as unabashedly straight, a shocking image from someone who had made a career in the 1970s creating a series of proto-queer personae. Even if Bowie’s visual performance emphasised its very performativity, the character for the song seemed to go against type, a decision that angered many in his very loyal fan base. Yet the new straight personality as seen on the album and in the video and concert versions of the song contrasted with his role in Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), in which Bowie played Jack Celliers, a British officer and man’s man who is captured by the Japanese Imperial army and interred in a prisoner of war camp in Java in 1942.15 As the focus of the camp commander’s sexual interest, Bowie himself becomes a figure in a foreign environment—feminised, if you will, and made into an object of desire. The very signifiers of White Westernness that Bowie sports for the concert—blond hair, blue eyes, sparkling tan—transform him in the film into everything that the camp commander, Yanoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto), wants. That is, Bowie becomes the Other. This transformation is emphasised at the end of the film, when Celliers is killed in a ritual suicide by being buried up to his neck in the sand, his beautiful head all that is left sticking out, defiant and sculptural to the end—a metonym for the West and a cherished token to Yanoi, who cuts off some of Celliers’s hair to save. In the context of Bowie’s other Asian-inspired creations from the same year, one has to wonder whether or not Oshima’s film offers another perspective on ‘China Girl’: does it reverse the polarity of those performances to have Bowie taking the place of the ‘China girl’ in Oshima’s film? Does the movement into a same-sex environment place the work in ‘China Girl’ into another perspective? Does it alter Hisama’s damning critique of Bowie’s racial and gender politics? Does it offer any insight into Bowie’s anti-racist and anti-imperialist intentions in his music videos? It is perhaps difficult to say, though Bowie’s work from that year should be seen as all of a piece. He represents not only one, but four, China girls to the public, each one different but connected in some way. The problem for Bowie, and it was the problem for him throughout the 1980s, was that though he had more creative platforms at his disposal than ever, he was not always able to convey the complexity of his choices to the public. The Asian port motif of the Serious Moonlight tour was surely lost on most of the many people who saw it; the viewers of the ‘China Girl’ video and Oshima’s film were from two very different fan bases. The ‘China girl’ phenomenon, then, was a sort of hologram of the 1980s in which each part contained the pattern for the whole, but the meaning was lost on most of his critics and his fans.

The “China Girl” Problem  155 The interests and obsessions that Bowie had during the 1970s were carried over into the 1980s, though often in forms that were difficult to see. The hand-swipe that become a part of his gestural vocabulary at the end of the video for ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ in 1979 reappears again at the end of the ‘China Girl’ video when Geeling Ng smears her makeup—a gesture Bowie stole from the transgendered Berlin performer Romy Hagg, Bowie’s erstwhile girlfriend (Buckley, 2001: 311)—to break the audience’s illusion and make clear that what one is seeing is merely an act, a performance of gender.16 Likewise, the barbed wire that appears at the beginning and the end of ‘China Girl’ suggests the prison that Bowie is in in Merry Christmas and perhaps other imprisoning structures—like gender, race, class, and sexuality—as well. As film critic Adam Bingham has argued: Playing at times like a riposte to David Lean’s bloated The Bridge Over the River Kwai (1957), Oshima’s film ... plays out in a hermetic, enclosed milieu in which notions, indeed clichés, of national character and identity become performative, almost ritualistic, rites of passage. (Bingham, 2011: 63) In terms of the film’s specific dynamics the connection between gender and nationality references how the West has often feminised and objectified Asian men as somehow less than real men, sexualised as passive objects. As Hisama notes, this tradition is at least as old as Puccini’s Madame Butterfly or as recent as David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (Hisama, 2000: 331). The notion of the Asian man as passing for female is tied to the notion of duplicity, of misreading the surface for the symbol, or applying Western standards to an identity that is not formed within a Western context. Oshima’s film, however, and possibly Bowie’s performance of ‘China Girl’ as well, works the space between identification and objectification as it is Bowie who is objectified and a Japanese man who is in power. As Takayuki Tatsumi writes about J. G. Ballard’s childhood obsession with Japanese fighter pilots and their planes (outlined in Empire of the Sun and A User’s Guide to the Millennium, among other places), Ballard’s “homosexually binational romance with brave Japanese kamikazes turns out to be intricately tangled with man’s cybersexually fetishistic romance with sophisticated machines” (Tatsumi, 2006: 90). In Empire of the Sun, Ballard, as a young ‘Jim’, is attracted both to the Kamikaze pilots and to the ultimately superior technology of the Americans’ B-29s. Tatsumi concludes: It is through a looking glass called Japan that Ballard feels more comfortable effacing himself and creating an interzone where his British body melds with his American fantasy technosexually and multinationally. (Tatsumi, 2006: 91)

156  Shelton Waldrep Through the medium of film and video Bowie does the same, giving representation to a desire of escaping gender and nation, space and time, to become the sort of international presence that he had been at least since his album Lodger in 1979, which celebrates his peripatetic nature, his ability to be a citizen of the world. The violence of sexual attraction does not seem to be lost on Bowie, who includes in the ‘China Girl’ video a disturbing scene in which Bowie, as a sort of European financier in top hat and tails first sees the China girl working in a field (in some sort of Maoist retraining program?) and chooses her for a job in his factory. Bowie and a Chinese military officer approach her as she lies on the ground. Bowie makes his fingers into a gun and mimes shooting her. She rises toward him and Bowie pats her head. By running the actual encounter between Bowie and the China girl in reverse, some of the shock of the scene is muted, but when pictured in linear time, it is clear that Bowie is actually touching her hair and then miming shooting her. Captured in Bowie’s usual minimal gestural form is a pantomimed reference to one of the iconic photographs of the Vietnam War, the brutal point-blank killing of Nguyễn Văn Lém by Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, taken in Saigon in February 1968 (“General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon”). As if to underline this reference, the image of Bowie and Ng momentarily loses its colour saturation and becomes almost black and white. The sudden transition from colour to black and white suggests the brightness of a gunshot as well as the iconicity of the black and white photo on which the scene is based. Bowie seems to reference the history of brutality toward Asians by Westerners by depicting the brutality of war. In that sense, Vietnam becomes a generational stand-in for World War II as Bowie translates from one era to another.17 Conclusion What changes about Bowie with Let’s Dance is that while previously videos and live concert performances had enabled him to expand and layer meanings onto songs that already had a large number of meanings—were indeed, elliptical or circular machines for producing nearly endless numbers of productively ambiguous meanings (from Ziggy Stardust through Scary Monsters)—his music in the 1980s depended upon the music videos and the Serious Moonlight tour to explain the music, or at least to provide it with a palatable political and/or cultural backstory to make it clear to some of ­Bowie’s fans (or to Bowie himself) that he was still doing something artistic, if not avant-garde. The 1980s were a decade on which subtlety in general was lost or never took hold. And while Bowie may have been reaching, he was to plumb lower depths to come. For better or worse, throughout the 1980s Bowie was to say that he was doing things that were not clear to his audience: that the over-the-top choreography of the Glass Spider Tour of 1987 and 1988, for example, was an attempt to do Pina Bausch in its combination

The “China Girl” Problem  157 of dancing and theatrics, as if Bowie had created his own attempt at ‘tanztheater.’18 The 1980s, or Bowie himself, would never let him have it both ways. As we attempt to take stock of Bowie’s influence and the enormous amount of material that he has produced in a career spanning more than four decades, we must keep in mind that it may be only now that we can begin to understand what was happening in his output in the 1980s—and perhaps, by extension, the early 1990s. The ‘Let’s Dance’ phenomenon represented not only the high water mark of his fame, but also the point of highest saturation of his ability to make any one album into a multi-performative model in which the meanings of the individual songs are merely the ur-text on which to drape other possible interpretations and performances—visual and otherwise—in the form of live concerts, music videos, interviews, photo shoots, etc. The album, tour and subsequent publicity placed Bowie into the pantheon of highly paid stars and allowed him for the first time to hold his own with the likes of the Beatles or Michael Jackson. The fact that Bowie would not stray near the top ever again was probably to his benefit as an artist, but the early 1980s emphasise the extent to which we have to examine not just Bowie’s music but other concomitant performances as well. His work needs to be seen in the terms outlined by Raymond Williams, as “a whole way of life” (Williams, 1994: 60). This cultural materialist approach, which I try to illustrate briefly here, is arguably the best way to understand what Bowie has achieved. We have to re-create as fully as possible the texture of each performative moment he created. Though Bowie’s career may be far from over, he has signalled that it is time to begin to evaluate it in total as can be seen by his giving access to his archive for a show of his costumes, props and videos at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2013. As we do this work we need to put emphasis on those areas of Bowie’s career with which we have not fully reckoned—the late albums Hours (1999), Heathen and Reality (2003); the leaked material from Toy and the unfinished Outside/ Contamination series—and return to the periods previously found fallow, like the sixties and the eighties, when Bowie was constantly retooling, trying to overcome himself, and attempting to find his own place within history and to come out of a dark time alive and well. Notes 1.  Other highlights of the decade would include another remake with Pop, ‘Dancing with the Big Boys’, which has strong lyrics and is underestimated as a political song, and Bowie’s greatest creation of the decade, his production and writing on Pop’s album Blah Blah Blah (1986). 2.  My use of the notion of the “oriental” as the Other of the “occidental” comes from Edward W. Said’s seminal Orientalism (1979) and Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs,1982 [L’Empire des Signes, 1970]. Said makes clear that the Western notion of the Orient is a construction made up of everything that the West does not want to acknowledge within itself – hyper-sexuality, anti-rationality,

158  Shelton Waldrep contradiction – that gets displaced. This passive feminine construct is itself the result of upon a supposedly objectified object of study that we call geographically and temporally the Oriental. The passive feminine construct is itself the result of a long history of what he terms “Orientalism”. 3.  See, for example, Bowie’s claim in Alan Yentob’s documentary, Changes: Bowie at Fifty, that in the period 1983–84, “Commercially I sold ... an awful lot of albums with work that I now feel was very inferior ... artistically and aesthetically it was probably my lowest point” (Yentob, 1997). 4.  Let’s Dance was a huge commercial success for Bowie, especially in terms of the tour that supported the album. The album went platinum in the United States, France and the United Kingdom. The song ‘Let’s Dance’ reached the number-one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for the United States. ‘Modern Love’ and ‘China Girl’ were in the top fifteen. The album received a mostly positive critical reception. 5.  For a somewhat different reading see Chapter 3 by Dillane, Devereux and Power in this volume. 6.  ‘Let’s Dance’ is itself an unusual song. It is, like the album it is on, a black hole of meaning, despite the fact that it receives by far the most ornate attention and production.’ Rodgers spatialises the song—much as Bowie does on his song ‘Win’ from Young Americans (1975)—and brings his signature break outs to the song—each instrument getting isolated and disconnected from the rest of the song while being forced to carry the rhythm or melody. 7.  Though Bowie is given the sole songwriting credit for the ‘Let’s Dance’, Rodgers has described in detail the process he went through to rearrange the chords of this song and ‘China Girl’. See for example, Rodgers, 2011: 190, 195–96. 8.  Pop was later to marry Suchi Asano, a young woman he met at a concert in Japan, in 1985. They divorced in 1999. Some of the songs on Pop’s third and final album with Bowie, Blah Blah Blah, are probably addressed to her. 9.  A pentatonic or gapped scale has five as opposed to the usual eight notes in a diatonic (major or minor) scale. The particular melodic pattern set up by notes with uneven intervals (spaces between notes) is often perceived as representing older musical scales from more ancient music cultures. In the case of China, the pentatonic-scaled melodies, played on Chinese instruments, become a sonic shorthand, to Western ears, for the ‘East’ (also part of the Orientalising project). 10.  In 1992 Bowie married Somali born supermodel, Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid. 11.  Loder, Kurt (12 May 1983), “Straight Time”, Rolling Stone (395): 22–28, 81. 12.  See Chapter 7 by Helene Thian in this volume for an extended discussion of Bowie and Japonism. 13.  For more on the concert and Bowie’s use of Asian motifs, please see Chapter five of my book The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie (Waldrep, 2004). 14.  Bowie’s pantomime may well reference another filmic moment since it is exactly like a trick that Sean Connery uses as James Bond to escape some guards at the beginning of From Russia with Love (1963). 15.  For an extended reading of this film, see Chapter 9 by Mehdi Derfoufi in this volume. 16. Bowie repeats this gesture in his video ‘Jump They Say’ (1993; dir. Mark Romanek), which is also about the violence done to the body by the imposition of allocentric identity systems.

The “China Girl” Problem  159 17.  Nile Rodgers speculates that the lyrics to ‘China Girl’ might refer to “[o]ne of the nicknames for heroin among users ... ‘China White’” (Rodgers, 2011: 195). Iggy Pop was definitely known to have used heroin and at the time of the making of The Idiot (1977) he and Bowie were in Europe’s heroin capital, Berlin. If R ­ odgers is correct, then the song’s violent imagery takes on another level of meaning and the paranoid underpinnings of some of its lyrics might be explained as partly an explanation of the effects of drug use. 18.  See, for example, Bausch’s signature fall, which Bowie seemed to incorporate into the dance steps of the concert and to use as early as his video for ‘Fashion’ from Scary Monsters. Bowie’s choreographer for the tour was Toni Basil, whom he had used before. Bowie’s interest in calling attention to dance continued in his next tour, 1990’s the Sound and Vision tour, which featured LaLaLa Human steps dancer Louise Lecavalier and was much more artistically successful.

References Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Bingham, Adam. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”. Cineaste 36 (2, 2011): 62–63. Bowie, David. “Cat People”, Let’s Dance. EMI America, 1983. Bowie, David. “China Girl”, Let’s Dance. EMI America, 1983. Bowie, David. “Criminal World”. Let’s Dance. EMI America, 1983. Bowie, David. “Let’s Dance”. Let’s Dance. EMI America, 1983. Bowie, David. “Modern Love”. Let’s Dance. EMI America, 1983. Bowie, David. “Shake It”. Let’s Dance. EMI America, 1983. Bowie, David. “Without You”. Let’s Dance. EMI America, 1983. Bowie, David. “It’s No Game”. Scary Monsters (and Supercreeps). RCA Records, 1980. Buckley, David. Strange Fascination: David Bowie, The Definitive Story. London: Virgin, 2001. Hisama, Ellie M. “Postcolonialism on the Make: The Music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie, and John Zorn”. In Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music, edited by Richard Middleton, 229–346. New York: Oxford, 2000. Loder, Kurt. “Straight Time”. Rolling Stone (395), 12 May 1983, 22–28, 81. Rodgers, Nile. Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2011. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Tatsumi, Takayuki. Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Waldrep, Shelton. The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Williams, Raymond. “The Analysis of Culture”. In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey, 56–64.New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Yentob, Alan. Changes: Bowie at Fifty. BBC2, 4 January 1997.

9 Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness David Bowie in ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence’ Mehdi Derfoufi Introduction David Bowie is a star of the transmedia era.1 Bowie’s artistic output espouses all available forms of the media sphere—video clips, television ­commercials and print advertisements, websites, movies, fashion, videogames, ­appearances on TV shows, concerts, albums, contemporary art, derivative products to his effigy, even online banking—not to mention the so-called “Bowie Bonds”.2 The extreme reflexivity which is his aesthetic trademark seems almost like a way of having fun with the exceptional influence he exerts over the realm of postmodern culture. It is as if David Bowie were trying to make us u ­ nderstand that, if he ends up quoting himself so much, it is because e­ verything around us has become “bowie-ised”. There are in fact three aspects to David Bowie’s persona: a carefully cultivated image ­stretching across a spectrum of media, sexual ambivalence and a boundary spanning body. Any discussion of his work as an actor has perforce to take into account these three aspects. However, it is not the ambition of this ­chapter to cover the full breadth of his acting career, but to explore what makes David Bowie particularly interesting for cinema. If one were to look for a word to characterise the basis of Bowie’s image, it would be with no doubt ‘otherness’: a manifold otherness that fundamentally escapes being pinned down into any existing category and is incarnated in the body of a star. The transformations of Michael Jackson’s body seek to stabilise a reconstructed identity whereas Bowie is a shapeshifter whose body aligns with our desires while also arousing them. From this perspective, one can argue that the carefully crafted sense of otherness visible throughout ­Bowie’s career as a singer inevitably shapes his film personae. This is particularly striking in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (­Nagisa Oshima, 1983). In my view, this film taps the potential of the Bowie body as much and as completely as can be. In this film, the star’s body and its otherness become entangled in the political and aesthetic stakes of the ­ ­postcolonial relationship as envisioned by Oshima: is a (really) non-­Western cinema possible? Is it possible to create a cinematic gaze that does not p ­ ertain to the Western way of looking at things, which is based on an imperative of transparency and unveiling, as well as a binary opposition between identity

Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness  161 and otherness? This chapter is mainly devoted to the analysis of the way the “boundary spanning Bowie body” relates to these questions, engaging with the idea of Orientalism particularly in terms of gender. Before turning to a more complete analysis of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, insofar as ­Bowie’s movie career is not often addressed, it seems necessary to e­ mphasise the way his work as an actor is a full-fledged part of his artistic work. Regarding gender issues, I will show how The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983) displays something like an underground (in)version of Bowie’s m ­ asculinity, forming a dyptich with Oshima’s film. 3

Bowie and the Cinema According to the usual criteria of cinephilia, the film career of David Bowie hardly qualifies as brilliant. Only a handful of the films he appears in are considered to be “good” films. What is more, no one would dare to argue that this British artist known the world over for his songs is also a great actor with a secure place in cinema history. Nevertheless, one has to assume that, if respected directors keep working with him, he must have some sort of ­talent. In the final analysis, his oeuvre as an actor is quite ­impressive for a pop star. He has seldom appeared in main parts, most of the time ­settling for walk-on parts as noteworthy as they were brief. In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, 1992) or Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001), B ­ owie’s performance amounts to little more than a fleeting a­ ppearance. It is as if one of the many potential images of the star that wander about at all times in the flow of media had hit the silver screen by accident. A similar effect can be observed when Bowie is ‘present’ through one or more ­musical quotes (as in Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson, 2004)). He is probably the rock star that gets quoted most often in movies or advertisements. But in Into the Night (John Landis, 1985), The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin ­Scorsese, 1988), Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996) or The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006), he does create fully embodied characters. Even if they appear ever so briefly, the latter are obviously meant to make an impact. In the eyes of most observers, the pop star outshines the movie actor, which is precisely the reason it is important to bear in mind that, as far as Bowie himself is concerned, his work as an actor is not just a marketing stunt but something that has been part and parcel of his artistic endeavor for a long time. Take for instance his very first film, The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976). This isn’t a mere star vehicle. Bowie’s taste for ­avant-garde trends and contemporary art is well known. At the time, Roeg was a filmmaker of the British New Wave who ‘flirted’ with ­experimental cinema. Even if the final result may raise doubts, it was the fruit of a ­serious and ambitious project, born of a genuine partnership between two a­ rtists. Bowie subsequently reaped critical acclaim while also enjoying the accolades

162  Mehdi Derfoufi of the general public as soon as 1979 with his performance in Bernard Pomerance’s play, The Elephant Man. He went on to make the following statement at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival: I never wanted to be anything other than a director. That’s why ­everything I’ve done in music has been conceptualized to such a great degree. [...] Until somebody gives me money to make a film, I’ve got to do it on albums or in concerts. (Maslin, 1983) Even if one has to take Bowie’s statements—which sometimes veer on the inconsistent and contradictory side—with a grain of salt, there’s no ­doubting that he takes his cinema very seriously, and in perfect coherence with his other artistic activities at that. The fact of the matter is that critics have rarely taken his parts in the movies as seriously as he seems to do himself; according to them, David Bowie is merely a rock star who happens to have acted in a couple of films. Opportunistic and Ambiguous Remasculinisation of Bowie’s Image during the 1980s Scary Monsters (1980) is at once one of Bowie’s best albums and the ­starting point of a new stage in the star’s command of media images—which would keep unfolding in the years to come. In their very stylistic ­opposition, the major songs ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and ‘Fashion’ highlight the twofold nature that informs Bowie’s new persona; it took all his considerable talent to ­prevent this duality from contradiction. In this album, Bowie especially displays self-­ reflexivity and self-quoting through the figure of Major Tom, who appears to be—more than a figure of belief—a “junky” (as if it was ­nowadays ­impossible to believe in anything). Of course, the self-parodic dimension here is obvious, as part of the reflexivity that characterises ­Bowie’s new ­artistic and business strategy. Bowie’s otherness shifts from the figure of an alien visiting from another planet (a true figure of identification and ­fascination) to a transhuman body which has the capacity for encoding the mediasphere. The year 1983 proved to be a watershed year for Bowie. He enjoyed worldwide success with the album Let’s Dance and graced the covers of major international magazines such as Rolling Stone and Time4 with a new look that was less eccentric than in the 1970s but remained shaped by ­sexual ambiguity. Rolling Stone’s cover title “David Bowie Straight”, ­accompanied by a photograph displaying his new look, is interesting because the ­polyvalence of the word “straight” highlights one of the aspects of the marketing strategy adopted by the star in this threshold year of 1983. There were now a few darker locks in his bleached blond hair, betraying ever so slightly the artificiality of Bowie’s image but as for the rest, the portrait is ‘clean’.

Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness  163 Gone are the eccentricities of the 1970s, the makeup and the orange hair, the Glam rock outfits and the glitter dust. Taking into account the context of the Reagan-Thatcher years, one could speculate about a certain normalisation (albeit relative) of David Bowie’s image and even detect the first signs of it being remasculinised.5 However, the refinement of this new image allows it to retain some sort of sexual ambiguity, which Bowie uses as a device which allows him to embody a charismatic seduction, alluring for both sexes, and based on bodily performance. Lastly, this position as a ‘boundary spanner’ builds the artistic legitimacy of the Bowie persona on the union of the mainstream and the avant-garde. This strategy took on a special significance in the two films that ­showcased the British star that year: The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983) and Merry  ­ Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Nagisa Oshima, 1983). Thus, at the moment of his greatest commercial success, David Bowie was headlining two films bordering on the avant-garde while flirting with mainstream ­­cinema. Because the two films form a kind of diptych, it seems important to give some attention to The Hunger before turning to the more detailed study of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. Both of these films were obviously made with an eye on the box office. One might argue that The Hunger is handicapped by a certain visual ­ponderousness, but the fact that it became a cult movie shows that it was far from an insignificant film. Critics have even acknowledged in hindsight that it epitomises certain aesthetic characteristics of the 1980s. The Hunger is a curious combination of the aesthetics of the television commercial and some kind of postmodern/urban reinterpretation of gothic cinema and film noir. That said, The Hunger also depicts (male and female) homosexuality as well as relationships between men and women in a rather contradictory manner. The film vacillates between the stigmatisation of a sexuality shown as monstrous and dangerous—the AIDS metaphor is rather obvious here— and an undeniable fascination for an ‘outlaw’ way of life that is outside the dominant codes of mainstream society. The latter reading is of course facilitated by the personas of each of the three stars who play the main characters; Catherine Deneuve (as the glamour queen), David Bowie and Susan Sarandon. The masculinity of John (Bowie), who is the companion of the Deneuve character Miriam6, symbolises the submissive and effeminate masculinity one can find in anti-feminist rhetoric. But his physical decline followed by his demise, as well as his replacement by Sarah (Sarandon), allows the film to put the lesbian relationship center stage (Hanson, 1999: 190–191). John represents a defeated masculinity that has been betrayed by the false promises of power (i.e., eternal life) made by a powerful woman. Unlike John, Sarah’s male companion cuts a possessive and arrogant figure which is a parodic version of the alpha male—but she manages to get rid of him all the same. And, finally, Sarah’s transformation, which results from the mutual attraction she and Miriam have for each other, is akin to a story of female empowerment.

164  Mehdi Derfoufi Taking into account the fact that both films appeared the same year, I would argue that the Major Celliers character in Merry Christmas Mr.  ­Lawrence is John’s doppelganger. In fact, on one hand there is The Hunger, perpetuating the ‘underground’ image of Bowie’s ‘Berlin’ years (Low/“Heroes”/Lodger, 1977–1979), and on the other hand there is Nagisa Oshima’s film, playing with the “new look” that Bowie introduced in Let’s Dance, with its obviously ‘straightened up’ masculinity—albeit not without a touch of ambiguity. Functioning as the mirror image of The Hunger, a ‘lesbian movie’ epitomised by the kiss exchanged by Deneuve and S­ arandon, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence became a staple of gay culture with its emblematic kissing scene involving Bowie and Sakamoto. This alone shows how much the two films echo each other, almost as if they were meant to form a genuine diptych. Postcolonial Cinema, David Bowie and the Desire for the West Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence allows us to observe the reconfigured Bowie persona dovetailing with the stylistics of an art house film with ­international ambitions—and directed by an avant-garde auteur from the Japanese New Wave to boot. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is indeed the very first attempt by Oshima at an international production and his first English-language film. It so happens that, at the time, Oshima was known mainly for In the Realm of Senses (1976) and Empire of Passion (1978). These two pornographic films were marked by an aesthetic perfectionism that pushes the idea of the visionary and God-like artist to its very limits. The end result is the transformation of the voyeuristic logic of porn into a formal avant-­gardiste experimentation, something that is equally at work in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. But the most interesting aspect of the movie (which is also what makes it so original) is the way Oshima’s aesthetic project, which leans towards a postcolonial cinema, “meets” Bowie’s persona. The plot of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is based on stories by ­Laurens Van der Post who was a prisoner of war (POW) during World War II. The film takes place in 1942 in a Japanese POW camp on the island of Java. The commander of the camp is Captain Yonoi, a young Japanese officer played by Ryuichi Sakamoto, a Japanese pop star who is also the composer of the film’s music. The arrival of Major Jack Celliers, played by Bowie, ­crystallises the tensions borne of the postcolonial relationship of East and West. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is rooted in the universe of the p ­ risoner of war film and follows the blueprint laid out by cinematic forebears such as A Town Like Alice (Jack Lee, 1956) or Three Came Home (Jean Negulesco, 1950).7 However, it is influenced above all by The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957). Similar to David Lean’s movie, the theme of intercultural ­interaction between Eastern and Western people is refocused on an all-male

Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness  165 community. However, Oshima’s film reverses the usual point of view; it is no longer the West that looks at the East but the other way around, hence the representation of a desire for the West substituting for the representation of Western superiority at work in David Lean’s film. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence reactivates the Western cultural ­memory of the war in the Pacific in a critical manner, flying in the face of the ­dominant American conception of multiculturalism (of which the late Stuart Hall was one of the most prominent critics) with its tendency to essentialise ethnic groups. As pointed out by Edward Said, unlike the Americans, the British consider Japan a “cultural rival”—a rival imperial civilisation, that is (Said, 2003: 14). The film’s British POWs are those whose detention occurred after the fall of Singapore in 1942. A humiliating defeat for Great Britain, this historic event had a great impact in Asia because it lent strength to the idea that, after all, the ‘invincibility’ and ‘supremacy’ of White men might be nothing but myths. The idea of White vulnerability is important for the comprehension of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a film that fed on the historical memory of the events it depicts, but which was shot in a quite different context. The expression of a desire for the West is part of a crisis of imperial ­Japanese masculinity that is indicative of the malaise generated by the ­country’s defeat by, and subsequent submission to, the United States in 1945. But this masculinity crisis also alludes to the more recent episode of Yukio Mishima committing seppuku in November 1970 in the a­ ftermath of a failed coup in which he took part.8 Indeed, the Captain Yonoi ­character is an explicit reference to Mishima, whereas the soundtrack’s main score ‘­Forbidden Colors’ alludes to Mishima’s eponymous novel. As shown by Chozick, in this novel Mishima “broke away from traditional Japanese notions of sexual orientation in favor of a more Western construction of the Self” (Chozick, 2007). Homosexuality is shown by Mishima as being at once the expression of a masculinity in crisis, the never-before r­ealised possibility of transcending the restrictive limits imposed by Japanese ­ ­patriarchy and, lastly, the highest expression of an artistic and aesthetic ­sensitivity to the real world as well as to the world of emotions. Because of the very characteristics of his persona as detailed previously (stardom, sexual ambiguity, an artistic status somewhere between the avant-garde and the mainstream), it is up to David Bowie to embody the realisation of these three aspects: a masculinity in crisis, the transcending of gender and the aesthetic Absolute. This is the reason Captain Yonoi finds himself attracted, romantically as well as sexually, to Major Celliers, an experience which leads to his demise. As for Celliers, he makes use of his charisma to provoke the destabilisation of Japanese male power. This is how former prisoner of war Eric Lomax remembers the state of mind of the British POWs: “We began to experience the overriding, ­dominant feature of POW life: constant anxiety, and utter powerlessness and frustration” (Lomax, 1998: 72). This might as well be the description

166  Mehdi Derfoufi of Captain Yonoi’s state of mind. In Mishima’s work, this Japanese crisis of masculinity has a morbid aspect, but also a somewhat positive value as a dynamic movement leading to regeneration and to the reaffirmation of an innate superiority, whereas in Oshima’s case the result is more ambivalent. His film does not offer any closure. In other words, Oshima’s postcolonial aesthetic project rejects the binary logic of Western representations. A huge part of Oshima’s work deals with issues of cinematographic ­representation—which is precisely the reason he has always been identified with a certain artistic vanguard. As pointed out by Heath regarding In the Realm of the Senses (1976), [...] the ‘out of frame’, the ‘hors-champ’ to be recaptured in the film by the spatially suturing process of ‘folding over’ of which field/reversefield is the most obvious device, but that of the edging of every frame, of every shot, towards a problem of ‘seeing’ for the spectator. (Heath, 1981: 150) In In the Realm of Senses, as well as in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, the viewer’s position as an authorised peeping Tom brings with it no s­ atisfaction. Oshima’s directing style prevents the gaze of the viewer from reuniting the subject and the object of desire. This problematisation of the place occupied by the viewer dovetails with postcolonial concerns regarding c­ ontemporary Japan, the latter being a major aesthetic and political issue in Oshima’s work. Critics have often lingered on the ‘scandalous’ leitmotifs of Oshima’s films: sexuality, power, politics, violence, cultural identities—all of these themes being considered as having a subversive aspect in and of themselves. Stars’ Bodies, Aesthetic of the West/East Relationship and the Negotiation of a Third Space of Identification Cinema is a mode of representation dominated by binary oppositions. As Philippe Descola has shown, in the West, since at least the Renaissance, the representation of the world and human beings therein is based on a rational project characterised by a division between Nature and Culture. In film, this translates aesthetically as the centrality of the human figure, placed as a ­Subject set apart from all that is not human. Cinema offers us a ­representation of the world that is shaped by dualities: time/space; the human subject/his (or her) environment (the sets); that which is ­contained by the frame/that which remains outside the frame; the field/the r­ everse-field or the viewer/the image shown on the screen—the underlying notion being that of an All-­Perceiving Subject (to use the words of Metz, 1986: 45) viewed as separate from the world at large. In spite of his/herself, this ­subject is assigned a form of neutrality to the exclusion of any gender, racial or class identity.

Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness  167 These are precisely the “matters of fact” that are called into question in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. And by calling them into question, the film highlights the way such binary oppositions contribute to the r­ eproduction of dominant representations in the sense that they veil power inequalities under the guise of neutrality or the so-called objective distance of the viewer. Thus, in order to be able to call into question the ‘matter-of-factness’ of this unequal relationship, it is crucial to fight the identification processes that commonly induce these binary logics. Taking into account the fact that the dominant Western conception of cinema aims at implementing a mechanism intended to reconcile ­conflicting terms, we could say that, in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Oshima strives to offer an alternative to this dominant Western conception of r­ epresentation. But how does this alternative work ? As Dyer points out, the charismatic power that characterises the star “holds together” conflicting terms (Dyer, 2003: 53). Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence leaves the viewer facing the instability of his/her own s­ ituation because of the conflicting terms with which he/she has to identify. Of course, these contradictions are not only thematic in nature. They are backed by a specific filmic direction, as we can see in the famous ­kissing scene between Celliers (Bowie) and Yonoi (Sakamoto). One of the f­actors enabling Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence to make such an alternative ­credible is the mano a mano between its two stars, Bowie and Sakamoto; the film ­managing the rare feat of perfectly blending the character with the star, without the awkward discrepancies that sometimes prevent some stars from being credible as actors. From the Western viewpoint, ­Sakamoto’s (Yonoi’s) body belongs to a clearly otherised character. Nonetheless, ­ Sakamoto’s (Yonoi’s) desire for Bowie (Celliers) destabilises this unequal relationship and oscillates our position as viewers, which becomes uncertain. Indeed, like Yonoi, we desire Celliers too and cannot but identify with this desire. But Sakamoto’s (Yonoi’s) exoticised body is eroticised as well. What is more, having identified with Yonoi’s desire for Celliers, we become aware of the exoticisation of Bowie’s (Celliers’) body, which is reflected in the erotic fixation on the star’s bleached blond hair. Bowie’s (Celliers’) whiteness ­ must indeed tend towards an absolute Whiteness so as to become the ideal object of desire. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence invites us, as viewers, to ­experience the position of the postcolonial subject. The latter involves an identification process similar to the one analyzed by de Lauretis regarding the female film spectator: [...] we could say that the female spectator identifies with both the ­subject and the space of the narrative movement, with the fi ­ gure of movement and the figure of its closure, the narrative image. Both are figural identifications, and both are possible at once; more, they are ­ concurrently borne and mutually implicated by the ­ process of ­ narrativity. This manner of identification would uphold both

168  Mehdi Derfoufi positionalities of desire, both active and passive aims: desire for the other, and desire to be desired by the other. This I think, is in fact the operation by which narrative and cinema solicit the spectator’s ­consent and seduce women into femininity: by a double identification, a ­surplus of pleasure produced by the spectators themselves for cinema and society’s profit. (de Lauretis, 1984: 183) The refinement and sensitivity of Yonoi can, as a matter of fact, be read at once as the sign of his belonging to a higher social class and as the sign of an ongoing Westernisation process (indeed, with the exception of Colonel ­Lawrence, Yonoi is the only character of the film able to speak both ­Japanese and English flawlessly). The film appears at first glance to be endorsing the notion of Western cultural superiority. This is the case, for instance, in the scenes where the Japanese act in a despicable ­manner: they are shown to be trapped inside their archaic national traditions. Their arrogance and ­brutality, especially as exemplified notably by Sergeant Hara (Takeshi Kitano), are in stark contrast with the intelligence and c­ulture of Colonel Lawrence (Tom Conti). Nevertheless, the film does not aim to ­reconcile contradictory terms (or to eliminate the weakest of two terms) in order to reach some final closure. Quite the contrary, it strives to stay in the narrow space of postcolonial negotiation where neither can ­ultimately win out over the other. From the Japanese viewpoint, the tertiary ­character of this space (which is neither inside nor outside the frame but on its very edge) is ­probably the best translation of the experience of i­ rreversible ­transformation that takes place in the ‘relationship’ with the Western Other. These cracks can hence be c­ onsidered as spaces of negotiation and r­ econfiguration where an experience exemplified by Celliers’ influence on Yonoi and allowing for the emergence of a new, postcolonial subject takes place (Bhabha, 2004: 169). The Star’s Body as a Desire for Otherness The kissing scene, having acquired mythical status since the film’s release, is thus one of the most important scenes in the whole film. The sequence begins with an eyeline match between a close-up of Yonoi’s face and a pan shot from the point of view of Yonoi. The pan shot sweeps the group of British prisoners. The film contains numerous shots from Yonoi’s point of view, which clearly shows that this is also the story of his personal ­fantasies. All the prisoners are weak, wounded and demoralised. They represent what used to be an ultra-virile masculinity that has been defeated. They are indeed the epitome of defeat. Out of shame, most of the men look away so as to avoid Yonoi’s gaze. Only Colonel Lawrence looks Yonoi in the eyes, with a posture that expresses his disapproval. Yonoi’s reaction is telling: he

Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness  169 flees. A British officer then calls out to him and reminds him of his duty. Yonoi responds by overreacting and thereby demonstrating his absolute lack of authority, which the film suggests is linked to his ­unmanliness. Yonoi indulges in a—mostly ridiculous—show of strength. Facing the ­uncooperative ­officer, he adopts the posture of the alpha male and displays his sword as if it were a badge of superiority so as to bring his opponent to heel by brutally i­ntimidating him. The strategy seems to work but this is obviously a part Yonoi is loath to play; he seems to hesitate and gives a faint scowl. He closes his eyes and appears to be silently praying. The close-up of Yonoi’s face is then immediately followed by a close-up of Celliers’ (Bowie’s) face, the effect being reinforced by the camera dollying in. The montage underlines the fact that Celliers (Bowie) is the ­materialisation of Yonoi’s secret desires. Yonoi desires the Other’s body as an incarnation of the Absolute and of perfection, both of which are now beyond the reach of his “deficient” masculinity. One might add that this Absolute and this perfection have both to do with masculinity, even if Bowie’s masculinity has its share of ambiguity. The desirable body of the Other is a Western one, and it belongs to Bowie, the reason being that it is invested—and not only within the Western collective imagination—with a modernity that is the opposite of the so-called fossilised traditions of Japan. The way the film shows them, Japanese bodies seem to be ossified by rituals and taboos (but what is at stake here is the staging of a tension between two reverse images of East and West, not the production of a discourse of truth on the nature of one or the other). The way Sakamoto’s (Yonoi’s) body resists Bowie’s (Celliers’) ­charismatic power is quite striking. Sakamoto’s (Yonoi’s) body is indeed itself eroticised, offered to our glance and fetishised. A large number of shots insist on showing his white gloves, the details of his uniform, the perfection of his white shirt which is buttoned up with great care, the subtle ­reflections of the perfectly smooth skin of his face. The desire of Captain Yonoi for Major Celliers is not reciprocated. But while we are invited to identify with this desire, we are also invited to appreciate the beauty of Sakamoto’s (Yonoi’s) body. The image of Bowie the star is unable to assert itself completely because Bowie (Celliers) is caught in the trap of Captain Yonoi’s desire. Thus, the ­fascinating scene where Celliers performs a pantomime in his cell is at once a final challenge, a tragic gesture and an admission of helplessness. This is not an expression of the character himself but of Bowie’s body, a body which is confined within someone else’s fantasy. Oshima has ­managed quite astutely to dissociate the star’s body from the very basis of his artistic ­legitimacy—his voice. Indeed, it is Celliers’ younger brother, who is afflicted with a twisted body and appears in several flashbacks, who has a gift for singing. Part of the star’s charismatic power is thus transferred elsewhere, allowing for a putting in perspective of Bowie’s (Celliers’) image as an embodiment of the Absolute and of perfection. All this is exemplary of the concrete work of

170  Mehdi Derfoufi negotiation done by the film. These sequences give a depth to the superficial image presented to the world by Major Celliers—but their oneiric aspect allows for a subtle balance. It is impossible to be sure of the authenticity of Celliers’ memories. Yonoi’s perception can be understood as a tragic delusion engendered by the “staging” of a fantasmatic West. Far from being an embodiment of the Absolute, Celliers is in fact consumed with guilt. Thus, the contradiction between what is seen by Yonoi and what is seen by the viewer, as well as the unstable position the viewer is assigned (neither on one side nor on the other, but at the edge of that which remains impossible to represent), all these contradictions become bearable for a Western glance for one reason and one reason only—the presence of the star, of ‘our’ star, David Bowie. The charismatic phenomenon produced specifically by the star prevents the fiction from getting disjointed under the pressure of all these contradictory tensions. Like the incident in the Marabar Caves in David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984), that which is impossible to represent is the reality of a ­postcolonial encounter. Or, when the latter does get to be represented, it assumes the form of a rape (the kissing scene). As Kershaw puts it, the power of the “carrier of charisma” rests on his ability to meet the expectations placed in him by his “audience” (Kershaw, 1998: xiii). The kissing scene—as well as the scene where Celliers mimes a shave—fulfills these expectations. However, there remains a degree of ­frustration in the sense that our identification with the star’s charismatic power is relentlessly challenged. His body isn’t merely shown; it is squeezed into the straightjacket of antagonistic modes of representation. Thus, the scene of Celliers’ appearance before the Japanese military court is shot in a way that is endlessly deviating from the kind of frontal ­filming that is customary in such circumstances. The way the protagonists are positioned within the frame creates a series of ‘misaligned’ axes. Celliers is framed in a frontal close-up with his Japanese translator, who is seen behind his shoulder, standing very close and constantly looking at him. This way of framing prevents the creation of a binary opposition between Celliers and his judges. Captain Yonoi is not exactly in front of Celliers but on the right side, below the platform where the superior officer stands. Nevertheless, the way the scene is shot is focused mainly on their relationship. At the center and on both sides, military court clerks are positioned along an axis ­perpendicular to the scene. The exchange of glances, the way the c­ haracters are positioned within the frame and the camera axes form a complex scheme within which any kind of frontality becomes impossible, making the usual idea of a meeting unlikely and highlighting the impossibility of the latter. The filmic space circumscribed in this way is a narrative construction that holds all bodies captive. Bowie’s body is highly supple and always in motion, free from l­ imitations of space and time. Moreover, it’s almost as if it was Bowie the star himself appearing on the screen, in that he is highly recognisable. I would argue

Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness  171 that Bowie isn’t really acting here. He is merely being Bowie; he is the image we have of Bowie, as illustrated by the sequence where he mimes the act of ­shaving, mime being one of the trademarks of the Bowie body. We know from Orientalist representations (from Lawrence of Arabia to Indiana Jones) that mobility is one of the prerogatives of the White man. When ­Celliers (Bowie) steps confidently forward toward Yonoi, he’s the only one in motion. All the other characters stay absolutely still as if petrified. Time and space are organised around Bowie as he “naturally” subjugates the ­direction of the film to his will. Thus, the desire Yonoi (Sakamoto) has for Celliers (Bowie) joins our desire (as Westerners, that is) to see Bowie the star get into action and offer himself to our gaze. The desire for otherness is structured around the star’s body, in a double movement of fascination and ­repulsion aimed at both Western and Japanese audiences. Furthermore, we share Yonoi’s desire of being touched by Celliers (Bowie). When Celliers (Bowie) crosses the ­invisible barrier that both separates and protects Yonoi’s ­Oriental body from the body of the star, not only does Yonoi’s desire of ­having a ­physical experience with the Western Other get realised, but so does our own desire of being kissed by Bowie, if only by proxy. Yonoi’s body, saturated as it is with desire, cannot stand this physical contact and falls backward. Indeed, adopting a modernist idea of authorship, one might say that only ­Oshima’s direction, on a par with the abstract and divine q ­ ualities of the Bowie body, is able to contain the attraction of the Bowie body. But at the same time, the movement of Bowie (Celliers) towards Sakamoto (Yonoi) reenacts the ­narrative of Western intrusion threatening Japanese integrity. This ­movement and this kiss signify thus at once the realisation of a desire and the manifestation of an aggression. This is the reason why one might call Merry Christmas Mr. ­Lawrence the lustful version of The Bridge on the River Kwai. In Oshima’s film, the ­eroticisation of power has shifted from the body politic or the ­military corps (neither of which can generate desire in a time of postmodern d ­ isillusionment) to the body of the star. The body of the star is conceived as the ­paradigm of the Christlike New Flesh of mass consumption (to quote from David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome, also from 1983). Merry  ­Christmas Mr. ­Lawrence reproduces the experience of sublimation of the voyeuristic game as a formal and artistic experience. It is no longer simply a matter of enjoying the exhibition of the star’s body, as is the case regarding images of mass consumption. In this case, since it involves art, the act of seeing the star becomes an aesthetic experience. And since it also involves Bowie, this aesthetic experience blows away the hegemonic framework of masculinity and Whiteness and blurs the issue at stake in the postcolonial relationship between East and West. Because of the involvement of Bowie, the West is at once dreaded and desired; it is at once embraced as necessary for the ­reconfiguration of Japanese subjectivity and dreaded as a source of danger. As a matter of fact, because of the presence of Bowie (Celliers), it is the ­Japanese themselves who get trapped.

172  Mehdi Derfoufi But the film is directed in such a way as to create a distance between the viewer and this paradigm. And yet, Oshima is less interested in B ­ owie’s talent as an actor than in David Bowie himself as an image; and as the embodiment of this abstract, mediated and artificial image. Where Oshima’s interest really lies is probably in Bowie’s image as seen at the time on the covers of Time and Rolling Stone. As can be seen on the posters of the film, it is of course David Bowie who gets highlighted. Furthermore, the Major Celliers character refers explicitly to Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.9 The reference isn’t merely visual: it also alludes to the relationship between East and West as one of fascination and repulsion and as the fantasmatic space of sexual ambiguity. The Framework of a Fetishised Interracial Relationship The ‘distance’ towards the body of the star as the new flesh of m ­ ultimedia mass consumption is thus established through the direction of the film. Oshima films Bowie the way Sternberg filmed Marlene Dietrich—with the aim of shutting the object of desire in a “closed” and fetishised. This frame is intended as much to prevent the desired body of the star from ­getting out as to prevent others from getting in. The result is a ­fetishisation of the body of Bowie (Celliers), represented consistently as an object of desire. Indeed, the body of Bowie (Celliers) exists only to arouse desire ­without ever ­experiencing it itself. The artificial aspect of the part each ­character plays thus gets highlighted. Yonoi’s (Sakamoto’s) body is fetishised as well, his white gloves, his clean-shaven face with its feminine features enhanced by movie makeup,10 the small chain hanging from his belt, his body-hugging tight uniform. All these elements contribute to the f­etishisation of Yonoi’s body but do so in a way that is fundamentally different in comparison with Bowie (Celliers), by delineating a body imprisoned by a performance of masculinity. The latter takes place for the benefit of the Westerner’s gaze (which identifies the Other with this imperial uniform) but also with a view to putting up a front. Indeed, Oshima’s camera systematically highlights the fact that the Japanese soldiers never let Captain Yonoi out of their sight. Thus, except at the end of the movie, there are no intimate moments between Yonoi and Celliers. Starting with the kissing episode, all the intimate scenes they’re involved in take place in public. Oshima films Bowie the way Sternberg filmed Marlene Dietrich—but within the framework of an interracial relationship. This is an important difference. The theme of the postcolonial relationship that shapes the film raises issues that remain unresolved. The analysis by Studlar (1990: 229–249) of the masochistic contract in The Blue Angel (Josef Von Sternberg, 1930) comes in handy here. In this scenario, the consenting victim is not destroyed by the object of his desire but by his desire itself. The process is based upon

Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness  173 a push and pull mechanism and upon the acceptance of the dominator, who must yield to the authority of the victim’s desire. Among other sequences of the film, the one where we see Captain Yonoi steal through the night to the spot where Major Celliers is buried up to his neck in the sand is a perfect example of the nature of the contract between the two characters—Yonoi isn’t there to ‘save’ or even to give a glass of water to the object of his desire, but to cut a lock of his hair. Night has descended on the camp. Celliers (Bowie) is viewed in close-up. His sunburned face is framed by an abundance of blond hair, bleached by the sun. Behind him, Yonoi (Sakamoto) stands at attention in the b ­ ackground; we see his patent leather boots. Yonoi produces a razor, holding it firmly in his white-gloved hand. He leans behind Celliers and starts cutting a lock of hair. Having put it on a piece of paper that he folds before slipping it in the breast pocket of his uniform, he gets up. Still standing behind Celliers, he stands at attention and salutes him in the traditional Japanese way by ­bending his torso. The scene is shot in a way that allows us to see both characters facing us. Yonoi then proceeds to walk around Celliers, moving forward on the left side of the frame. He stands on a spot with his back to the camera, facing Celliers, and gives him a Western military hand salute, palm to the front, whereupon he exits from the right side of the frame. For the first time, it’s Captain Yonoi who has the ability to move around freely. This sequence mirrors the kissing scene. Yonoi signifies the reunion of the shot and the reverse shot by his movement within the frame of the image. However, this doesn’t bring any resolution. That he ‘performs’ two differents salutes, one unbeknownst to Celliers while facing the camera, the other with his back to the camera, in plain view of Celliers and for the ­latter’s benefit, emphasises the fact that we are still in the realm of contract, performance and sham, characteristic of the postcolonial relationship. The staging of the masochistic contract applied to the ­ postcolonial relationship allows the film to take stock of the blind spots of the ­ latter ­ ­ without essentialising the differences between those involved. Merry ­Christmas Mr. Lawrence stages two imperial masculinities, but one of them is defeated within the context of the film. One might add that even if ­Sakamoto is a star in his own right, he does not quite enjoy the same status as Bowie in our ­Westerners’ eyes. Furthermore, the film clearly shows that, in spite of the unequal relationship between Bowie (Celliers) and ­himself, it is the ­masochistic contract that allows Sakamoto (Yonoi) to d ­ estabilise the ­situation of domination in which he is enmeshed and to make it more ­uncertain. In addition, we have to take into account the ­aforementioned aesthetic ­ambitions of Nagisa Oshima that amount to a speculation on the possibility of a narrative cinema unburdened by the influence of ­dominant Western representations. Is it possible to create a non-Western cinematographic aesthetic? I try to emphasise in my work the way ­Western cinema defines itself by producing a very specific aesthetic of otherness. This kind of aesthetic consists of forms and representations within which

174  Mehdi Derfoufi Whiteness (as undergirded by a Western outlook) gains substance as a universal category for human subjectivity. Thus, the cinematic apparatus appears to be shaped by naturalism, understood as being an ontology of Western visual representation. David Bowie and the Idea of a POSTCOLONIAL WHITE Masculinity The capacity of the film to fulfill the ambition of destabilising ­naturalistic modes of representation depends mostly on the charismatic presence of David Bowie whose persona allows not merely for the inversion of ­dominant modes of representation, but for the possibility of different kinds of ­representation that go beyond Western dichotomies. The desire of Yonoi for Celliers could thus be seen allegorically as the appeal of a tertiary model of postcolonial masculinity (however, this “model” is not offered up as a solution or an answer, but as a question). There is often talk of Bowie’s androgyny but it would probably be more accurate to say that he produces something that goes beyond the usual criteria of masculinity and femininity—that goes beyond binary categorisations. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is thus a meditation on the stakes and maybe also the impossibility of the postcolonial relationship that, rather than producing a discourse about antagonisms, is more concerned with the production of “different” terms that go beyond binary oppositions. This is achieved by calling into question the positions usually assigned to the viewer as well as to the filmmaker. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is not a film that is intended for a viewer in a central position but a film that forces the viewer to decenter him/herself and to take into account the political dimension of sexuality, of the postcolonial relationship, of cinematographic aesthetics and of the body of the star itself, not as an abstract image but as an image devoid of ontology since it becomes an immaterial interface, either real or ­imaginary, between intentionalities and interpretations (Descola, 2013). The reflexivity of the postcolonial encounter is echoed by the reflexivity of creative and artistic subjectivities—Bowie’s incarnation as the image of the star and Oshima’s direction that shuts this image inside the frame of a ­desiring gaze. This allows Oshima to claim a status as an artist and a ­creator11 and, at the same time, Bowie to prove that his image as a body (as well as his body as an image) arouses the same transcultural and ­transgender desires. The best evidence of this can be found in the flashbacks meant to humanise the character of Jack Celliers, where the physical appearance of Bowie is the same as it is nowadays. And yet, the events he reminisces about are supposed to have taken place many years ago. As a being even ‘more Other’ than the Other, Bowie topples the usual paradigm of viewer ­identification and enables the Western spectator to experience the position of the postcolonial subject.

Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness  175 Conclusion In this chapter I have attempted to shed some light on David Bowie’s ­contribution to cinema as an actor. As we have seen, a star’s persona can be of the utmost interest to a filmmaker with artistic ambitions. Few actors would have been able to highlight as well as Bowie does in Merry ­Christmas Mr. Lawrence the richness and complexity of contemporary issues such as the gaze, desire and otherness within the context of a postcolonial, ­hybridised and globalised world. In the final analysis, it appears that the figure of David Bowie tends toward being the catalyst of problematics specific to this new world. In the context of the Reagan-Thatcher years, Bowie takes on the part of a White soldier who seems quite confident in his masculinity. But, all the while, his demeanor constantly hints at an elaborate performance. Through the flashback sequences, the narrative itself reveals the facade put up by Bowie (Celliers) to be nothing but a sham. Even so, the truth about the character remains a mystery. At the beginning of this chapter, I underlined the fact that, in 1983, Bowie started following a deliberate strategy to normalise his image. In 1972, he was claiming to be bisexual. He would later retract this s­ tatement, ­choosing—fittingly enough—the watershed year of 1983 to do so, in the above-­mentioned issue of Rolling Stone with the title “David Bowie Straight” on the front cover. The same year, the Let’s Dance album was a mainstream success and many an observer declared Bowie lost for the cause of art. Only the crying lack of attention to his work as an actor can explain how it could so easily be assumed that the star went astray. By ­making ­adjustments to his image, Bowie managed to climb to the very top of the charts, ­having gone number one with ‘Let’s Dance’ in Great Britain and, crucially, the United States, a country where displaying one’s homosexuality or ­bisexuality was, and remains to this day, akin to commercial suicide, especially for s­ omeone for whom the sky is the limit. In fact, with The Hunger and, above all, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, Bowie shows us that, in 1983, he gets to have it both ways and then some. Dressed in a suit and tie, he fills the ­stadiums with enthusiastic fans, asking us to “put on [our] red shoes and dance the blues”, while also maintaining his image as an underground icon and his ­ambivalent sexuality for the benefit of restrained audiences with an elitist bent such as can be found at film festivals and within sexual ­minorities. But then, after all, Bowie (Celliers) is an idea, not a character. To put it quite simply, Bowie (Celliers) is just David Bowie. Translated from French by Civan Gürel Notes 1.  I discovered Bowie when I saw Absolute Beginners (Julian Temple, 1986) at the movies (in fact, I had already “seen” him on soda bottle caps in Morocco when

176  Mehdi Derfoufi I was six or seven but that doesn’t count, even if I was hugely impressed by his extraterrestrial-like face). Thus, to my mind, the rock star and the movie actor are inseparable. 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_bond. See also O’Leary, Chris, “The Bowie Bonds” (online), http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2013/08/27/the-­ bowie-bonds/. 3. Philippe Descola’s work facilitates the understanding of this idea: indeed, he demonstrates that modern Western societies are the only ones that establish a frontier between self and other based upon a division between Nature and ­Culture (Descola, 2013). 4.  Rolling Stone, 12 May 1983. Time magazine, 18 July 1983. 5.  America went through a process of remasculinisation in the Reagan years (the twice-elected president was also named “Man of the Year” twice by Time, in 1980 and 1983). In mainstream cinema, the bulky bodybuilder frames of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian (J. Milius, 1982) and Sylvester ­Stallone in Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos, 1985) epitomised the ­hyperbolic virility of Reagan’s discourse, regarding especially the Soviet foe. Simultaneously, in Great Britain the Iron Lady asserted her power through the image of a masculinised woman, deepening her voice, dressing ­conservatively, avoiding any “feminine” frivolousness and voicing a pseudo-Churchillean ­martial discourse during the Falklands War. Throughout this period, Bowie seemed to be willing to broaden his audience, which inevitably involved moving away from the visual excess of the 1970s. He started sporting a suit—­complete with a necktie—on stage, a far cry from his appearance as Pierrot in the (quite recent) music video of ‘Ashes to Ashes’. At that time, of course, American ­mainstream cinema was putting front and center the muscular and highly energetic body of a White man as the object par excellence of filmic spectacle (Jeffords, 1994). Nevertheless, while appearing normalised on the surface, Bowie’s body would retain a certain degree of ambiguity, if not “abnormality”, which is to say that he managed to eliminate the most immediately eccentric parts of his image (a product of the Glam rock years) while emphasising the artificial and constructed aspects of his new image. No doubt it was this balancing act that allowed him to successfully broaden his audience without losing the bulk of his fans. 6.  We may note here that the couple Bowie forms with Deneuve echoes the one he forms with Dietrich in Just a Gigolo (D. Hemmings, 1979). 7.  Indeed, as soon as World War II ended, a vast number of autobiographies, war tales and fictions were published, contributing to maintain the image of “POWs” in the Anglo-American world. The phenomenon even spread to France with Pierre Boulle’s famous novel The Bridge on the River Kwai (1952): the book was subsequently made into a movie by David Lean. 8.  In 1968, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima became the cofounder of a private paramilitary militia called Tatenokai, dedicated to a traditionalist and ultra-­nationalist ideology. On 25 November 1970, Mishima and four of his disciples visited the commandant of the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Japanese army and took him hostage. Mishima then addressed the ­soldiers with a speech intended to inspire a coup d’état to restore the power of the emperor. He succeeded only in irritating them and was mocked and jeered, whereupon he decided to commit seppuku (Japanese ritual suicide). Whereas

Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness  177 homosexuality was one of the main themes of his work, in private life, Mishima suppressed his impulses. This characteristic allows for a comparison with the Captain Yonoi character in Oshima’s film. 9.  The “Lawrence” of Oshima’s film is Colonel John Lawrence, who h ­ appens to be a cultivated and polyglot British officer with extensive knowledge of “­Oriental” culture just like T. E. Lawrence himself. 10.  If anyone remains unconvinced about the feminine aspect of Yonoi, all they have to do is compare him with the officer who succeeds him. The attitude, the facial features and the less refined uniform of the latter clearly show that he is meant to embody a conventional virile masculinity. 11.  Oshima’s status as an artist was acknowledged in the West: for instance, he won the Best Director Award at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival for Empire of Passion.

References Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Chozick, Matthew. “Queering Mishima’s Suicide as a Crisis of Language”. ­Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 15 October 2007. www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/2007/Chozick.html (accessed 15 October 2013). Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago (IL): University of Chicago Press, 2013. de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: ­Indiana University Press, 1984. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. 2nd edition revised. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Hall, Stuart (interviewed by Osborne, Peter and Segal, Lynne), ‘Culture and power’, Radical Philosophy 86 Nov/Dec, 1997. Hanson, Ellis, ed. Out Takes: Essays On Queer Theory and Film. Durham and ­London: Duke University Press, 1999. Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington (IN): Indiana University Press, 1981. Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinities in the Reagan Era. Newark New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Lomax, Eric. The Railway Man. London: Vintage, 1998. Maslin, J., ‘A Rock Singer Takes Off As a Movie Star’, The New York Times, 29 May 1983, retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/29/movies/a-­rock-singertakes-off-as-a-movie-star.html. Melody Maker, 22 January 1972. Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. ­Bloomington (IN): Indiana University Press, 1986. Said, Edward. Orientalism, 25th Anniversary edition. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Studlar, G. “Masochism, Masquerade and the Erotic Metamorphoses of Marlene Dietrich”. In Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, edited by Charlotte Herzog and Jane M. Gaines, 229–243. New York: Routledge, 1990.

10 Art’s Filthy Lesson Tiffany Naiman

Introduction In 1995, David Bowie unleashed the album 1.Outside: The Diary of Nathan Adler, or the Ritual Art-Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle on the listening public. Featuring 19 tracks and running 75 minutes in total, the work is a bricolage of cut-up, Burroughs-­esque1 ­lyrics, jazz, pulsing electronic time-counting with industrial leanings, classical quotations, and musician and producer Brian Eno’s signature eerie sound collages.2 Bowie, often called a chameleon for being able to align his musical output with the ever-changing “now” of rock music, incorporated many styles and sounds into Outside and, in so doing, created a philosophically, psychologically, and sonically dystopian3 world-on-the-brink. The album shows a dark, toxic, Western society on the verge of the twenty-first century. As Bowie describes it, the album is about “Neopaganism in search for sense in a fragmented society” (Witter, 1995). More specifically Outside is a concept record in the form of a loosely structured detective story revolving around art, murder, and ritual. The private eye on the album endeavours to solve the case of an outrageous art crime wherein a young teen has been mutilated and transformed into a horrific sculpture. A combination of song and spoken interludes that function as segues between the music and the record’s companion booklet reveal that the album’s heroine, 14-year-old Baby Grace Blue, may or may not be dead but has most certainly been altered from the normal state of the living so her body can be used as artistic material. A film noir-styled detective, Nathan Adler, is on the case and his suspects include Leon Blank, a petty thief and plagiarist, Algeria Touchshriek, an “art drug” dealer, and the “tyrannical futurist” Ramona A. Stone (Bowie, 1996). These characters constitute a world (as we are shown by the accompanying booklet’s text) where there are only extremes.4 The world of Outside is one that has no boundaries to encompass and define art, and thus, art becomes muddled with crime, ritual, m ­ adness, and dismemberment. This chapter reflects on the ways Bowie’s creation expresses anxiety surrounding art at the end of the millennium, which at once aligns his work with that of Jean Baudrillard’s transaesthetics (Baudrillard, 2009: 7)—a

Art’s Filthy Lesson  179 concept that addresses the issue of art being incorporated into everything in the postmodern society, making it no longer a singular, transcendent phenomenon—while, at the same time, Bowie leaves room for the possible redemption of art via aural moments of the grand piano found throughout the album’s technologically mediated soundscape. By showing the ways in which Outside functions simultaneously as simulacra in the order of Baudrillard’s “transaesthetics” and as a piece of counter-revolutionary art that works to re-establish traditional signifying aesthetics, this study analyses ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ reading it as Bowie’s attempt to align himself with a particular history of Western Art music that reaches beyond the pop music of the latter half of the twentieth century where he is most often located. The majority of scholarly writings have focused on David Bowie’s earlier work from 1969 to 1985, virtually ignoring his output of the 1990s. My work, drawing upon the disciplinary approaches found in musicology, critical theory, and performance studies is an inaugural contribution to a body of knowledge surrounding his more recent recordings. Bowie and Eno used the recording studio as a compositional tool to create a particular aural world capable of expressing contemporary anxieties about time, the role of art in culture and mortality. The prominent and deliberate placement of the acoustic piano within a largely electronic soundscape represents Bowie’s artistic aspirations—his desire for his own musical legacy is shown through the piano. Contrary to what one might expect, which is to equate vocals with the voice or intent of the artist, the vocals on the album enact various characters that Bowie invented. Within the world of Outside, these characters advance a narrative of the destruction of the very art with which Bowie wishes to align himself. Interpreting it thus, this album can be read as a musical meditation on ethics and aesthetics in art, about how far art can be pushed until it is no longer art and the possible outcome of going beyond the limits. This period in Bowie’s career may be understood as an attempt to engage in a conversation about the degradation of art in Western postmodern society on the cusp of a new millennium, or as Baudrillard described the crisis, when humans are only “accelerating in a void ... after the orgy” (Baudrillard, 2009: 3). Through a close musicological reading of this album, I encourage the reader to consider Bowie in a more atypical way than has been done in the many biographies, essays, and reviews of his work. I address Bowie’s output at a moment when he made a creative turn away from pop, much as he had done when he last worked with Eno on the albums known as the Berlin Trilogy in the late 1970s. Rather than focusing on the Glam rock alien Bowie, whose penchant for reinvention has been discussed at length, I consider Bowie’s contribution to postmodern art music. This examines Bowie positioning himself as a kind of modern master, concerned about his own legacy within the canonised history of music and art, and the ways he points to that desire through the grand piano’s musical gestures.5

180  Tiffany Naiman Baudrillard’s Transaesthetics I will briefly address Baudrillard’s theory of transaesthetics in order to provide a useful context for understanding Outside in its entirety, its background, and its affective power. In The Transparency of Evil (1990), Baudrillard claims that the postmodern era is filled only with simulacra6 and a reality no longer exists, thus art now informs life since life cannot inform anything as it is only made up of the experience of commodified systems, such as food, pleasure, etc. So, although Baudrillard sees art proliferating everywhere, noting that “talk about Art is increasing even more rapidly” (Baudrillard, 2009: 14), the power of art has disappeared. Art as beauty, as a dreamlike illusion of transformation, as an exploration, as revulsion, as secret desire can no longer be perceived as an affect. Art is everywhere, but there “are no more fundamental rules” (Baudrillard, 2009: 14) to differentiate art from other objects. Thus, difference is eradicated and everything is aestheticised. Baudrillard describes how the loss of the ability to perceive the beautiful or ugly is due to the aestheticisation of everything. This loss is a complete symbolic breakdown, which causes art itself to disappear (Baudrillard, 2009: 18). He points to Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol as the leaders of a revolution in art that forced the ordinary to be judged by aesthetic standards, to become art, thus making art less extraordinary. These ideas put Baudrillard in the position of an arbiter of taste, and one who holds dear the values of High Art and heteronormative culture. They fail to take account of the ways in which Duchamp waged a critique on the makers and upholders of value when he entered his “Fountain” into the Armory show in 1917, which upturned (like the physical object, the urinal, that Duchamp turned on its head) conventional ideas about art.7 It also challenged the so-called “democracy” of the exhibition, which anyone could enter for a small fee. By using the name on the urinal, R. Mutt, rather than his own already widely recognised name on the submission to the exhibition, Duchamp also severed the mastery of the “Artist” from the physical object (the maker from the object he creates) and philosophically posed the question: what is art? Warhol, too, brought the everyday into view in a new way—from soup cans to movie stars—throwing the gaze on capitalist and celebrity culture.8 This is not to say that I disagree with Baudrillard in his critique of the circumstances he describes as transaesthetics; however, I quarrel with the outcome he provides. Instead of all meaning and art being lost, the artist must recognise the conditions under which he or she is operating (transaesthetics) and create accordingly. The musical construction of Bowie’s Outside rejects the disappearance of art through its proliferation of forms and also plays with the discursive themes of Baudrillard’s theory as much as Baudrillard was at play himself—to take all of Baudrillard at face value would be a mistake.

Art’s Filthy Lesson  181 Performing Under Transaesthetics: Operations on Bodies and Words Outside signals Bowie’s exploration and concern with the body as artistic material. There are references to corporal artists such as Ron Athey and Damien Hirst contained in the accompanying booklet.9 As artists such as Hirst and Athey made headlines at the end of the twentieth century, Bowie may have perceived/experienced a symbolic turn occurring and, thus, may have decided to include references to these particular artists to point our gaze beyond the storyline or the textual aspects of the album. He could have ­chosen them not because of an artistic failure that made art no longer art, but rather to highlight that pre-millennial artists were creating discursive, aesthetic art under the conditions posed by transaesthetics. Athey, particularly, was not aestheticising HIV through his blood when he staged Four Scenes in a Harsh Life (1994) but was using the discourse of “high” art to critique a ­society that was allowing thousands of people to die. With Hirst, dead animals in vitrines, like the bisected cow and calf of Mother and Child (Divided) (1993) or the fearsome shark suspended in a state of eternal attack used in The ­Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), similarly become a tool for social critique. The message was not merely that evil is transparent, but rather the work affords the viewer/critical thinker an opportunity to critique the aestheticisation of evil, our lack of love and respect for companion species and the gross harm we are doing to our environment. Further, Hirst’s use of real dead animals forces the onlooker to face mortality.10 Corporal artists like Athey and Hirst clearly influenced Bowie when he created Outside. He explains that the title and lyrics of the track ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ are an ode to the autocratic futurist Ramona A. Stone, who deals in body parts and signifies the death of beauty in art and artistic degradation through neo-paganistic ritualisation (Penman, 1995). Ramona sells teeth, fingers, and any other part of the body one can imagine and might like to own. Very much like Bowie cutting up sentences into parts and reassembling them, Ramona provides a cut-up service for artists looking to create something new out of the human form. Simply put, the “hearts filthy lesson” is that we will all die and that death is an integral part of one’s life and existence. Thus, Bowie is playing with punctuation in the song’s title moving it from the singular possessive that seems more natural, to the plurality of hearts in order to make this point. Many of us live in a perpetual state of denial of our own mortality, which is aided by most forms of popular media. In contrast, with Outside, Bowie situates the listener in relation to his or her own mortality. However, Ramona’s actions deny the death of the body. She sells parts of the body as if the body does not die with its owner, as if the named subject is not the owner of the body, as if one’s body is not properly one’s own, but just a bodily prop. Ramona sells parts extracted from the whole to be used in the construction of something new. To take these bodily operations one step further, in an NME interview about the making of Outside, Bowie proclaimed, “I LOVE it when it rocks.

182  Tiffany Naiman I love it when it has balls! I love it when it has big hairy massive balls on it! ... Layer it on! Baroque and roll!” (Buckley, 2010: 430). It is not only the imagined sonic Baroque with which Bowie aligns himself, but also the artifice and body modification aspects of the period. It is worth noting that, during the Baroque era before the mid-eighteenth century in Italianate opera, heroic masculine roles were often sung by castrati. Much like the prepubescent boys whose testicles were altered in order to make great art, Baby Grace, possibly one of Ramona’s victims, is dissected, gutted, drained, and then reworked into a grotesque sculpture, about which the liner notes query: “It is definitely murder—but was it art?” (Bowie, 1996: 3). It can be argued that in the story created by Bowie, there is no complete body, only parts, so there is nothing to see—nothing to see that is, except the lack which stands in place of Baby Grace—a delectable absence. There is no more Baby Grace. There is only art, or what might be better expressed as artifice, a surface with no meaning beneath its façade—a statement that is quite similar to ones made over the years about Bowie himself and, of course, there is the Baroque love for artifice.11 While it is unlikely that Bowie condones his character’s actions, his allusions to various musical genres, especially those made through the piano,12 perform a similar symbolic function in the sense that it is piecing together different parts from many different sources into an artistic whole. It is not the piano alone that stiches together fragments; Bowie designed a computer program called the Verbasizer,13 which expands upon the cut-up method originated by Burroughs and Gysin, to aid in the creation of his non-linear, tumultuous sound by cutting up layers of signification. He input newspaper and magazine headlines into the program and they were spat back out; shuffled, merged, and reassembled (Apted, 1997). The program stripped, clipped, cut, and sliced words from the contexts that would otherwise make them meaningful and, through this cutting, generated new, unrelated meanings. He manufactured with the Verbasizer a porousness, allowing for multivalent readings and associations to arise. If art has a reference (something based in reality or Realism), Bowie seems to suggest that this reference is malleable and that the artist (Bowie) spins it on its head to generate something entirely new that cannot be traced back to its origin. So, rather than coming from within, Bowie takes his cues from outside himself for the text. These cues are random, meaningless, computergenerated words that have come loose from their signifying positions in order to have new meaning inserted into them through Bowie’s vocal choices and his placement of them within the sonic space.14 In addition, producer Eno once again used oblique strategy cards in the studio while recording Outside, reprising their successful use from his past collaboration with Bowie during the Berlin years. The oblique strategy cards have aphorisms printed on them, which are used as a way to move musicians forward and reignite or draw on a creative source that seems incoherent or out of place. Through these processes, the origin has lost its meaning, yet meaning is reinserted through the musical composition achieved through the suturing that occurs

Art’s Filthy Lesson  183 during the album’s production. Through this compositional method Bowie is mimicking the larger conditions the artist is working within, letting things that would not normally converge align with each other. Outside has a mirroring effect, reflecting back Western society’s horrors and anxieties to the audience, only magnified and made more extreme. As the mirroring occurs, reality is called into question suggesting perhaps that “one is not the simulacrum of which the other would be the real: there are only simulacra” (Baudrillard, 2009: 55). Both the listeners and the album Outside may inhabit what Baudrillard called the third order of simulacra, where people are incapable of experiencing anything that could exist outside the codes of simulation, where the boundaries between signification and reality have imploded. Now all we can experience are representations of representations (Baudrillard, 2009: 121). However, I would argue that this is precisely what Bowie is toying with, working outside the codes of simulation by using a means of artistic production that is outside the typical framework of music making and thus not tied explicitly or even implicitly to signification to begin with. With this creative process, Bowie is working in transaesthetics on the one hand, but on the other, he brings the signifiers back in by using the piano as a through-line of the album. The piano, instead of being lost in a transaesthetic nightmare, becomes the signifying voice, and it does so because of its history being (re)presented sonically. By doing this, transaesthetics is debunked and shown as an unreliable concept of reality as there is always something signifying. 15

Counter-Revolutions In exploring Bowie’s album through the lens of Baudrillard’s philosophies it is important to pay careful attention to the ways in which the sounds created do not agree with Baudrillard’s somewhat archaic rigidity.16 Outside operates within Baudrillard’s “transaesthetics” by playing with varied styles and creating the porousness that is key to transaesthetics, but it also functions as a piece of counter-revolutionary art. It is counter-revolutionary in the sense that, through composition and production, it forces the listener to recognise traditional signifying aesthetics and differentiate between genres, a skill that is near extinct in a world dominated by transaesthetics. By doing this, Bowie’s work may be understood as Art in the critical sense. For decades David Bowie’s music has played on the surface of a multiplicity of systems such as gender, capitalism, fashion, and religion. He grabbed at cultural elements and characteristics that made him alien, whether it was outer space, Eastern cultures, androgyny or homosexuality. His work and his personae (e.g., Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke) have always worked towards performing that which is “othered”. Continuing in this fashion, with the release of Outside in 1995, Bowie plays with the fact that the act of aesthetic differentiation itself has become “othered”. The work

184  Tiffany Naiman one must do to recognise ‘classical’ forms of music such as piano fantasies and jazz riffs is now “othered”, especially in popular music. In other words, the recognition of these canonised styles or pieces is no longer expected and Bowie is pushing listeners towards a desire for this kind of work to matter again. These canonic sounds and styles are now “othered”, and elements of his former repertoire such as queerness, aliens, and religious critique are, in contrast, run-of-the-mill subject matter in pop music today. In postmodern Western society, there is very little value placed on skills of aesthetic recognition that allow one to discern a Baroque piece of music, a Corinthian column, a line from Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, yet we still long for Art’s ability to move us. In such a reading it is important to foreground Bowie’s use of Western art music history, which he employs throughout the work by quoting multiple composers and genres, which allows him to artificially reinsert aesthetic boundaries into a narrative of a world with none. Thus, by juxtaposing an array of styles, by not weaving snippets of genres neatly together, but by letting them stand on their own within a collage, songs such as ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ are acts of musical creation where boundaries, distinctions between musical genres, are reinserted through proximity and contrast. Glenn Watkins writes about the power of collage in his book Pyramids at the Louvre stating that ... the effects, and the context of artistic theory, social inference, and technological progress as they relate to the issue at hand; ... demonstrate that rather than promoting a disoriented, incoherent jumble of contradictions, collage has exhibited a vigorous capacity to enlighten through juxtaposition, to forgo resolution, to sponsor pluralistic conclusions, and to promote understanding of an order that eludes all edicts. (Watkins, 1994: 2) Therefore the construction of the album already leads to a multiplicity of possible readings due to the pastiche nature of the sonic structuring. The album takes the issue of transaesthetics to heart in its textual storyline and then uses the music to push back against what is expressed through the album as a dismay/concern with the degradation of art and the anxiety or the “terror of knowing” (Queen/Bowie, 1981) that it is happening. Placing the industrial next to the Baroque, or the Romantic next to jazz, establishes tensions that inscribe aural boundaries, and the audience is put in a position where aesthetic judgment and recognition are possible. If that which is killing art is its pervasiveness and its inability to be recognised, judged or mastered, then creating a work such as Outside is in David Bowie’s best interests. He needs to resurrect the field in order to be a part of what is considered Art, in order to be a great Artist. Perhaps Baudrillard would critique Outside as a pure simulation, but the cut-ups, the historical musical

Art’s Filthy Lesson  185 references and what they do, how the piano signifies and Ramona and her bodily fragments for sale intrigue and invite interpretation, which is in part a rejection of Baudrillard’s circular thinking that all meaning is lost. Outside can be regarded as a counter-revolutionary act if we are working within the framework of Baudrillard’s transaesthetics. Baudrillard alleged the revolution in art in the mid-twentieth century eradicated boundaries and made everything pervasive, so there is no longer anyone able to tell you what is/was aesthetically correct. Is Baudrillard mourning the loss of masters—Grand Master Narratives—and the masters who determine taste, value, meaning? It certainly seems so. However, that is not the type of mourning created by the songs on the album such as ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’. The music in the album clearly sets out to expose and engage with the many genres at work, with Bowie playing with boundaries by putting elements into tension with each other to create a set of effects, to put the listener to work and destabilise her/his comfort zones. For Baudrillard, when art has ceased to exist due to lack of aesthetic judgment and being diffused into all other aspects of life, it can only be reinvigorated by establishing clear markers that differentiate it.17 Regarded thus, Bowie’s authorial act makes him a counter-revolutionary insofar as he reinforces the boundaries of different aesthetics and styles, which places him in the position of artist. This position brings to view what we might wish not to see about ourselves, about the myths of beauty, mastery, the ugly, and the horrific. The entirety of this process creates a new form of mastery.18 Bowie is exaggerating conditions that seem to have put an end to mastery (transaesthetics) and then asserts his artistic will over those conditions, creating a new piece of art. This is the type of mastery one has to be capable of when one is in a world that is subject to transaesthetics. The art of Outside also references Bowie’s previous oeuvre. It fits well with what I call Bowie’s “narrative of decline”—his musical discourse concerned with the deterioration and fall of civilisation as evidenced in The Man Who Sold The World (1970), Aladdin Sane (1973), Diamond Dogs (1974), Station to Station (1976), Scary Monsters (1980) and The Next Day (2013) to name but a few of his albums that explore the darker side of humanity. This certainly is not art devoid of a referent or content, nor is it one where difference is lost. Bowie’s music is purposefully porous; leaving listeners various points of entry—and exit—so that multiple forms of connection and meaning have room to proliferate. As Bowie conceives of it, the job of the artist is “to create good puzzling questions and keep things really confused ... [and] to continually show how ever more complex an otherwise confused situation is” (Witter, 1995). Bowie’s relationship with a Baudrillardian framework is fraught with tension insofar as Bowie manifests a similar anxiety with Baudrillard in the 1990s, regarding the postmodern Western world’s loss of art as something inviolable, while simultaneously exploiting the very loss of boundaries in the creation of this album. With variation and repetition occurring simultaneously, there is a never-ending

186  Tiffany Naiman shift for the listener to either feel disoriented or grounded, ultimately leading to a feeling of chaos in which the listener is placed in a state of subservience to the music, and in turn, subservience to the chaos generated. Order is an imposition on chaos, on the nameless, and on the irreducible excess. Crucially, the piano, its utterances and its symbolism in ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’, is what is providing order and a stable point of reference in the song (and across the album). The piano functions like the vanishing point in a Renaissance painting, the thing that anchors the viewer/listener (and I argue that it anchors Bowie too—as the auteur, the artist).19 It both unifies the perspective and is the point where all the parallels seem to meet and create a whole. The Role of the Grand Piano ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ contains the instrumentation and sonic layers found throughout the album and can be read as a microcosm of the album as a whole. Bowie creates a cut-up sound space constructed from disparate traditions, and inserts the piano into it as one truly organic, unmediated element. Of course the piano is a highly mediated, labor-intensively produced mechanism of the capitalist era; that fact cannot be denied. However, in the milieu where Bowie places the piano and how it performs (in comparison with the electronic sounds) makes it signify a conception of traditional forms of Western high art figurations of the piano as a pure form of expression. Through his use of this singular instrument, Bowie provides a hopeful voice and connects himself to artistic traditions grounded in recognisable genres such as Baroque music, jazz, and minimalism (as suggested in the works of Bach, Schumann, Davis and Reich) to substantiate his vision of himself as a “true artist”. Within the stream of consciousness nightmare of Outside, the layers of electronic sounds, the mechanical noises, often overwhelm the piano, covering it up, and making it disappear. The piano—which is being read here as what is left of the organic, an ideal of humanity found in art—struggles to be heard; to stay alive. The fact that it is an organic element makes it stand out and brings further attention to it as the tool that helps inscribe boundaries. The piano mediates between levels of signification, referring to various musical genres and history in tacit and non-tacit ways. Outside’s liner notes specify that the piano played on the album is a “grand”. A grand piano invokes a particular vision (as opposed to, say, an upright or electric), setting it firmly in the realm of Western art music, specifically the concert hall, which is the central location of performance from the ‘Classical’ era onward. Mike Garson, the featured pianist, is classically trained and is steeped in the free jazz and minimalist schools of the 1970s (Sandford, 1998: 110). Garson says of himself that he does “not have boundaries about jumping styles” (Fortner, 2011: 22), and considering he

Art’s Filthy Lesson  187 has a 30-year working relationship with Bowie it indicates that he obviously must give Bowie what he desires musically and has the flexibility to change right along with Bowie. In discussing Garson’s abilities Bowie explains, “... there are very, very few musicians, let alone pianists, who naturally understand the movement and free thinking necessary to hurl themselves into experimental or traditional areas of music, sometimes, ironically, at the same time” (Pegg, 2006: 43). Garson’s breadth of style is an important key to creating the multiplicity of pianistic personalities needed by Bowie on ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’. As a guest at David Bowie’s end-of-the-world masquerade, the piano and its player, Mike Garson, put on sonic masks and enact four distinct musical characters throughout ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’. The individual characters each represent a specific musical genre, namely Baroque, Romantic, jazz, and minimalism. Each piano gesture appears within a different area of the aural space, a strategy that signals the importance and distinctiveness of each genre to Bowie, while also working to mediate the relationship between the lyrics and the electronic noises in the song. The piano/keyboard is able to function as the mediator because it can signify the Baroque (1600–1750), the Romantic (1825–1900), jazz (1918–present), and even minimalism (1960s-present), while sounding alternately percussive and violent, mimicking the song’s electronically processed drums and guitar. In “Shaping Sounds, Shaping Spaces”, Lelio Camilleri argues that with the advent of stereo recording and playback equipment, aural sound and space become key organisational elements in musical production (Camilleri, 2010: 200). This is certainly the case for ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’, edited together from improvised studio recordings and Bowie’s cut-up lyrics. The piano drops in all around the stereo field, shuffling through specific historical moments at a rapid pace. In each example, the piano moves over the sounding structure of the temporal space frame (Camilleri, 2010: 203).20 For the listener, the drastic changes in the piano may be experienced as a fracturing, similar to Baudrillard’s description of how, when a living form becomes disordered, art may be interpreted as a fundamental break in the secret code of aesthetics (Baudrillard, 2009: 16). Arguably this fracturing is so much more interesting than a break in the code of aesthetics; something else is breaking here, something perhaps infinitely more significant than aesthetics. The cut-ups of Bowie and Ramona bring one closer to it. It is a fracturing of the Real, the fundamental split of subjectivity.21 It also concerns the line we bring to view between ourselves and our own (inevitable) deaths—a line we don’t long to cross, or even mentally encounter, when the body is most certainly no longer our own, which is something Ramona understands with her properties/property. We first hear the piano one minute, thirteen seconds into ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’, at a distance, in the background of an electronic, pounding foregrounded noise. Garson plays diatonic arpeggios of repetitive, fast, and high tones, giving the listener the sense that the piano is lurking, observing, and chattering from the ceiling corner of the sound box, rearranging the

188  Tiffany Naiman perception of the listener.22 The piano defines the space. It gives a top, a roof, to the space in which the song exists, while the rest of the sound is packed in below, giving the listener a claustrophobic feeling. Thus far, the piano has served a textural function typical of keyboard parts in complex popular music, but the minimalist repetition runs head-on into a dramatic, even bombastic, Baroque gesture at one minute, thirty-five seconds. This intrusive piano flourish arrives out of nowhere, like a tutuclad ballet dancer pirouetting across the stage at an industrial dance club. As a clarifying gesture, Bowie pushes the piano all the way forward in the mix. Though this piano gesture alleviates the claustrophobia, a sense of confinement is maintained by the relentless, repetitive drumming that seems to be trying to pull the piano into its modern repetitions. The piano’s quoted sonic dance is reminiscent of two canonical compositions of Western art music—Bach’s Baroque Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D Minor (1720) and Robert Schumann’s Romantic and dramatic Davidsbündlertänze (1837). The moment in the Bowie song just described points towards the opening flourish of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy. Within the musical language of Bach’s time (1685–1750), such a “fantasy” was designed to be musically daring and dramatically expressive. Bach’s chromatic freedom leads to dissonance that is still shocking at times, even today.23 In Bowie’s track this quotation, edited from a much longer improvisation of Garson’s piano playing, represents a sharp musical and semiotic dissonance, which rudely destabilises the track’s feeling of claustrophobic, repetitive modernism. The term fantasy implies a freedom of form, yet it is still a recognisable musical structure. By pulling a section from Garson’s longer piano recording session, where he is knowingly or unknowingly quoting Bach, the moment is one in which separation occurs and a sonic border is drawn, harkening back toward the tradition of the “fantasy” while simultaneously commenting on the disappearance of this type of wild artistic freedom by making its appearance so brief. The piano here is part of Bowie’s critique of the character of Ramona Stone as a decadent, a pervert whose freedom has turned into sadistic self-indulgence. The song’s title and lyrics are also at work here as an ode to the autocratic, futurist Ramona A. Stone, one who deals in body parts and signifies the death of beauty in art and artistic degradation through neo-paganistic ritualisation (Penman, 1995). This is not Bowie’s first nod to J. S. Bach. As far back as 1973 he employed a sped up sample of Bach’s Brandenburgh Concerto No. 3 in reconfiguring the ending of the Pink Floyd song ‘See Emily Play’, which he covered on Pin Ups.24 Shortly after the Bach quotation we get a similar, but slightly different, piano run that quotes the rolling, open octaves that create the frame for Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze (1837). The nostalgia for a dreamlike state found in Schumann’s flowing notes is echoed in the notes that roll off Garson’s fingers, transporting one to an otherworldly space. These are explosively poetic moments, articulated by the multitude of notes on the

Art’s Filthy Lesson  189 off beats directionally sweeping up and down. This rushing and flowing of poetic and human impulses seems random and bold in contrast to the cyclical, repetitive pattern of the minimalist piano material we get otherwise. This gesture frequently reoccurs in ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’. It is not only the piano that alludes to the Romantic era (1825–1900). Bowie’s vocals are at times blurted out in between moments of loud guitar riffs and drum beats and are further intruded upon by the piano. We get bits and pieces of a story and desperate pleadings along with the demand to “go tell the others” about the “fantastic death abyss” (Bowie, 1995), lyrically linking Bowie to the nineteenth century through the French symbolists of whom he is also deeply fond.25 Thus once again, through lyrical signification this time, Bowie connects himself to Schumann’s Romantic drama, which depicts the lonely, tortured artist driven mad by a love unable to be consummated, much like Baby Grace who has no recognisable body to engage in any type of physical love. Perhaps Bowie is not only troping (which of course is itself a historical and venerable way of creating within Western art music) on the Romantic and Baroque traditions I’ve described here, but is also establishing his relationship to the artistry of classical music through linguistic play—after all, his own first name is part of Schumann’s title. This may seem like a stretch, but not when one considers that Bowie was cutting up and reassembling sentences to create the lyrics. The desire to cut up, fracture, and then reassemble allows for new and radical forms of signification where linking one’s name to a musical cycle two hundred years old is hardly a leap. Bowie once said of himself, “I’m actually very nineteenth century—a born Romantic” (Penman, 1995). Bowie seems determined to insert himself into the musical canon of the great artists from the Baroque and Romantic periods, along with the cutting edge creative minds of the postmodern era such as Hirst and Athey. This is a determination made clear when he asserts, “I would like to feel what I did actually changed the fabric of music” (Apted, 1997). After connecting Bowie’s composition to the canon of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “masterworks” through aural allusion, the piano throws off its classical mask and replaces it with a countervailing spirit: the avantgarde genius of Miles Davis. At one minute and fifty-one seconds, the spirit of jazz arrives in the form of stacks of perfect 4ths and extended chords of the 11th and 13th similar to those found in Horace Silver’s piano comping26 on Miles Davis’ ‘Four’ (Davis, 1954). Bowie has always had an affinity for Black America’s music, starting with his early Chuck Berry guitar sounds to the plastic soul play of Young Americans (1975). In this song in particular, the jazz chords appear as a light in the darkness, in a major mode, reversing the cultural historical binary of light and dark by using blackness to bring the light in an imagined world come undone in the confining soundscape of the song. However, the staccato jazz chords prevail only for a moment. They start out forward in the mix and slowly fade to the background and are then swallowed by other sounds and music, delineating a space of oppression

190  Tiffany Naiman and inescapability, the type of ugly space where Ramona A. Stone can exist, carving up bodies for art. Ultimately, a restrictive industrial minimalism in the vein of Throbbing Gristle and Tony Conrad27 takes over the rest of the song, except for at the very end where Baroque sequences conflated with later Romantic chromaticism reappear just as the song fades out. Each of the examples I just described features a dramatic move by the piano over “temporal space frame” (Camilleri, 2010: 203), molding space out of a sound box that is as confining and dramatic as a madhouse. This is the basic structural trope of ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ and it is significant. The piano moves while all the other instrumentation stays in one place. The constant churning of the piano and Bowie’s vocals, along with repetitive figures in the guitars and drums, creates an over-accumulation of sound, sound that is in motion but not moving forward. The result is a track that feels chaotic yet static, overwhelming, disconcerting, and imprisoning. As Camilleri points out, “Repetition of patterns can accentuate the sense of saturation in a sound structure in which the spectral space is packed, is made up of close frequency bands, and the instruments fill all the stereo space” (Camilleri, 2010: 203). Thus the world in which Ramona A. Stone and the dismembered Baby Grace Blue exist is easily conjured in the listener’s mind through the obsessive sculpting and signifying of improvised music creating a sonic narrative, which of course may have multiple interpretations and mine is the one being offered here through musical analysis. In contrast with the repetition of the drums and guitar patterns, we hear dramatic variation from the piano. The piano not only changes genres—from avant-garde jazz, to Romantic and Baroque gesturing, to minimalism—it also moves all over within the sound box. We experience it up, behind, to one side, dominating at some moments and being dominated at others, exemplifying claims that “the idea that the form of a sound as it subtly changes in time can be placed in space, means that the sense of stasis or motion is viewed like an articulation of the relationship between space and time, a metaphorical way to ‘measure’ the distances among sounds” (Camilleri, 2010: 203). It is made clear in every interview and most biographies of David Bowie that he was in full control of the structuring of Outside that occurred in the studio both during the recording and the mixing of the album; it was his sonic sculpture and no one else’s. Bowie and Eno, of course, partnered in the studio and spent months cutting and reshaping the extensive tapes of improvisation into the end product which Virgin Records finally agreed to release in the United States. However, Bowie’s Baroque tendencies ultimately won out over Eno’s desire for a more minimal approach with Eno stating, “The only thing missing was the nerve to be very simple” (Thompson, 2006: 135). In the end, the final mixes were loud, clamorous, and violent layers of sound and music that pummeled listeners, grabbing them by the throat and never letting go until the album’s final track ‘Strangers When We Meet’, making it an album that was not easy to listen to and seemed to sonically attack from every angle.

Art’s Filthy Lesson  191 Conclusion ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ takes the listener across space and time, using the piano to allude to four distinct historical moments in music while inserting the author into each of those musical conversations and traditions. It connects the listener/Bowie to a time before the anxiety of the approaching millennial turn and into Baudrillard’s postmodern era of transaestheticism. The piano is the sound of resistance, unlike the body of Baby Grace, unlike electronically mediated instruments and unlike Bowie’s own vocals. The piano is the tool used to resurrect walls, boundaries, differences that Baudrillard expressed had disappeared and erased art and aesthetics all together. It is a ‘Grand Piano’, a symbolically intact acoustic instrument, delineating several eras and cordoning off the fractured state of the other merged electronic sounds. So the album ultimately plays with Baudrillard’s transaesthetics and shows its limits, revealing other possibilities and outcomes for artistic merging. Did Bowie actually change the “fabric of music” with his modern operatic rumination on death, art and ritual? I am not the one to answer that. However it is clear there is something at work in Outside that wants to move people’s emotions by other mechanisms than the extremities of Baudrillard’s perceived postmodern society caught in a never-ending looping system. Outside is an album that mourns for referentiality, and works to reestablish it in a musical form in order to set our gaze towards ourselves and our precarious position as human beings. The album mines the surfaces of music to return its affective dimension. The album is one “where unrelated objects are placed together and achieve cohesion through arrangements and proximity” (Watkins, 1994: 1). By establishing boundaries and borders, it creates space for aesthetic judgment to include self-reflection. The form and the structure of the recording and the performances do nothing to confirm truth in art, rather, they explore its limits and boundaries in ways that disrupt the normative practice of rock music. This is David Bowie’s continued legacy, one which, be it through space aliens, suburban madness or subversive myths of ritual and mutilation, is always on the brink, at the edge, speeding beyond where listeners are sometimes prepared to go, ambiguous and always leaving room for the autonomy of the listener. David Bowie said of Outside in a brief video interview, that the album would be “a diary in music and texture of what it felt like to be around at the end of the millennium” and followed that with “Wow, I mean what an accomplishment you know”.28 notes 1. William Burroughs is a literary author whom David Bowie first met in 1973. Burroughs, in conjunction with the painter and writer Brion Gysin, pioneered

192  Tiffany Naiman what is called the “cut-up” technique in the early 1960s. The method consists of visual and verbal deconstruction and reassembly of full and complete artworks, be they paintings, novels, recordings, etc. After the work is cut up, it is reconstructed to make a completely new text or artwork. After Bowie met Burroughs, he used the cut-up method to different extents for the rest of his career. Bowie’s procedure for creating the lyrics on Outside was a technological evolution of the original cut-up method, scrapping a pair of scissors for a computer program he co-created called the Verbasizer. 2. Brian Eno, similar to Burroughs, has a substantial body of music work that plays with and deconstructs traditional assumptions about how music can be produced, performed and recorded. He is known for his experimentation with the band Roxy Music, and his work in the genres of ambient and environmental music. I choose to use the term sound collage when describing his work as it helps to put forth the idea of active construction from varying pieces. 3.  This word dystopian is one which is commonly used by reviewers when discussing the record for example: see Burr, 1995 Entertainment Weekly; Butler, 2011 Sputnikmusic. 4.  What I’m trying to get at is the way in which the language is representing beyond what the words mean and this is all the more heightened by the cut up method. It is about the relationships of all the songs and the book that create an album representing extreme phenomena (in the Baudrillard sense). 5.  My conclusions regarding the notion of canons and ideas of master composers scattered throughout this chapter are indebted to Nicholas Cook’s Music: A Very Short Introduction and Scott Burnham’s Beethoven Hero. 6.  Simulacra are things (images, objects, etc.) that take form but lack the substance or qualities of the actual thing. Simulacra may represent the thing but it is not the thing. 7.  For further reading on Duchamp and the ways in which he harnessed the everyday via mechanical reproduction in order to break free of artistic repetition and thus altering the normative standards for “what is art?” in the process see Francis Naumann’s Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 8.  He predated Mad Men, and gave the public an immediate deadpan look at our values. 9.  Ron Athey is a Los Angeles born performance artist who is well known for his work that pushes his own body beyond conceivable limits while making bold comments about family, society, religion, and gender. Damien Hirst is the most prominent member of the 1990s’ Young British Artists scene. His work challenges ideas about the living of daily life calling into question the boundaries that separate life and death, science and faith, desire and fear, love and hate. 10.  The problem with the general reception of Hirst’s work is that the supposed tastemakers absorbed the work as a mirror reflecting back their idealised image— popping pills is cool, slick art is cool, etc.—rather than approaching the work more like a fun house mirror, reflecting how askew such modes of being are, how distorted, how profoundly unconscious and located in fantasy. The potential affective work of Hirst’s art was lost, but it still existed within the project, latent until the viewer saw the object looking back rather than his/her own narcissism reflected.

Art’s Filthy Lesson  193 11.  For a more detailed reading of artifice and the Baroque, The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics by William Egginton is a great place to start. 12. The piano has a long history of symbolic gesturing, and within ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ there are moments where piano references the Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Jazz eras. Keyboard music was elevated in status during the late Baroque era, thanks to J. S. Bach and George Frideric Handel, whose compositions for the harpsichord and clavichord spurred the rise of virtuoso style. As time moved on, and the piano itself became a central instrument in the ­mid-Classical era, composers such as Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven became the masters of form and harmony using the piano as their main tool. Finally, following the French Revolution the structures found in Classical music became too restrictive and a change came with Romantics. The ideal for the Romantic composer was to instill in the listener certain moods. The manifestation of emotion and the sparking of the imagination were a primary goal. 13.  The Verbasizer is a computer application co-developed by Bowie and Ty Roberts that sped up the cut-up method removing it from the land of paper and scissors to columns and rows that could be sorted and rearranged by subject, nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on making it a controlled randomising system. 14.  Camilleri (2010: 201) uses the term sonic space to indicate the space “in which the piece unfolds in the recorded format” and as he defines that space it is a “three-dimensional space divided into: localised space, spectral space, and morphological space”. 15. The Outside sessions were filled with long recordings of different musical moments and were then sliced and diced by Bowie and Eno into cohesive songs. 16.  Baudrillard’s bemoaning of “true art” through its configuration of transaesthetics is similar to Adorno’s criticism of popular music especially found in “On Popular Music” in that the new can never achieve the level of a mythical nostalgic ideal of art in the great Western canon. 17. A perspective other than Baudrillard’s to be considered is of course that art never ceases to exist, but rather that it shifts forms, in that aesthetic judgment is a matter of taste, of cultural values that are particular to a given time, culture, modes of power and perception. 18.  Mastery in the sense of what it is considered important to control, to have power over, to dominate in the musical sense. 19.  A vanishing point is the place in a picture or painting where the lines that create perspective come together and is the spot where they all disappear and where the eye is drawn. 20.  Camilleri (2010) describes how sound unfolds temporally (over time) shaping and augmenting the other space types (localised, spectral and morphological) which changes and allows for different types of sensory perception such as stasis, movement, saturation, emptiness and direction. 21.  In bringing up a split of subjectivity I am alluding to the work of Jacques Lacan and his psychoanalytic theory that “The subject is split between the ego … and unconscious … , between conscious and unconscious, between and ineluctably false sense of self and the automatic functioning of language … the subject is nothing but this very split” (Fink, 1996: 45). 22.  See Lelio Camilleri’s “Shaping Sounds, Shaping Spaces” and Francis Rumsey’s Sound and Recording.

194  Tiffany Naiman 23.  Musical notes that sound good together are called consonant. Chords that are built with consonant notes sound pleasant and create a sonic stability where the listener doesn’t get the sense the music needs to change or move on. Notes that seem to clash, or sound unpleasant together, are called dissonant. Often dissonant chords give the listener the feeling it wants to move change and resolve. Of course both consonance and dissonance are dependent on a particular understanding of Western music and can also depend on taste. Dissonant music historically has shocked or unsettled listeners. Though tastes have changed over the history of music and thus the ways dissonance is received by listeners has as well, it is still discussed and used as a tool to create certain feelings or narrative meanings. 24.  Granted, what has just briefly been expressed is a profusion of references within fifteen seconds of piano playing. However, if someone is trying to insert himself into a tradition two hundred years in the past, and from the launching point of a rock song, the piano as signifier must carry a heavy and rich load. 25.  This is a predilection made clear in a mass of interviews over his 50-year career, too numerous to fully detail here. 26.  Comping in Jazz is the term used to describe the interplay between the rhythm section, including the piano and sometimes the guitar, and a soloist who is improvising. The other musicians accompany the improvised music and in many ways are improvising along with the soloist adding a contrasting rhythmic layer. 27.  Hear Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1979) and Tony Conrad’s Outside the Dream Sydicate (1972) for examples of early industrial minimalism. 28.  The full interview can be found on youtube and until this date I have not been able to find who made the video or why. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spb8bhuKDdQ.

References Apted, Michael. Inspirations. DVD. Israel/USA, 1997. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Translated by James Benedict. London: Verso, 2009. Bowie, David. “The Hearts Filthy Lesson”. Outside. Virgin Records, 1996. Buckley, David. Strange Fascination. London: Virgin Books, 2010. Burnham, Scott. Beethoven Hero. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Burr, Ty. “David Bowie Outside”. Entertainment Weekly, 20 October 1995. Butler, Nick. “David Bowie Outside”. Sputnik Music, 21 September 2011. http:// www.sputnikmusic.com/review/45679/David-Bowie-Outside/ (accessed 12 January 2013). Conrad, Tony. Outside the Dream Sydicate. Caroline Records, 1972. Cook, Nicholas. Music: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Camilleri, Lelio. “Shaping sounds, shaping spaces”. Popular Music, 29 (2, 2010): 199–211. Davis, Miles. Blue Haze. Prestige Records, 1954. Egginton, William. The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Art’s Filthy Lesson  195 Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Fortner, Stephen. “Mike Garson: On Ultimate Improvisation”. (January, 2012). http://www.keyboardmag.com/artists/1236/mike-garson-on-ultimate improvisation/28580 (accessed 1 February 2014). Liu-Rosenbaum, Aaron. “The Meaning In the Mix: Tracing a Sonic Narrative in ‘When the Levee Breaks’”. Journal on the Art of Record Production, 7 (2012). Naumann, Francis M. and Marcel Duchamp. Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ghent: Ludion Press, 1999. Pegg, Nicholas. The Complete David Bowie. London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2006. Penman, Ian. “The Resurrection of Saint Dave”. Esquire, (1995). http://archive.is/ HJiz#selection-37.0-36.2 (accessed 1 February 2014). Queen and David Bowie, “Under Pressure”. EMI, 1981. Rumsey, Francis and Tim McCormick. Sound and Recording: An Introduction. Oxford: Focal, 2002. Sandford, Christopher. Bowie: Loving the Alien. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. Thompson, Dave. Hallo Spaceboy: The Rebirth of David Bowie. Toronto: ECW Press, 2006. Throbbing Gristle. 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Industrial Records, 1979. Watkins, Glenn. Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994. Witter, Simon. “David Bowie”. Rock’s Backpages Audio. 4 October 1995. http:// www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/david-bowie-1995 (accessed 1 February 2014).

11 Authorship, Agency and Visual Analysis Reading (some) Bowie Album Covers Ian Chapman

Introduction David Bowie’s album covers are a valuable resource for researchers across many disciplines. Some work has been done in ‘reading’ specific ­covers in order to support deeper investigations into, particularly, Bowie’s music and cultural impact.1 In this chapter, however, the album covers t­hemselves remain the sole investigative focus. I concentrate on eight covers that demonstrate a progressive diminishing ‘authorship’, starting with his ­ ­self-­titled debut (1967) and concluding with Diamond Dogs (1974). I also include a ­consideration of The Next Day (2013) as an addendum. On these eight covers Bowie is variously presented as his natural, ‘true’ self, in constructed, performative roles or as an amalgam. I contend that his declarations of authorship are commensurate with his presentation(s) of naturalness, while the obfuscation of authorship is inextricably linked to his increasing constructedness. Much attention within Bowie studies focuses upon fluidity of identity. A major contention resulting from my analysis is that the removal of authorship was a critical factor in enabling this fluidity. Intersecting popular music, portraiture and visual art, the album cover was a vital marketing device and primary means of communicating ­information between artist and audience, particularly during the time in which the first eight of these covers were released. Through a cover, an ­artist could ­communicate a broad range of information about himself.2 In a ­photographic portrait, for instance, an artist might carefully construct a visual demonstration of emotion and authenticity, embodying the p ­ hysical constructs of thought or reflection to showcase his depth, worthiness and commitment to his art. In traditional portraiture this careful assemblage, usually compiled according to the wishes of the subject/patron, can be thought of as an “often generous statement, summing up of a life” (Brilliant, 1991: 10). Highlighting the performative possibilities of the form, Pointon regards a portrait as a kind of stage set (Pointon, 1993: 1).3 The primary component is the subject’s face, “the most distinctive and widely used key to a person’s identity” (Bruce & Young, 1986: 305).4 The methodological approach which forms the basis of this chapter is primarily located within art history and preserves the primacy of the visual object.

Authorship, Agency and Visual Analysis  197 The flow of analysis is determined by the unique factors displayed upon each cover. In the language of social sciences, it is a grounded ­theory approach. Within art history, techniques for visual analysis are established and robust, allowing deep engagement with the visual object without s­ubordinating it to inflexible theory. As Warburg suggests, analysis is best conducted when the methodology “can range freely with no fear of border guards” (Warburg, 1995: 585). Katritzky posits that iconographical research within the performing arts should embrace “an interdisciplinary approach which is able to benefit from advances made in other fields, notably art history” (Katritzky, 1999: 90). My employment of this fluid yet ultimately contained approach is to ensure a thorough grounding within performing arts iconography and its attendant disciplines, but with freedom to range further where appropriate. Borrowing from book cover conventions, music artists are often shown in a portrait-style photograph on the rear of their album covers. While the front cover of a book is usually designed to introduce the book itself, the rear cover will introduce the author, sometimes through text alone but often featuring a photograph because “The author’s portrait does indeed seem to be a way of bringing the author closer to the reader” (Kuitert, 2011: 369). By looking at an author’s image, we seek to better understand his work. As Barthes puts it, “The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it ... the author ‘confiding’ in us” (Barthes, 1977: 143). In addition to an artist’s picture, other paratexts on an album cover can contribute to the impression of authorial presence.5 Throughout Bowie’s first eight album covers he cumulatively developed his performative modus operandi. All produced in the UK, a natural break then occurred when he moved to the US, radically changing his image and musical style with the Young Americans album of 1975. In order to d ­ iscern the degree of authorship in Bowie’s more recent work, The Next Day (2013) is also assessed. My central tenet is that on Bowie’s first eight album covers he ­experimented with displaying authorship through the degree of naturalness or artifice in his portraits, and/or through the presence of handwriting and/or through name change or absence. As becomes evident through the chronological analysis to follow, I contend he initially sought to convey authorial ­presence, before progressively abandoning the tactic to leave his increasingly ­artificial, invented characters—for which he is renowned— alone upon his album covers.6 David Bowie (1967) The front cover of his debut album features Bowie in a head-and-shoulders colour portrait, almost front-on to the camera, making direct eye contact with the viewer. His expression serious, the image is imbued with honesty and earnestness. His longish blonde hair is styled in a fashionable ­‘mop-top’,

198  Ian Chapman and he wears a dark-coloured garment reminiscent of a military uniform. A  large gold button bearing a crown insignia adds to the militaristic ­suggestion. Both clothing and grooming are consistent with mod imagery, a subculture in which Bowie had previously participated.7 The rear cover features another head-and-shoulders photograph in black and white. In mid-frame, looking straight at the viewer, Bowie is more ­casually dressed, his outer garment open at the neck. He wears a light-­ coloured top with a ribbed neck, and his outer garment here looks more a casual jacket. With his hair less coiffured he appears informal, yet his expression remains serious. The location appears to be an outdoor setting, wayward tufts of hair giving the impression of being blown by a breeze. It is a naturalistic image. In crucial support of this candid photograph, biographical information written by manager Kenneth Pitt appears beneath the track listing, ­something that is viewed here as a highly significant paratext. Pitt states, “His line of vision is as straight and sharp as a laser beam”. Bowie indeed provides a visual representation of this in his direct gaze. When Pitt continues that Bowie’s vision “cuts through hypocrisy, prejudice”, we are assured of his integrity and perceptive abilities, both qualities demonstrated in the images. Pitt underlines the artist’s honesty further: “David writes and sings of what he sees to be the truth ...”. This text, allied to the manner in which Bowie is depicted on both sides of the cover, confirms the artist’s honest intentions. The front and rear images differ in composition, yet the message they convey is the same. Bowie is depicted as a serious young artist, earnestly truthful and honest. With little division discernible between the person and the performer, his authorship is declaimed unequivocally. David Bowie (1969) On the front cover of his second album, also self-titled, Bowie again faces the viewer front-on, making full eye-contact.8 Here he has abandoned the ­carefully assembled mod-aligned appearance of his first album. C ­ entralised and surrounded by blue dots, he has somewhat scraggly long hair. The ­bottom of his neck and shoulders fades to a thin layer of bright green, providing a sense of disembodiment, as the lighting reveals the right side of his face and neck (from the viewer’s perspective) while shading the left. Unsmiling, his mouth is partially open, his teeth visible. Close inspection reveals that his lips are dry, perhaps cracked, and his expression is calm and focussed yet alert. Bowie is presented honestly, unadorned and candid; an artist without pretension. Naturalism is partially subverted after-the-fact, however, by the encroachment of the dots. Nevertheless, Bowie’s sincere candour ensures his a­ uthorial hand remains clearly evident.9

Authorship, Agency and Visual Analysis  199 The rear cover is very different, being a series of fantasy drawings. Titled ‘The Depth of the Circle’, the work is credited to George Underwood and is a montage of scenes pertaining to the songs. A link to the front is ­nevertheless provided by a continuation of the dots at the bottom of the picture, while a drawn version of Bowie’s front cover photograph appears at bottom right. In a reversal, here Bowie’s head covers the dots rather than vice versa. Bowie’s authorial presence is not emphatically declaimed on this side of the cover, at least not in the way his candid photograph ensured it was on the first album. However, because his drawn image mirrors the real image on the front, an element of realism is implied. In summation, Bowie’s visual representation of authorship remains ­discernable, being clearly rendered on the front while considerably less so on the rear. The Man Who Sold the World (1971) The front cover of Bowie’s third album shows him relaxing upon a couch or chaise longue draped with a light blue covering. Positioned on his right side facing the viewer, his right arm and shoulder support him as he leans on the arm of the couch. His left leg is stretched out, visible from just below the  knee with his right leg tucked in behind it. He wears a silver-coloured dress of shiny material bearing blue floral designs. The dress is close fitting to the waist, ballooning out below. Two fastenings at the chest leave skin v­ isible from his neck to almost his naval. Long black boots reach to his knees. He holds a playing card in his right hand, the floor strewn with many others. His left arm is held above his head, angled at the elbow, and his ­fingers touch the crown of his head in a contemplative gesture. He wears a silver metal bangle. Bowie’s long brown hair falls in curls, a fringe swept over the right eye. His eyes open and staring straight at the viewer, the expression is serious, evidently deep in thought. Bowie engages in gender play by wearing a dress, a key reason this cover has often been critiqued.10 With regard to the focus of this chapter, ­however, the important innovation is that he is for the first time adopting a role instead of being himself. This theatrical, stylised picture is a radical departure. Bowie is presenting an archetype, imbuing his work with imagery from well outside popular music—Pre-Raphaelite art.11 The close-up black and white photograph on the rear cover features only Bowie’s upper body and head. Again markedly feminized, the ­collarless jacket he wears has padded shoulders and a zipped v-neck. A dark beret is cocked toward his right eye, beneath which his long hair frames his ­downward-looking face. It is a contemplative pose with just the hint of a

200  Ian Chapman smile, as if secretly amused at something unavailable to the viewer. There is no direct engagement; Bowie’s eyes are open but averted from our gaze, marking a departure from his previous covers. While this image supports the gender play of the front, there exists one important difference in that there are no props and we have no obvious ­context. The carefully constructed Pre-Raphaelite parody is absent. This abandonment of the staged context is supported by the shift from colour to black and white and the change of costume. There is no sense that the ­photograph has come from the same session as the front, and the only ­continuity is the co-option of female gender signification. Here then, Bowie engages in gender play without the borrowed context of parody, casting off both the distancing device and justification it p ­ rovided. Without this theatrical context, the image brings the viewer back to the here and now, and the picture has more resonance because there exists a sense that we are seeing the artist as he really is offstage; the ‘true’ hand behind the front cover fantasy. In terms of Bowie’s authorial claim, the adoption of a role on the front introduces distance between Bowie and audience, and authorship is denied. On the rear, however, where he is simply ‘being’—an actor having discharged his role—an authorial hand is evident.

Figure 11.1  Hunky Dory. RCA Victor SF 8244. December 1971.

Authorship, Agency and Visual Analysis  201 Hunky Dory (1971) The cover of Bowie’s fourth album is a grainy picture of his face, head and hands. Featured in three-quarter profile with face turned upward, his eyes are fully open but avoid contact with the viewer. Attention focussed ­elsewhere, his expression is one of slightly melancholic seriousness. Bowie’s right hand cradles his ear and right side of his head, while his left is placed behind his neck. He appears to be wearing a high-necked garment with full-length sleeves made from light blue and black patterned material. On the left side of his neck is a thin greenish-yellow scarf. Bowie’s hair is a bright yellow, his eyes blue and his lips pale red. His skin is very light; a pale creamy-white, particularly upon his forehead. The background is a pale yellow, slightly darker to the left. The colouring of the image appears unnaturally bright.12 There is no text indicating the artist’s name or album title. Bowie is again playing a role, pictured in a highly stylised manner easily associated with Hollywood silver-screen film icons such as Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich.13 The contrast between front and rear is extreme. In black and white on the rear cover, Bowie is pictured full-length against a white background with arms at his sides, staring directly at the viewer. The album title and his name are prominent at upper left. He is dressed in a loose, white, long-sleeved shirt open at the neck and chest and wears baggy trousers that emphasise his small waist. Long dark hair falling freely over his shoulders frames his face upon which his expression is serious. There is none of the theatricality so prominent on the front. Handwritten text follows the contours of his body, encroaching upon his torso at one point. To the viewer’s right this is written vertically on the cover, while to the left the lines are horizontal. The suggestion of emotional transparency on the rear cover—of seamless, open communication with the viewer by the ‘real’ David Bowie—is boosted greatly by this untidy, highly individualised, scrawl.14 In addition to marked stylistic changes in the handwriting, words are crossed out, dedications are scrawled in brackets etc. The idiosyncratic writing style declaims Bowie’s authorship. Informal, couched in the first person, it is as if he were scribbling a note to family or friends. The shaping of the text around his body adds a deeply personal touch, as if the words are so intrinsically his that they bear likeness to his image. The way he writes out the song list is similarly personalised. He p ­ refaces the titles of some tracks with bracketed messages that dedicate songs to a ­specific individual (“for small Z.”, beside the song ‘Kooks’) or that acknowledge an influence upon him (“V. U. white light returned with ­ thanks” beside the song ‘Queen Bitch’). The rear cover also carries a paratext supporting the artifice of the front. Under the song titles, Bowie writes that producer Ken Scott was “assisted by the actor”. As Bowie was co-producer, the reference to himself as “the

202  Ian Chapman actor” provides proof that the qualities the viewer observes on the front are allied to the artist’s own view of himself. It is as if Bowie throws off the mask he went to such trouble to adopt on the front and shows his ‘real’ face, admitting, “It was me all along! I was just acting!” This is a pivotal moment. It is clear Bowie is presenting two faces on this cover: a constructed one on the front, and an ostensibly authentic one on the rear, demonstrating an author’s hand. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) In a highly contextualised setting on the front of his fifth album, Bowie stands in an urban street at night. Dwarfed by his surroundings and facing the viewer front-on, the Victorian architecture of industrial buildings loom to his left, while parked cars frame him to the right. Buildings reach up at the rear, their drab appearance echoed by the dark sky. Yellow lights glow from windows, while a streetlight above the artist’s head illuminates both him and the large green door to his left. Above and slightly behind is a large yellow sign: K. WEST. The footpath is wet and shiny. Bowie, dressed in a light blue jump suit open at the front and exposing his chest, has his left leg raised and bent at the knee, upon which his right arm rests. His purple left boot rests upon a rubbish bin. His hair is an unnaturally bright yellow hue. In his right hand he clasps an electric guitar at waist height, a black strap across his left shoulder. Occupying the bottom right are cardboard boxes, the front one of which bears the handwritten text, L. I. CO. ­LONDON No. 2003. The bright colouring of Bowie’s costuming and hair are in stark ­contrast to the browns and greys of the bricks, concrete and sky s­ urrounding him. His exposed chest and light clothing seem incongruous in the wet and presumably cold temperature of what we can justifiably contend to be a winter’s night in London. Incongruity exists between the subject and his environment. Clearly alienated—he simply does not belong—Bowie nevertheless appears largely self-assured, his head held high, legs wide apart and engaging the viewer front-on in a pose Paytress regards as “gently macho posturing” (Paytress, 1998: 91). While his size within the frame, coupled with the shadowing around his eyes, makes it unclear whether his eyes are open, his focussed directness gives the impression that they are, and that he is fully present in the moment. The image resembles a typical scene from film-noir movies in which “lonely characters in empty, urban spaces evoke a sense of urban alienation. The city is usually shown at night and in the rain” (Mennel, 2008: 7).15 Because of this resemblance to a set, the scene possesses a dreamlike quality, an impression enhanced by the use, once again, of artificial colouring.16 The sense of unreality and the filmic allusions mean there is little authorship evident.

Authorship, Agency and Visual Analysis  203 On the rear cover Bowie stands inside a public telephone box, still e­vidently playing the role of Ziggy Stardust and sporting the same blue ­jumpsuit that he wears on the front. However, Bowie’s physical presence is markedly ­different. Rather than being diminished by his surroundings he is to the forefront. ­Continuity with the front is provided by the surrounding darkness and the, once again, artificially coloured brightness of the interior lighting. A viewer might well assume his presence in the telephone booth to be a development within a narrative relating to the front cover. But here the expression on his face is bemused, even dismissive. With one hand on his hip and the other raised, his elbow resting nonchalantly upon the telephone, Bowie’s pose is highly stylised. Certainly, he is not using the telephone box to make a call, and instead seems to be using the location as a kind of frame for public viewing. The impression conveyed is consistent with camp, a point noted by other critics, with Paytress believing it to be a “distinctly campy posture, hand on hip and lithe limbed” (Paytress, 1998: 91).17 As pre-empted on the ­ previous album, Bowie’s posture and expression can be aligned to

Figure 11.2  Aladdin Sane, RCA Victor RS 1001. April 1973.

204  Ian Chapman S­ ontag’s ­requirements for camp as outlined in her essay, ‘Notes on Camp’, most ­especially in the qualities of detachment and disdain (Sontag, 1966: 288–289). Bowie’s stance is pretentious, possessing a knowing quality ­ ­signifying ­purposeful intent acted out for the viewing of others, another defining element of camp.18 This sense of knowingness imbues the rear cover with an authorial quality absent on the front. While he does not quite ­metaphorically hold up his hands in the “it was me, David, all along” manner that he did previously, his employment of camp ensures the work is imbued with a knowing admission; of authorship and humour. ­However, dressed on both sides as Ziggy Stardust, and with contrivance in both images, Bowie as the architect is never quite revealed in the frank manner that has been the case previously. Ziggy Stardust, alien rock star hero, is not completely dispensed with. Aladdin Sane (1973) The cover of Aladdin Sane is a heavily manipulated photographic portrait of Bowie with long orange hair, red lipstick, red eye-shadow, no eyebrows and long black eyelashes. Splitting his face from top left to lower right is a red, black and blue lightning flash symbol. His face is unnaturally pink and his high cheekbones are heavily accentuated. Contrasted against these bright colours is the metallic grey of his upper shoulders and neck that blends to a brilliant white for the remainder of his visible torso, a hue mirroring the background. Bowie casts no shadow, imbuing the image with a lack of ­context. He floats in nothingness; a vacuum. Eyes fully closed, ­eliminating any possibility of direct communication with the viewer, there is a ­neutrality of expression. Inexplicably, a pool of liquid lies at his left collarbone, ­following the contours of his body yet defying gravity, and contributing much to the unreal (alien) quality of the image. Immediately striking is the degree of artifice, as Bowie’s true image is masked by the heavy makeup. Indeed Bowie does not look like a real human being. His appearance is “the archetype of artificiality—glittered, painted, dyed, decorated with a lightning flash, its flesh marble-cold and deformed with a silver teardrop, sculpted, emaciated, haughty, vulnerable and ­ultimately alien” (Doggett, 2011: 175). Matthew-Walker suggests this is the most remarkable of all Bowie’s covers because “David had subjected himself to some extraordinary multi-coloured make-up ... using his body in a Warhol-like manner almost as a canvas on which the makeup artist could draw” (Matthew-Walker, 1985: 31). The denial of access to his eyes is telling, as the eyes are the primary organ of non-verbal communication.19 The extreme constructedness renders the front cover completely devoid of authorship. David Bowie, the human being behind Aladdin Sane, is absent. The rear cover features a thin silhouette of the front cover photograph. Bowie’s head is outlined in red, his torso in blue. The encroachment by the

Authorship, Agency and Visual Analysis  205 white background that began upon the lower part of Bowie’s torso on the front has now progressed to eliminate all but the barest outline. ­Background and foreground are merged. All facial features are absent and the viewer is confronted by a faceless, empty shell, a bare framework devoid of d ­ efining personal characteristics. As Stevenson puts it, “Bowie has evaporated” ­(Stevenson, 2006: 65). The outline that remains is a silhouette in its simplest form; a single line traced around the edges of a figure’s profile with the interior filled in by a solid colour.20 Silhouettes most commonly feature black as the fill-in colour, giving a sense of corporeal occupation when juxtaposed against a c­ ontrasting background, frequently white. Here, however, because the fill-in colour is a continuation of the white background, the impression given is of complete absence. The Aladdin Sane cover is Bowie’s most dramatic authorial absence to date. There is no evidence of the ‘real’ David Bowie, the result of the ­utilisation of techniques that in combination remove his authentic presence. Bowie has for the first time broken with his pattern of admitting a degree of authorship on the rear of his albums. The implication is that the character has taken over the performer, leaving nothing behind. Pin Ups (1973) The front cover of Bowie’s seventh album is a close-up photographic ­portrait picturing Bowie with Sixties’ fashion model Twiggy. Positioned lower in the frame, in front and to his right, Twiggy rests her head against Bowie’s neck. Set before a featureless light blue background both subjects are naked, making full eye contact with the viewer while possessing very different expressions. Although quite different from the previous album, continuity exists in that Bowie’s face once again appears masked, highly stylised and u ­ nnatural, as does Twiggy’s. This artificiality is noted by critics, with Buckley for ­example, suggesting the two subjects “look more like wind-up dolls than beings made of human flesh” (Buckley, 1999: 198).21 In addition to the depersonalising effect of the masks, for the first time he is identified simply as ‘Bowie’. This first name absence depersonalises and estranges him further because “the first name not only grants one a ­specific identity ... but also directs who that person is and will be through the name’s physiognomy and reference to the world” (Tschaepe, 2003: 68–69). The absence of ‘David’ reduces the precision of the artist’s identity, a step towards Barthes’ notion that a lack of specificity in naming “is a good symptom of disturbance” (Barthes, 1981: 51). Given that Bowie was an adopted name, for the first time in his career there exists the total absence of any given name.22 In combination with the other features discussed, I contend that authorship is absent.

206  Ian Chapman The rear cover consists of six rectangular panels, three containing ­ andwritten text and three comprising colour images. The top, cenh tralised image is an off-front headshot of the artist performing, stage lights reflecting on his hair as he gazes above the viewer in thoughtful reflection. He sports the Ziggy Stardust era rooster haircut and the circle on his forehead that he adopted during Ziggy concerts. The image at bottom right is also a live shot, the beam of a spotlight shining down as he sings into a microphone. It is a high-energy shot, his face contorting with effort. His glam-styled costuming confirms it is a photograph taken at a Ziggy-era concert. The remaining photograph is something new. The artist is seen in a highly posed stance, legs apart, the fingers of his right hand spread upon his suit jacket and his left hand tucked into his pocket. He gazes directly at the viewer with a s­ erious, intense expression. The orange-red background suggests the location is a carefully lit studio. He wears a brown suit that gives the image a more ­formal quality than the other ­pictures, and holds a saxophone in the crook of his right arm. The only obvious linkage between this image and the others is his orange ­rooster-style haircut. The utilisation of handwriting is a significant paratext linking the album to the rear cover of Hunky Dory, although here it is rendered in vivid pink. Suggesting authenticity and informality, the return of this tactic mirrors the earlier album even to the appearance of similarly messy corrected errors. In addition to handwriting the track titles, Bowie writes an explanation for his selections. Confirming this as a personal message, he signs off with, ‘Love-on ya!’, a highly informal sentiment such as one might utter to a close friend, family member or lover. As an emphatic stamp of authorship, he then signs his work with a heavily stylised ‘Bowie’, underlined and personalised further with a heart shape above the ‘i’. It is an intensely personal statement, yet the absence of his first name supports the similar absence on the front cover. On the spine of the album, however, his name is still David Bowie, retaining a small link to the nomenclature used on the previous six albums. On Pin Ups, as on Hunky Dory, the two sides are at odds in that the front conveys depersonalisation whereas the back offers personal communication with the viewer. As on the earlier album this was largely achieved through personal handwriting and the first-person nature of the written message. There is therefore still a sense of acknowledged authorship—of the visible hand behind the artistic product—but only through this paratext and not through Bowie’s image because, differing from that earlier example, all three photographs on the rear of Pin Ups show him in performance guise rather than depicting him as he ‘really is’, offstage. Overall, there is a partial return to the admission of authorship on his rear covers. However, mitigating this apparent reversal, such admission is here attributable to a totally fictitious entity: Bowie.

Authorship, Agency and Visual Analysis  207

Figure 11.3  Diamond Dogs. RCA Victor APLI 0576. April 1974.

Diamond Dogs (1974) The cover of Diamond Dogs is a gatefold painting of Bowie lying propped up on his elbows on a wooden floor, a stage or boardwalk perhaps, partially concealing a billboard behind. Visible from the waist up, his head is positioned at centre-left, his face front-on and his eyes wide and staring straight at the viewer. The muscles and sinews of his naked body are accentuated by shadowing, his hands crossed in front of him with fingers splayed. When the cover is opened to reveal his body in its entirety, it is clear that the lower part of his body is that of a dog, complete with canine paws. A gold bangle adorns the wrist of his left arm, while a large round gold earring hangs from his left earlobe and long red hair hangs over his shoulders. His face is heavily made-up, with dark eye-shadow, bright red lipstick and rouge on his cheeks. Although his pose is relaxed, the expression is alert, his eyes focussed and head erect, giving the impression that he might yet spring into action. Behind Bowie, the billboard features two highly anthropomorphic female cartoon figures with paws instead of hands, flaming red hair, silver/grey flesh and red lipstick upon their smiling mouths. Behind them, at top left, lies the dark silhouette of a city skyline beneath a dark grey cloudy sky. The ­impression given is of a bleak, uninviting and abandoned urban landscape.

208  Ian Chapman At top left is an orange circle ringed in red featuring ‘Bowie’ in red l­ettering. The letter B is highly stylised, fashioned from a twisted lightning bolt, and another lightning bolt underlines the word. The only other text is the words Diamond Dogs at the base of the billboard, and the record ­company name, RCA Victor, at top right.23 The gatefold cover disallows a separate picture on the rear, and therefore the only image the viewer sees is the artificial therianthropic one. The ‘real’ David Bowie is completely absent, his identity masked emphatically. His name is again reduced to ‘Bowie’, and this truncation extends to the cover’s spine. For the first time, ‘David Bowie’ does not appear anywhere.24 As with Aladdin Sane, there is no presentation of Bowie as his real self— the author’s hand is nowhere to be seen; no image, no first name, and no personal handwriting. There remains only the role he is playing. The Next Day (2013) In the covers examined thus far, David Bowie has variously presented his own, real image, and also the images of his constructed roles. On the cover of his much vaunted surprise album of 2013, however, he does something entirely new by almost obliterating an earlier, highly revered image, and replacing it with nothing.25 The cover is a reworking of “Heroes” (1977). Both front and rear are ­heavily subverted by a large white square obscuring the centre of the frame. Bowie’s face is covered on the front, as are the song titles on the rear. In their place the new title and track listing, respectively, appear upon the white squares. The extent of the intrusion is calculated however, with enough of the “Heroes” cover remaining to allow recognition. Similarly, the old album title is struck through with a line thick enough to make the title’s cancellation obvious, but thin enough that it remains legible. The Next Day is the first of Bowie’s covers to not show his face. An implied, residual image is planted in the mind of the viewer, however, by the reminiscence of the earlier work. Despite the obfuscation, the cover leads us towards seeing Bowie in the image shown on “Heroes”, one heavily stylised and influenced by artist Erich Heckel; an image with which Bowie fans, at least, are extremely familiar.26 While the white square is, literally, a blank canvas, Bowie has chosen to not offer an updated image, allowing the implied nostalgic one to remain the only visual referent. The cover is jarring and confrontational, its message seemingly akin to “Wake up! It is the next day—you cannot live in the past”. However, in offering us no visual presentation of the Bowie of 2013, all we have is the past, even if obscured. When we look at, and listen to, The Next Day, we do so in the shadow of 1977. The cover of The Next Day is Bowie’s boldest, inviting deeper analysis. Eschewing manipulation of his image in favour of complete obliteration, authorship is problematized to an even greater extent than before.

Authorship, Agency and Visual Analysis  209 Conclusion David Bowie completed the transition from author to role(s) over the course of his first eight album covers. While not a clean, linear process, as his career progressed his investment in relinquishing the visual ­representations of authorship existed in a concomitant relationship to his developing investment in constructedness. It had been an eight-year journey from ­ the earnest young artist depicted on his debut release in 1967—so clearly ­concerned with ­convincing an as-yet unaware public of authorial i­ ntegrity— to the ­ disturbing, blatantly fabricated fantasy figure of Diamond Dogs in 1974. By this time his methodology of inventing, inhabiting and then ­discarding roles had become clear, and he was about to reinvent ­himself once more as the plastic soul singer of Young Americans (1975).27 While this chapter has dealt with only a small portion of his career, ­speculation about the ‘real’ David Bowie has been ever-present, u ­ ndoubtedly contributing much to his mystique and appeal. Although authorship had become absent by the release of the penultimate album examined in this study, Diamond Dogs, I do not suggest this remained the case throughout his Eighties, Nineties and early post-millennium albums, which clearly deserve their own appraisal. However, the surprising and controversial nature of the cover of The Next Day makes it clear that the visual representation of authorship remains a device that Bowie continues to manipulate to this day. Through unpacking Bowie’s tactic of obfuscating authorship, as ­demonstrated on his album covers, a deeper insight has been gained into how his much-lauded performative quality of fluid identity was enabled, a­ llowing a more critical theoretical understanding of the artist’s methodology. Considering Bowie’s album covers in a wider and career-spanning ­context, it is clear that he has consistently used these potential-rich and highly communicative canvasses quite differently than other major artists and bands. The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and others whose careers have reflected remarkable longevity and who can be regarded as having attained similar iconic status to Bowie, have largely sought to convey consistency through their album cover imagery, particularly in terms of their own personal image(s). This tactic (in marketing terms at least) is generally thought of as being essential to maintaining trust in a brand. The prevailing notion of good practice is that, if change must happen it should occur slowly and at a rate that will not risk alienating the consumer. Confronting unsuspecting fans with imagery markedly different to what they are used to seeing might suggest the artist/act has somehow moved away from them and may no longer ‘represent’ them in the way that they used to do, thus breaking an unspoken contract. Accordingly, while change due to the gradual effects of ageing can be observed in the faces of Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan across passing decades of covers, with very few exceptions they are still presented in largely the same manner each time. The procession of frank, unadorned, true-likeness portrait photographs ensures a high level of ongoing consistency for their fans. This is not so when one traces Bowie’s progression, however. In Bowie’s case, with reinvention, role-playing

210  Ian Chapman and alienation in various different guises his central thematic cornerstones— comprising the very reason his fans are attracted to him—it is clear that he has used his album covers to do exactly the opposite of these other performers. Bowie’s brand consistency is achieved through change rather than through the avoidance of change. He uses his face and his body as a mannequin on which to project his own constant, dramatic evolution, with his album covers becoming an ongoing showcase for this highly performative tactic. Bowie’s approach to album cover art throughout the enormous body of work he has produced is unique. Similarly, the kinds of messages he has so convincingly conveyed through his album cover artwork remain unmatched by any other artist or band. Even an appraisal of Madonna’s album covers, an artist with whom he is methodologically linked at times, shows nothing like the breadth and rapidity of change one sees in Bowie’s work. Realising early in his career the potential for the covers of his records to reflect, promote and even lead the underlying essence of his work, Bowie introduced a new performative depth to the album cover, as well as achieving a level of symbiosis with the recordings they housed that was deeper than had previously been achieved in popular music. Notes 1.  See Stevenson, 2006: 44; Trynka, 2011: 154; Buckley, 1999: 188. 2.  See Gronstad & Vagnes, 2010: 10; Dean & Howells, 1987: 10; Herdeg, 1974: 118; de Ville, 2003: 8. 3.  See also Leppert, 1996: 153. 4.  See also O’Sullivan, 1982: 300. 5.  Paratexts are defined as all additional visual information external to the main picture. This is drawn from a seminal text on book covers. See Genette, 1997: 3; Barchas, 1998: 260; McGann, 1991: 13. 6.  My research is based upon New Zealand releases. Variations may exist between international releases. 7.  For accounts of Bowie as a mod, see Cann, 1983: 29–33; Stevenson, 2006: 16; Auslander, 2006: 59–60; Frith & Horne, 1989: 115. 8.  This duplication of title has at times caused confusion. Released in the UK by Philips under this title, in the US the work was released by Mercury Records as Man of Words/Man of Music, before being reissued by RCA Records in 1972 as Space Oddity. 9.  The artwork is attributed to Vernon Dewhurst, but is based upon the work of ­Victor Vasarely. The style is Op art, a technique designed to engage the viewer using optical effects that tricked the eye into seeing the illusion of movement through repeated geometric patterns and syncopated rhythms. See Barrett, 1981: 219; Rycroft, 2005: 355; Reichardt, 1981: 241. While beyond this study, the cover art can be seen as addressing the threat of mechanisation and technology, one of Bowie’s primary concerns in the album’s lyrics and a common theme for Op artists. See Reichardt, 1981: 241; Rycroft, 2005: 358; Diehl, 1973: 92. 10.  See Benjamin, 2006: 45

Authorship, Agency and Visual Analysis  211 11.  See Buckley, 1999: 102. 12.  The image was hand-coloured. See Paytress, 1998: 68. 13.  See Pegg, 2002: 232; Cato, 1997: 26; Gillman & Gillman, 1986: 273. 14.  Handwriting is held to be a typographical substitute for authorial presence. See Kendrick, 1999: 12: 4; Neefs, 2011: 130. 15.  See also Spicer, 2002: 48; Vincendeau, 1992: 54. 16.  See Auslander, 2006: 239; Paytress, 1998: 91. 17.  See also Cleto, 1999: 3; Babuscio, 1999: 119. 18.  See Hawkins, 2009: 146–147. 19.  See Synnott, 1993: 224; Schirato & Webb, 2004: 58. 20.  McKechnie, 1978: xix. See also Rutherford, 2009: 13. 21.  See also Auslander, 1999: 89–90; Cann, 2010: 313. 22.  For accounts of the artist’s unofficial change of surname from Jones to Bowie in 1965, see Trynka, 2011: 51; Doggett, 2011: 34; Buckley, 1999: 33–34. 23.  The cover was painted by photo-realist Guy Peellaert, popular at the time due to his book of fantasy paintings of rock artists, including Bowie, titled Rock Dreams (1973). Photo-realism used photography as its starting point and was highly popular during the mid-1970s. The goal of photo-realist artists was to produce images that married the colourful vibrancy of painting to the a­ ccuracy of photography, resulting in “tension between authenticity and artifice” (D’­Amico, 2011: 9). 24.  This is also the case on the label of the record. 25.  Designer of The Next Day cover, Jonathan Barnbrook, who was also ­responsible for the covers of Bowie’s Heathen (2002) and Reality (2003) albums, has given candid insight as to what Bowie and he intended. He confirms the cover was designed to convey “the spirit of great pop or rock music which is ‘of the moment’, forgetting or obliterating the past”. Immediately having acknowledged this goal, however, he admits that such erasure of the past is actually an impossible task because while time moves on, and we have no choice but to move with it, one “cannot break free … it seeps out in every new mark you make”. Barnbrook also relates that consideration was given to obliterating the “Heroes” cover with scribble, but argues this would not have implied the degree of detachment from the past that was sought. In addition, by obscuring Bowie’s image with the white square his identity too was obscured, thereby making stark comment on the artist’s absence from the music industry for the previous ten years. 26.  For details on Heckel’s influence see Trynka, 2011: 277; Seabrook, 2008: 144. 27. The front cover here saw him revert to David Bowie, the name scrawled in handwritten signature over an airbrushed portrait, relaxing with a cigarette and engaging his audience with full eye contact. On the rear, he titled himself both David Bowie and, simply, Bowie.

References Auslander, Philip. (1999) Liveness: performance in a mediatised culture, London: Routledge. Auslander, Philip. Performing Glam Rock: Gender & Theatricality in Popular Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

212  Ian Chapman Babuscio, Jack. “The Cinema of Camp (AKA Camp and the Gay Sensibility)”. In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, edited by Fabio Cleto, ­117–135. Ann Arbor: Michigan Press, 1999. Barchas, Janine. “Prefiguring Genre: Frontispiece Portraits from Gulliver’s Travels to Millenium Hall,” Studies in the Novel 30 (2 1998): 260–286. Barrett, Cyril. “Kinetic Art”. In Concepts of Modern Art, edited by Nikos Stangos, 212–224. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1981. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. London: Fontana/Collins, 1977. Benjamin, Harry. “Transsexualism and Transvestism as Psycho-Somatic and ­Somato-Psychic Syndromes”. In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 45–52.New York: Routledge, 2006. Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 1991. Bruce, Vicki and Andrew Young. “Understanding Face Recognition”. British Journal of Psychology 77 (1986): 305–327. Buckley, David. Strange Fascination: David Bowie: the definitive story. London: ­Virgin Publishing Ltd., 1999. Cann, Kevin. Any Day Now: David Bowie. The London Years 1947–1974, London: Adelita Ltd., 2010. Cann, Kevin. David Bowie: A Chronology. London: Vermilion, 1983. Cato, Philip. Crash Course for the Ravers: A Glam Odyssey. Elkton: S.T. Publishing, 1997. Cleto, Fabio. “Introduction: Queering the Camp”. In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, edited by Fabio Cleto, 1–41. Ann Arbor: Michigan Press, 1999. D’Amico, Stephanie A. “Reviewing Realism: Eric Fischl, Will Cotton and the Legacy of American Photorealism”. MA dissertation. Concordia University, 2011. de Ville, Nick. Album Style and Image in Sleeve Design. London: Octopus Publishing Group, 2003. Dean, Roger and David Howells. Album Cover Album 4. Surrey: Dragon’s World Ltd., 1987. Diehl, Gaston. Vasarely. New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1973. Doggett, Peter. The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie and the 1970s. ­London: The Bodley Head, 2011. Frith, Simon and Howard Horne. Art into Pop. London: Routledge, 1989. Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gillman Leni, and Peter Gillman. Alias David Bowie. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986. Gronstad, Asbjorn and Oyvind Vagnes. “Introduction”. In Coverscaping: ­Discovering Album Aesthetics, edited by Asbjorn Gronstad and Oyvind Vagnes, 9–19. ­Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010. Hawkins, Stan. The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture. London: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2009. Herdeg, Walter. Graphis Record Covers: The evolution of graphics reflected in record packaging. Zurich: The Graphis Press, 1974. Katritzky, Margaret A. “Performing Arts Iconography: Traditions, Techniques and Trends”. In Picturing Performance: The Iconography of the Performing Arts in

Authorship, Agency and Visual Analysis  213 Concept and in Practice, edited by Thomas Heck, 68–90. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1999. Kendrick, Laura. Animating he Letter: The Figurative Embodiment of Writing from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1999. Kuitert, Lisa. “Reading the Body: Authors’ Portraits”. In Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in Autobiographical Writing since the Sixteenth Century, edited by Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker and Michael Mascuch, 355–371. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Leppert, Richard. Art & the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. Matthew-Walker, Robert. David Bowie: Theatre of Music. Buckinghamshire: Kensal Press, 1985. McGann, Jerome J. The Textual Condition. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991. McKechnie, Sue. British Silhouette Artists and their Work 1760–1860. London: Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd, 1978. Mennel, Barbara. Cities and Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008. Neefs, Jacques. “Written on the Page”. In Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, R ­ eadings, edited by Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw, 113–130. Piscataway, New  Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2011. O’Sullivan, Maureen. “Measuring the ability to recognize facial expressions of ­emotion”. In Emotion in the Human Face: Second Edition, edited by Paul Ekman, 281–317. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Paytress, Mark. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. New York: Schirmer Books, 1998. Peellaert, G and Cohn, N. Rock Dreams: Under the Boardwalk, London: Pan Books Ltd., 1974. Pegg, Nicholas. The Complete David Bowie. London: Reynolds & Hearn Ltd., 2002. Pointon, Marcia. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in ­Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Reichardt, Jasia. “Op Art”. In Concepts of Modern Art, edited by Nikos Stangos, 239–243. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1981. Rutherford, Emma. Silhouette: The Art of The Shadow. New York: Rizzoli International Publications Inc., 2009. Rycroft Simon. “The nature of Op Art: Bridget Riley and the art of n ­ onrepresentation”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23 (3 2005): 351–371. Schirato, Tony and Jen Webb. Understanding the Visual. Crows Nest, New South Wales, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2004. Seabrook, Thomas J. Bowie in Berlin: A new career in a new town. London: J­ awbone Press, 2008. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Spicer, Andrew. Film Noir. Harlow, United Kingdom: Longman Press, 2002. Stevenson, Nick. David Bowie: Fame, Sound and Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. Synnott, Anthony. The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society. London: R ­ outledge, 1993. Trynka, Paul. Starman: David Bowie: The Definitive Biography. London: Sphere, 2011.

214  Ian Chapman Tschaepe, Mark D. “Halo of Identity: The Significance of First Names and Naming”. Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental ­Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts 6 (1 2003): 68–78. Vincendeau, Ginette. “Noir is Also a French Word: The French Antecedents of Film Noir”. In The Movie Book of Film Noir, edited by Ian Cameron, 49–58. London: Studio Vista, 1992. Warburg, Aby. Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

12 Revisiting Bowie’s Berlin David Buckley

Introduction: The Silent Return of the Thin White Duke Firstly, the major players in the media are informed: the high-circulation music magazines, the prime-time TV slots. Then comes the PR gush; next, most likely, a pre-order of the new album on I-Tunes, with the inducement of a new song to download, and the new artwork to scrutinise. Next, a press conference, the announcement of a world tour … … Not this time. In 2013, David Bowie became the first artist to release new songs with the promotional equivalent of John Cage’s Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds.1 ‘Where Are We Now?’ was Bowie’s first new song for a decade. It arrived as an interlocutor; it spoke to us only. Bowie himself was completely silent. We would know him now only as one of his fictional creations. No press, no comment, just art. The music was sad. Bowie himself looked both bizarre and drowning in memory in the new promotional film by the New York artist Tony Oursler. For most of the song, Bowie is part of a homunculus, a co-joined puppet, whose Siamese wife is played by Oursler’s real-life wife, Jacqueline Humphries. Towards the end of the film we see Bowie, in middle-age, hair still thick but greying, attired in a marine-blue trendy Tee, which obliquely references his first love, Hermione. “As long as there’s me / as long as there’s you …”. The line haunted; a direct connection over time between the song’s protagonist and his audience. Although other songs on his comeback album The Next Day, released two months later, had pickings of the autobiographical, shards of past ideas, links to earlier songs, ‘Where Are We Now?’ appeared, at least initially, to be almost straightforwardly biographical. The song, and the film with the use of old footage from the Seventies, was a collage of remembrances about West Berlin. Bowie taking the train to Potsdammer Platz, or stocking up on the weekly shop at KaDeWe or sitting in the Dschungel, a famous disco and cocktail bar in the Schöneberg region of town. Yet, despite the emotional geography of the song, Bowie’s producer, Tony Visconti, points out a deeper meaning to Bowie’s words:

216  David Buckley The footage of Berlin is old footage before The Wall came down. What choked me up was that I walked on those streets, I drank in those bars and with very few words, very few lyrics, he evokes so much nostalgia in me. The song isn’t so much about Berlin, it’s about a time when everything was good in your life, a period where you think: ‘I could stay in this spot forever’. (Visconti, 2013) Bowie myths If no one shouted its arrival, once the return of David Bowie was confirmed, the media entered a veritable feeding-fest of words about Bowie. Not only did it afford the opportunity for a whole new generation of people to mispronounce his name, but it also meant an uneven re-evaluation of Bowie’s life and art. On the upside were the BBC’s documentary Five Years (2013), and the astonishing exhibition staged by London’s V&A, ‘David Bowie is’. On the downside was article after article rehashing accepted wisdoms about Bowie’s career. Many of these centred on his time in Berlin. Drawing upon my experience as a biographer, in this chapter I critically evaluate the ways in which the myth of Bowie’s Berlin has been constructed and disseminated.

Bowie myth one: The ‘Berlin’ albums Bowie is undoubtedly one of the most mythogenic musicians of his era. His interpretations of his work, his recounting of the basic biographical facts of his life, his likes and dislikes, his political views and his s­ exuality and identity form a deliberately jerky narrative. Having declared h ­ imself bisexual in 1972, he backtracked in 1983. Identifying the need for a New Right to clear up society’s corrupt morals in 1975, by 1980 he was insulted and degraded by ‘these fascists’ in the song, ‘It’s No Game’. So how do we explain this lack of consistency? A young man educating h ­ imself and reserving the right to change his mind? The direct product of too much on a febrile mind? Or a deliberate attempt to confuse and ­conflict an ­audience willing to suspend disbelief and be taken on a ride across musical genres, performance styles, sexualities and identities? One myth Bowie did not create, however, was the idea that the three albums, Low, “Heroes” and Lodger constituted his ‘Berlin Trilogy’. Time and again, those three albums are bracketed together and yet, sonically, they have almost nothing in ­common. Low’s sound is pure, clear lines and short, minimalistic thoughts on side one. On side two, an astonishing interplay between narrative and invention comes into place. Words exist but they are invented and tell no story, whilst the music swarms around nebulous and cold images of the East. “Heroes”, released just ten months later, is all discord and rage. The vocals are screaming matches

Revisiting Bowie’s Berlin  217 between Bowie and the guitars, ­improvised and at times wild, as opposed to the more considered and melodic parts on Low. The ­instrumentals on “Heroes” are more organic—there’s B ­ owie’s sax, but there are also Z ­ en-like flows of ambience and Gothic, almost ­horror-soundtrack excursions into the dark. Lodger, recorded in two stages, in a gap in a touring schedule in 1978 and after the tour in early 1979, is a series of ten relatively short songs. On the surface, it’s a return to the conventional and to pop (which would, in itself, not necessarily be a bad thing). However, Lodger is just as radical as Low or “Heroes”. The music is an astonishing fusion of beats and ideas from Anglo-American rock and disco with musical fragments ­collected from Europe (and specifically Motorik, ethnic Turkish music), whilst Bowie the storyteller returns with scenes of domestic violence, ­ex-­patriot Germans, gender-bending funsters and the unwelcome arrival of a tatty angel of death. Only “Heroes” was conceived and produced entirely in Berlin, o ­ ne-third of the so-called ‘Trilogy’. In fact, Bowie and Eno called their work a ­‘triptych’, in an attempt to compare their collaboration to an artistic study divided into three. The unifying feature of all three albums is the personnel. For all three records his main collaborator was Brian Eno. However, he was not the producer, that role, or co-production role, being taken by Tony Visconti. The rhythm section, arguably the best of Bowie’s career, was the same—Carlos Alomar (guitars), Dennis Davis (drums) and George Murray (bass). Other soloists were chosen for each album such as guitarists Ricky Gardiner, Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew, or electric violinist, Simon House. Often, the rhythm section of Alomar/Davis/Murray was nonplussed or even angry at the random studio methods of Bowie and Eno. Davis, who had worked with Bowie since 1974, said that he had “no tarot” for any of the music he made with Bowie after the soul-inflected Young Americans album (BBC2, 2013). This sense of musical aficionados confused and frustrated adds a wonderful tension to the music—a genuine fusion of rock and R&B playing with sonic adventure. Finally, it is worth pointing out that although Low, “Heroes” and, to some extent, Lodger are now praised for the groundbreaking works they are, this was not the case at the time. “Heroes” was the only one of the three given unanimous praise by the critics in the UK, with both New Musical Express (NME) and Melody Maker making it their album of the year. Low, however, was angrily dismissed by NME’s Charles Shaar ­Murray as an album which gave no hope at a time when it was needed most (“profoundly selfish and egotistical, encouraging each individual to lay on his ass and listen to his wounds fester rather than go out to help and be helped” [Shaar Murray, 1977a]), whilst Lodger was reviewed by an underwhelmed Jon Savage who stated: “Lodger is a nice enough pop record, beautifully played, produced and crafted, and slightly faceless. Is Bowie that interesting? … Projection: will the Eighties really be this ­boring?” (Savage, 1979).

218  David Buckley

Bowie myth two: Bowie the Berliner Bowie, then aged 29, was, in fact, officially resident in Switzerland. By the summer of 1976, Bowie lived at Clos des Mésanges, a villa near Blonay on the north side of Lake Geneva, which he shared with wife Angie, 5-year-old son Zowie and household staff. Angie had selected the house. Their neighbours were Oona and Charlie Chaplin and the elderly maverick painter, Balthus, whom Bowie would, in the mid-1990s interview for the journal, Modern Painters. Bowie would return to live in Switzerland for a dozen years after his residence in West Berlin before moving to live, permanently now it seems, in New York. A good case could be made for London, or New York, to have had a bigger impact on Bowie, the musician and the man, than Berlin. All of Bowie’s albums up to and including Diamond Dogs were conceived and recorded almost entirely in London (although Aladdin Sane is an obvious exception), whilst since 1997, all of Bowie’s music has been recorded in New York. Bowie lived and worked in Berlin from the late spring of 1976 to the spring of 1978, when he arrived in the US to rehearse for a world tour which would keep him on the road until December 1978. Even during this time, he was often away, either touring with Iggy Pop in early 1977, on holiday or on promotional duties for “Heroes” (not forgetting his duet with Bing Crosby at Elstree in September 1977 and his performance with Marc Bolan the same month). Revealingly, the journalist Adrian Thrills, who met Bowie by chance at a Human League gig in London, wrote that Bowie was “… Seemingly dreading the prospect of returning to Berlin – he said he would be staying awhile in Blighty to add the finishing touches to the Low/“Heroes”/ Lodger trilogy and was even considering a permanent move back home”. Thrills added that when asked about his own oeuvre that Bowie “rated Diamond Dogs as the artistic high-point of his career” (Thrills, 1979).

Bowie myth three: Spartan Bowie The picture of Bowie played out in the public imagination is of Bowie leading a ‘stripped down’, almost ascetic lifestyle in Berlin. In fact, what Bowie lived was simply a very unusual version of normality. He had no eight to five (as it is in Germany) job to go to. He didn’t have to sit down every month and pay bills or worry about being made redundant. He was still David Bowie, international rock star. What Bowie did was the sort of things he saw everyday Berliners do. His initial ‘costume’ of short-cropped hair, short-trimmed moustache, checked shirt and cap, in hindsight, looks almost like a Bowie character, a distillation of what he saw as being what a young, arty Berliner might wear. The fact that, at least initially, he could walk round Berlin, take the U-Bahn and S-Bahn or cycle to his favourite museum unnoticed was not only because of

Revisiting Bowie’s Berlin  219 his new reduction to normalcy; in 1976, Bowie had yet to sell many records in Germany. He would be known by the avid music fan, and his stock was high enough to play arenas in the major cities, but unlike in Japan, the UK and the US, he was not yet an idol. Looking at Bowie’s apparently ‘meagre’ existence in Berlin, it would be the life of a prince or princess for us mere mortals, a spacious Altbau (literally ‘old building’) in a happening city. Bowie knew that with a click of his fingers, he could return to his ‘normality’ at once. RCA, after all, according to Bowie, attempted to helicopter him out of Berlin when they heard Low, and offered to relocate him back in the States so that he could restart his career as a hitmaker. In relative terms, Bowie, for the first time since his time at Haddon Hall back in 1971, did live a life which was not dependent on others. The entourage of helpers and later drug dealers from the Mainman days, and his unhappy period in LA, were gone. Bowie was still not a well man. Bowie himself said that the Iggy Pop tour of 1977, on which he played keyboards, saw the drug consumption rise to ‘astronomic’ levels. He may have been misremembering, but the idea that Bowie was drug-free after his arrival in Berlin is perhaps misleading. Bowie also began drinking quite heavily during periods in Berlin and, although in comparative terms he was healthier and cleaner than his darkest days in 1974 and 1975, he was still a fragile specimen battling his demons. His marriage to Angie was breaking up, he was bored with rock music and Berlin offered him a space to address both personal and professional issues away from the media. However, being David Bowie, it could never be a life of normality. In 2002 Bowie commented: At that time, I was vacillating badly between euphoria and incredible depression. Berlin was at that time not the most beautiful city of the world, and my mental condition certainly matched it. I was abusing myself so badly. My subtext to the whole thing is that I’m so desperately unhappy, but I’ve got to pull through because I can’t keep living like this. There’s actually a real optimism about the music. In its poignancy there is, shining through under there somewhere, the feeling that it will be all right. (cited in Pareles, 2002)

‘Berlin’ Texts

Speed of Life One of the features of music-making in the Sixties and Seventies was that major artists, unlike today, were almost unnaturally productive. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Elton John, to give three examples, would average an album a year, and in Elton’s case, for a period, two albums a year. Bowie was no different. Low, released in January 1977, was his eleventh studio album in ten years.

220  David Buckley It was largely written and recorded just three months after completing a world tour. And during those three months, Bowie had written and helped produce material which would form Iggy Pop’s The Idiot album. Between May 1976 and February 1979, Bowie would record ­three-albums-worth of new material, plus co-write a hefty chunk of material for Iggy Pop. Bowie would be involved not only on The Idiot, but also its quick-fire follow-up, Lust For Life. He would also find time to act in a film, Just A Gigolo, tour with Iggy and to tour himself throughout the entirety of the second half of 1978; simply, an astonishing work rate. It helped that Bowie assembled an astonishingly creative team with which to work. It is a talent Bowie seemed to have almost innately—the ability to pick the right team for the job. Often it would be an assemblage of completely disparate elements and talents. It was a gift which would ­occasionally desert him after 1983. Adrian Belew, Bowie’s guitarist on the 1978 World tour and on the Lodger sessions expressed it like this: Carlos Alomar was the musical director but not only that, he was the glue, I would say. A lot of times in a band you have someone, they don’t seem like their parts are as significant as they really are. You only miss them when you take them out of the picture. When I worked with Talking Heads, I always thought that Jerry Harrison was that person in that band. You didn’t really know what Jerry was doing that much in the band, but if he wasn’t in the band, you’d notice. Sometimes there are a couple of people within a band that create the right chemistry, and, if you take them out of the band then it’s difficult to replace. Eno certainly turns the fire up! He tries to create an atmosphere in which you would do something that you wouldn’t think of yourself. He brings things out of you, and, in that sense is a unique type of record producer. Record producing is about the sounds and all that stuff, but that’s become pretty much technique, and the other side of record production is, for me, setting the stage for something great to happen. And I think Eno’s wonderful at doing that. Throughout Low there’s a pure tone to the synthesizers, as if Bowie’s catharsis (after three years of destructive behaviour in America) is magically recreated by these ice-clear timbres. And the fantastic drum sound (the snare was rigged by Visconti through a new gadget called a Harmonizer) gives the songs on Side 1 a colossal cultural and musical cache. This drum sound would now become a blueprint which left-field pop would build upon in the decade ahead. Bowie, who decided to play Low live in 2002, told The New York Times: I had brought the idea of having fundamentally an R&B rhythm section working against the new zeitgeist of electronic ambience that was

Revisiting Bowie’s Berlin  221 happening in Germany. It was terribly exciting to know that one had stumbled across something that was truly innovative. (Bowie cited in Pareles, 2002)

The Damaged Self There’s no doubt that when Low arrived in January 1977 a proportion of his fans, and his supporters in the media, were totally perplexed. Had Bowie ‘sold out’ to Brian Eno and was Low an Eno record in disguise? It was only with the passing years that the brilliance of Low was recognised, and the unique Bowiesque fusion of a brittle, electro-funk with impressionistic, ambient sounds became the musical template for almost all British post-punk music; the Human League, Gary Numan, Simple Minds, Joy Division, Ultravox and many others all carried Low’s imprimatur. Although Bowie declined to promote Low, he found himself with a Top 3 UK single. ‘Sound And Vison’, however, is less song, more worded instrumental. What pop song up until this point started with a one-minute and forty-second section of instrumental music, with just Bowie and backing singer Mary Hopkin’s breathy backing vocals to give any sense of a human element? The lyric itself is minimal; a frozen stare of a song, backed by a crunching electro-beat. Bowie is back in his LA darkened room: “pale blinds drawn all day / nothing to do, nothing to say”. Like so many of Bowie’s great pop singles, ‘Sound And Vision’ has a succinct, Pop Art-like manifesto quality about it, the title summing up the contents as a slogan—‘Fame’, ‘Fashion’, ‘Time’, ‘Repetition’ and “Heroes”. Side one of Low, when it does speak, speaks of isolation and harm. Bowie is damaged goods. On ‘Be My Wife’, Bowie is both pleading with Angie to be with him, and is looking for someone, anyone, to share his life. On ‘What in the World’, he asks the song’s addresse if she sees ‘the real me’. ‘Breaking Glass’ (thanks to Eno’s intervention in telling Bowie that the piece should be left as short as it is without trying to make it into a ‘proper’ song) is an astonishing moment, a fragment of music, dark and droning, with Bowie, seemingly again back in his LA room, drawing pentagrams, breaking glass. Perhaps, most disturbing of all is the Ballardian2 repeat horror story of ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’. It is reportedly partly based on a real-life event, when Bowie, having rammed his drug dealer’s car, drove ‘round an underground car park at high speed. The lyric hints at Bowie’s sense of growing futility, a man trapped, cursed, programmed to make the same mistakes. The ‘hotel garage’, could easily be a metaphor for his rock-star life in LA. “Heroes” and Lodger are less autobiographical works. However, an angry tension runs through the songs on side one of “Heroes” with ‘the proto-Industrial’ ‘Blackout’ summoning up a strong sense of emotional dislocation. “Get me to the doctor!” Bowie screams, “Get me off the streets / get

222  David Buckley me on my feet”. By the time of Lodger, Bowie is writing narrative again; the observer standing aside, reporting, not judging. ‘Repetition’ is one of Bowie’s most successful songs from the period, a disturbing, repeating bass line mimicking the blows received by a broken wife from a broken husband in this chill song of domestic violence. By the time of Lodger, Bowie’s sense of humour was returning. He was once again sufficiently comfortable to play three female backing singers in the video for one of his best singles, ‘Boys Keep Swinging’. And a sense of sonic fun returned when Bowie asked the rhythm section to swap instruments to get the right, wrong sound. Carlos Alomar later memorably said, “the best-sounding horrible young teen punk sound you ever heard” (Alomar, 1999). But the best version of the song would come later in 1979, when Bowie performed the song on Saturday Night Live using a technique he had borrowed from his time in Berlin: ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, used a trick that I had seen in the f­ airgrounds in Germany. Standing in a kind of Punch and Judy booth, the p ­ erformer, dressed in black, would attach a small body puppet (just trunk and limbs) below his chin. This gave the effect of a huge human headed marionette. He would then sing his oom-pah songs and everyone would drink and sing along. Very hearty. By using TV trickery we achieved the same effect while the puppet itself was seen to be of regular human height performing alongside the ‘real’ band. (Bowienet, 1999)

This Damaged Land More than any other city in Europe in the Seventies, Berlin possessed both an astonishing energy and a forceful darkness, weighted down by a blighted past, yet constantly receptive to new ideas. Bowie once commented: At that time, with the [Berlin] Wall still up, there was a feeling of terrific tension throughout the city. It was either very young or very old people. There were no family units in Berlin. It was a city of extremes. It vacillated between the absurd—the whole drag, transvestite nightclub type of thing—and real radical, Marxist political thought. And it seemed like this really was the focus of the new Europe. It was right here. For the first time, the tension was outside of me rather than within me. And it was a real interesting process, writing for me under those conditions. (New York Rock, 1997)

Revisiting Bowie’s Berlin  223 This heavy atmosphere is still to be felt today, as radio journalist Jakob Mayr argued: There was a special atmosphere in West Berlin because of the menace from the East. You never knew how long Berlin would remain a free city. Under pressure cultures evolve even quicker than normal with newer ideas, fresher ideas. The morbid character of the city would have fascinated artists and musicians. Many buildings were devastated during the War and they would still have been visible in the Seventies. And on the other hand there would have been many older buildings left, including buildings built in the Nazi era. You feel this atmosphere even now. (Mayr, 2010) Recording at the Hansa Ton Studios in the summer of 1977 was a memorable, sometime alarming process as Tony Visconti remembers: [this was] one of my last great adventures in making albums. The studio was about 500 yards from the wall. Red Guards would look into our control-room window with powerful binoculars. (Buckley, 2005) Of all the songs from this period, it is “Heroes” which has come to define who David Bowie is. The song itself is part love story, part political ­commentary, part self-analysis. Edited (and downsized, musically) for its single release, “Heroes” is best sampled either neat, on the original ­album, in all its six-and-a-half minutes of decadent splendour, in its German-­language version, ‘Helden’ or even on stage, where Bowie arguably improves on the original with an astonishing live vocal. The insistent synth pattern, drone-like guitar work and Bowie’s impassioned, histrionic vocal performance, brilliantly recorded by Tony Visconti, rightly make this a classic Bowie song, despite the fact that, as Radio 1 broadcaster Mark Radcliffe points out: “there was a sense that everybody was playing a different song at a different speed at the same time, and yet somehow creating something effortlessly glorious” (cited in Buckley, 2012: 280). Bowie himself would later claim that the “plodding tempo and rhythm”, were inspired by the Velvet Underground’s ‘Waiting For The Man’ (cited in Robinson, 2000). The song’s message of personal, mundane heroism against the odds has made this Bowie’s most personal and most universally admired message. However, ‘The Wall’, as Bowie would later comment, also was a symbol of that which he had left behind. Behind ‘The Wall’ was Bowie’s past—his rock star life style, unhappiness, emotional dislocation. In front of him, so he hoped, was a new version of himself, and a new vision for the future.

224  David Buckley Away from narrative lyrically, Bowie also explores the theme of a divided Europe in several instrumental pieces on both Low and “Heroes”. Bowie was learning a new musical language, learning to create music without necessarily having to use formal song structures. The funereal ‘Warszawa’, was Bowie’s attempt to recreate his impression of Cold War Poland. In the second half of the piece, Bowie sings in an astonishing nonsense language so convincingly that the listener feels it must be some long-dead Slavic tongue brought back to life. The beautiful melody of ‘Art Decade’ (and its punning title) takes us back to the era of high creativity in Modernist Berlin, before the bleak Nazi period and the gruesome legacy of shame after the War. ‘Weeping Wall’, its title referring not just to a divided Berlin, but any city or State which finds itself in a sorrowful partition, was an attempt by Bowie to re-create the spirit of one of his then-favourite musicians, Philip Glass. The piece pulses and judders, overlaid with bright timbres and sinister lead guitars. A short section of a chord progression written for the unreleased soundtrack to Bowie’s 1976 film, The Man Who Fell To Earth, pulses through the final instrumental on Low, ‘Subterraneans’. Bowie deliberately added faintly jazzy touches to a piece which sonically tries to re-create the plight of those left behind in East Berlin, and who would listen, concealed from the West, to the sounds of commercial culture. ‘Subterraneans’ as an epithet, was also perfect for Bowie’s cultish fans themselves, staying largely hidden within the mainstream of pop culture during punk, but soon to revolutionise music and fashion in the post-punk era. On “Heroes”, the instrumental mood is, if anything, bleaker: the evil Militaristic beat of ‘V-2 Schneider’, the soundtrack to a frightened mind that is ‘Sense of Doubt’. After the Zen minimalism of the haunting ‘Moss Garden’ comes perhaps Bowie’s greatest instrumental ‘Neuköln’. The sense of disquiet and unease created by the music mirrors the sense of not belonging and dysfunction felt by the newly arrived Turkish immigrants who lived in the Neukölln area of the city. The end section has Bowie’s sax booming out across a harbour of solitude, as if lost in fog; the final death throes of the instrument ending in one furiously rebounded note. It is the best ending to a Bowie album that never was; the final track on the album is ‘The Secret Life of Arabia’, a brilliant pop song which forges a sonic link between the album and Lodger, but which surely ought to have closed the first side of song-based music. The glorious ‘Fantastic Voyage’, the opening salvo on Lodger, comments directly on Cold War tension: “We’re learning to live with somebody’s depression”, sings Bowie, commenting obliquely on the desperation of two entrenched positions which could lead to the eradication of “an entire race”. Liberalised and humanised by his Berlin experience, Bowie, is “still getting educated”, and “has to write it down”. He can no longer stand aside or retreat into the realm of the imaginary or the symbolic. A new Bowie has now emerged: David Bowie the chronicler.

Revisiting Bowie’s Berlin  225 Bowie themes—Legacies and Conclusions For whatever reason, for whatever confluence of circumstances, Tony, Brian and I created a powerful, anguished, sometimes euphoric language of sounds. In some ways, sadly, they really captured, unlike anything else in that time, a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass. It is some of the best work that the three of us have ever done. Nothing else sounded like those albums. Nothing else came close. If I never made another album, it really wouldn’t matter now. My complete being is within those three. They are my DNA. (Bowie cited in Dalton & Hughes, 2001) Today, there are Bowie Tours to be taken, and a long-unified Berlin to sample. One can visit Haupstrasse 155 in the Schöneberg district, and even take a tour of the Hansa Ton Studios positioned, as it was back in the day, metres away from The Wall and the guards who could look directly into the recording studio. Most of the old haunts have either closed down or changed shape—very little of the cabaret, the transvestite review, the disco-land of Seventies Berlin exists, except in tribute form or pastiche. Yet Berlin is still a special city, the hub of European’s alternative culture. David Bowie left Berlin with more of David Jones back. By placing himself in a conflicted and vibrant city he knew himself the better. He was freer. His friendships with painters, musicians and the Berlin intelligentsia gave him back more of himself as a person. The ‘Berlin Young Man Clone’ of 1976 was replaced, by 1979, by a largely rounded version of himself. He would dabble in makeup and personae again, but there was no sense in, for example, his astonishing role-playing in the 1980 promotional film for ‘Ashes To Ashes’ that he felt the burn of alienation quite as keenly as his characters did. And neither did he feel the necessity to borrow their wardrobes for everyday life. Bowie and Iggy Pop saw first-hand the suffering and the tension of those living in Berlin. Afterward, if not straightforwardly politicised in their work, they became different sorts of writers, more alert to the world around them. In 1999, Bowie recounted: Iggy Pop and I were a couple of very naughty boys, who went to Berlin to learn how to be good … I remember one morning, after a particularly mischievous night out, we both met up at a coffee bar we used to frequent and discussed the doings of the night before, and Iggy, or Jim, related most extraordinary events. He said that he’d been to a punk club. It was the anniversary of the building of the Wall, that you must remember, and he went to a punk club that were holding an anniversary party and they built an entirely

226  David Buckley accurate replica of the Berlin Wall, and at the stroke of midnight, fifty savage, demented punks leapt on this wall and tore it to pieces with their mouths and teeth and fists—smashing it. But he said that it was the aftermath that was the most affecting, because after all this had happened—they demolished the wall—there were small groups of them, standing around the corners, pitifully crying, tears streaming down their faces. And I thought that was an incredibly moving thing, and a real memory of Berlin—the Berlin that I knew at the time, anyway. (Bowie, 1999) The music Bowie made between 1976 and 1979 was arguably the best of his entire career. Musical tributes have been made to this body of work in the Nineties by Philip Glass with his Low and “Heroes” symphonies, and latterly by percussionist Dylan Howe who successfully reinvents Bowie’s work as eccentric ensemble pieces on the album Subterranean: New Designs On Bowie’s Berlin (2013). The crash of ideas, the fusion of funk, electronica, ambient and chanson would prove a direct influence on Nineties groups, most obviously in the work of Radiohead but also, obliquely, on some of the soundscapes of artists as diverse as The Manic Street Preachers, Tricky, Björk, PJ Harvey, St. Vincent, LCD Soundsystem, Moby, Blur and many others. Bowie almost single-handedly introduced new ideas from Germany into the mainstream, notably the galloping Motorik beat of Neu! most clearly heard on Lodger and the tracks ‘Move On’, ‘Look Back In Anger’ and ‘Red Sails’. Bowie also talked up Düsseldorf’s Kraftwerk although Bowie himself claims their influence on his music has been overstated.3 In August 2014, NME placed David Bowie as the second most influential artist of all time (Radiohead, with some degree of irony, given their indebtedness to Bowie and Eno, and their relatively modest back catalogue in terms of numbers, were placed first). Although cases can be made for the songwriting power and shock-of-the-new theatricality of the glam period of 1971–1974, the ‘plastic soul’ of his American years, the pure pop mastery of more accessible work in the Eighties, the experimental glee of the Nineties, and the sombre steeliness of much of his latest work, the music he made in the second half of the Seventies is still astonishing; every time those three albums are played, new facets reveal themselves. However, where most of us mere mortals see stages and periods in Bowie’s work, and felt sonic shock when each album seemed to reinvent himself and his sound, Bowie himself sees progression and consistency. “There’s a very strong continuity to the work I do”, Bowie said in 2002. “The sensibility of the lyric from ‘Space Oddity’ (1969) is really no different than something from Heathen (2002). The sense of disorientation and solitude, the feelings are really not that different” (Bream, 2004). Disorientation and Solitude; perhaps this is the perfect description of his late-Seventies work.

Revisiting Bowie’s Berlin  227 Notes 1.  Perhaps John Cage’s most famous piece, 4’33’’, composed in 1952, was a paradigmshifting, avant-garde piece of ‘music’ that seemed to come from out of the blue, its most salient feature being its ‘silence’. For more on Bowie’s avant-garde tendencies, see Chapter 3 by Aileen Dillane, Eoin Devereux and Martin Power in this volume. 2.  J. G. Ballard was an English novelist associated with New Wave science fiction (see Baxter, 2011). 3.  Bowie rightly points out that the Kraftwerk track ‘Trans Europe Express’ came after his own ‘Station To Station’. Both pieces use the beats and rhythms of the train as an inspiration. However, whereas the Bowie piece unfolds like a mystical weave or spell, Kraftwerk’s music is more directly linked to the mechanics of the train and the track, its movement encoded in musical beats.

References Alomar, Carlos. Interview with David Buckley. 1999. Amend, Christoph and Daniel Haaksman. “Der Pop Der Frühen Jahre”. Translated by Martin Schneider. Die Zeit, 21 February 2013. http://dangerousminds.net/comments/iggy_pop_in_the_late_70s_early_80s_previously_unseen_­photographs (accessed 14 August 2014). Baqué, Egbert. A Tribute To David Bowie: Hauptstrasse—The Berlin Years 1976– 1978. Berlin: Edward Baqué Contemporary Art, 2013. Baxter, John. The Inner Man: the Life of J G Ballard. London: Orion Publishing, 2011. BBC2. David Bowie: Five Years, 25 May 2013, 21:20. Blackburn, Gavin. “A Trip Through Bowie’s Berlin”. DW, 3 August 2013. http:// www.dw.de/a-trip-through-bowies-berlin/a-16606407 (accessed 8 March 2013). Bono. “Bono On Berlin: I was there when the wall came down”. The Mirror, 10 November 2009. Bowie, David. “Where Are We Now?”. The Next Day. ISO Records, 2013. Bowie, David. VH-1 Storytellers. Recorded 13 August 1999, released 2009. Bowie, David. “Bowienet journal”. 20 February 1999. Bowie, David. ‘Fantastic Voyage’. Lodger. RCA Records, 1979. Bowie, David. ‘Be My Wife’. Low. RCA Records, 1977. Bowie, David. ‘Blackout’. “Heroes”. RCA Records, 1977. Bowie, David. ‘Sound And Vision’. Low. RCA Records, 1977. Bowie, David. ‘What In The World’. Low. RCA Records, 1977. Bream, John. “Hunky dory; All is well with David Bowie after battling the flu—and the burden of his own legacy”. Minneapolis Star Tribune, 9 January 2004. http:// www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-112031588.html (accessed 12 October 2013). Buckley, David. Kraftwerk: Publikation. London: Omnibus Press, 2012. Buckley, David. Strange Fascination: David Bowie—The Definitive Story. London: Virgin, 2005. Buckley, Louise. West Berlin—The Culture Metropolis: Myth And Reality ­1961–1989. Unpublished paper. University College London, 2010.

228  David Buckley C. G. “David Bowie: Ziggy In Berlin”. The Economist, 22 May 2014. http://www. economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/05/david-bowie (accessed 5 June 2014). Connolly, Kate. “Bowie’s Berlin: ‘A time of Sturm und Drang in the shadow of the Wall’”. The Guardian, 12 January 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/ music/2013/jan/13/bowie-berlin-sturm-drang-wall (accessed 5 May 2014). Dalton, Stephen and Rob Hughes. “David Bowie: ‘Berlin? I Can’t Express The Feeling Of Freedom I Felt There’”. Uncut, April 2001. http://www. moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_uncut-apr01.html (accessed 6 June 2013). Dax, Max. “From the Vaults: David Bowie—‘I am he who quotes, I am the sponge that absorbs’”. Electronic Beats, 21 May 2014. http://www.electronicbeats.net/ en/features/interviews/from-the-vaults-david-bowie-i-am-he-who-quotes-i-amthe-sponge-that-absorbs/ (accessed 6 July 2014). Davis, Richard . “Bowie Week Extra: On The Trail Of Bowie In Berlin”. Artrocker, 13 July 2011. http://www.artrocker.tv/features/article/bowie-week-extra-the-­ berlin-era-re-traced (accessed 18 August 2013). Dodson, Sean. “Bowie’s Berlin”. The Guardian, 5 August 2008. http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2008/aug/05/berlin.bars.musictour (accessed 17 November 2013). Enriquez, Trina. “Egon Schiele and David Bowie”. Under An Artichoke (Blog), 24 January 2012. http://trinaenriquez.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/egon-schiele-­anddavid-bowie/ (accessed 19 May 2014). Hewitt, Ben “Music For The Lizard Brain: Ty Bulmer of NYPC’s F ­ avourite Albums”. The Quietus, 8 October 2013. http://thequietus.com/articles/13527-tahita-bulmer-nypc-interview-favourite-records?page=14 (accessed 8 December 2013). Kenwood. Hong Kong: Tiger Balm Garden/Mandarin Hotel. 9 September 2013. http://kenwoodlennon.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/hong-kong-tiger-balm-gardenmandarin.html> (accessed 8 October 2013). Langenhan, Julia. “Berlin Special: David Bowie Renaissance In Berlin”. SILKsofine, 27 May 2014. http://www.silksofine.com/berlin-special-david-bowie-renaissance-berlin/ (accessed 19 July 2014). Llin/Ai, Anna. “Tracing West Berlin’s 70s and 80s subculture”. DW, 21 February 2013. http://www.dw.de/tracing-west-berlins-70s-and-80s-subculture/a-16615845 (accessed 26 November 2013). Maclean, Rory. Berlin: Imagine A City. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014. McNulty, Bernadette. “Bowie and Berlin: a guide”. The Telegraph, 8 January 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/9788958/Bowieand-Berlin-a-guide.html (accessed 30 September 2013). Mallet, Franck. “In The Enosphere”. Artpress, September 2001, http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/artpress01.html (accessed 3 January 2014). Mastropolo, Frank. “The History of David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy: ‘Low’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lodger’”. Ultimate Classic Rock, 18 May 2014. http://ultimateclassicrock. com/david-bowie-berlin-trilogy/ (accessed 6 June 2014). Marsh, Geoffrey. “David Bowie Is–an interview with the V&A curator”. Phaidon, 18 March 2013. http://de.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2013/march/18/ david-bowie-is-an-interview-with-the-vanda-curator/ (accessed 12 August 2014). Mayr, Jakob. Interview with David Buckley. 2010. Moore, Suzanne. “David Bowie’s top-100 reading list is virtually poetry in itself”. The Guardian, 2 October 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/ oct/02/david-bowie-top-100-reading-list (accessed 15 December 2013).

Revisiting Bowie’s Berlin  229 Murray, Charles Shaar. “Low: album review”. New Musical Express, 22 January 1977a. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/david-bowie-ilowi-3 (accessed 17 February 2014). Murray, Charles Shaar. “David Bowie: Who Was That (Un)masked Man?” New Musical Express, 12 November 1977b. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/­ Article/david-bowie-who-was-that-unmasked-man (accessed 17 D ­ ecember 2013). New York Rock. “David Bowie: The Dame Speaks”. NYRock, February 1997. http://www.nyrock.com/db_new.htm (accessed 12 August 2014) O’Leary, Chris. “V-2 Schneider”. Pushing Ahead of the Dame: David Bowie, Song By Song (Blog), 17 May 2011. http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/tag/kraftwerk/ (accessed 3 January 2014). Pareles, Jon. “David Bowie: 21st-Century Entrepreneur”. New York Times, 9 June 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/09/arts/david-bowie-21st-century-­entrepreneur. html (accessed 8 August 2013). Paterson, Tony. “Where was he then? Bowie relives odyssey in Seventies Berlin”. The Independent, 8 March 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ europe/where-was-he-then-bowie-relives-odyssey-in-seventies-berlin-8527222. html (accessed 25 March 2013). Robinson, John. “It Means More To Me Than Any Number of Hit Albums, This. Thanks Very Much”. New Musical Express, 2 December 2000. http://www. teenagewildlife.com/Appearances/Press/2000/1202/nmeinterview/ (accessed 8 September 2013). Rolling Stone. “David Bowie and Iggy Pop Biopic to Focus on Berlin Years”. Rolling Stone, 7 February 2013.