Is there room in the obituary for some bitchery? (Bowie, bye bye)

A 2018 piece for Stanford Live on Bowie's death and the art of the eulogy.

 

The night that the news went out that David Bowie had died, I was just finishing a book in which he was the central figure. On January 10^th 2016, I was literally on the last pages of my glam rock history Shock and Awe when Twitter told me that this towering pop figure had fallen.

A mixture of emotions muddied my mind. Having labored for three years on the book, I felt like I had an unusual intimacy with Bowie, as if I truly understood his motivations – specifically that ache of emptiness that drove him in search of a succession of cutting edges, a desperate hunger for new ideas to kindle the creative spark within him. At the same time, having reached the end of my book, I felt oddly detached, as if I had finished with Bowie, or even – in some superstitious way -  finished him off.

Born in Great Britain, but a resident of America since 1995, for me Bowie’s passing was further entangled with growing feelings of nostalgia: he’d loomed over the Seventies, my childhood, just like the Beatles had dominated the Sixties. Bowie’s songs were a perpetual presence on U.K. radio; his face appeared regularly on TV, especially on the weekly pop show Top of the Pops.  From the entrancing strangeness of “Space Oddity”, through the homoerotic intimations of “John, I’m Only Dancing”, to the cross-dressing subversions of the promo video for “Boys Keep Swinging”, Bowie had not only always been there, he’d always been startling.  For many people across the world, but particularly for those who grew up in the U.K. during that era, Bowie’s sudden non-existence felt like a part of the sky had suddenly vanished.

More ignoble thoughts intruded amid the grief. I did think, selfishly,  “damn, there’s going to be a flood of Bowie-related books rush-written, to compete with my own tome, over which I’ve toiled so diligently and protractedly.”  There was annoyance too, as it became clear that despite my exhaustion I would have to resume work immediately and write an extra closing essay to round off the book. 

Ending Shock and Awe with Bowie peeved me because one intention starting out had been to put the man in his place just a little: I aimed to contextualise Bowie, reconstruct the culture and the rock music discourse out of which he’d emerged, while also elevating other artists now semi-forgotten but who at the time were considered his contemporaries and artistic equals (as well as often selling many more records than him, in fact).  I hadn’t wanted my history to become his story - but here was Bowie upstaging everyone again, insisting on being the last word, or at least the last subject for my words, in  the Book of Glam.

Talking about upstaging - Bowie’s death coincided with the Golden Globes, which meant that he knocked all the winners off the front page worldwide, outshone the world’s stars with his own supernova. Including Lady Gaga – the figure who’d done her darnedest to be the Bowie of the 21^st Century,  and that night had won a trophy for her turn in American Horror Story.

As I returned reluctantly to my computer, I pondered how to approach the daunting task of summing up a man’s life and work. All around, online and in print, teemed thousands of public tributes and private testimonials – a fiesta of remembrance,  in which professional writers and fans alike competed to find fresh perspectives and idiosyncratic angles. Especially because my essay would have a longer shelf life, it felt like I should attempt to speak not just for my own feelings but for the larger community of people who had been affected by Bowie’s existence. There were many notes being sounded in those weeks immediately after his death, but a prominent leitmotif was gratitude, tinged with self-congratulation. A sentiment crystallized sharpest in the widely circulated statement, mistakenly attributed to the actor Simon Pegg: “if you’re sad today, just remember the Earth is over four billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie.”  As is so often the case with the passing of a pop-culture icon – think of Prince - it felt like people were mourning themselves by proxy, coming to terms with the fading of their own time, and holding fast to the consoling belief that they lived through an exceptional era.

I decided to approach the essay as a eulogy, written on behalf of the gathered grieving, yet I would also try for something almost impossible: a honest eulogy. In other words, I would aim to be true to the insights about his character,  motivations, influence and legacy that had emerged through writing the book (a verdict  more ambivalent than you might expect) while still transmitting a sense of awe that someone so strange and ambitious could have moved within the humble domain of pop music.  A sense of how improbable it all was, really -  and how unlikely to happen again, despite the wishful efforts of figures like Gaga, or Kanye West, or Janelle Monae, to achieve something equivalent in terms of art-into-pop impact. 

The root meaning of the word eulogy in Ancient Greek is “speak well.” The funeral oration is meant to be a song of praise, and that means it almost inevitably becomes a whitewash, a lick of paint covering over the cracks and fault-lines. The death of someone is not the best time for airing the whole truth about that someone. Instead, just like the cosmetically-enhanced face of the dearly departed at an open-casket funeral, you are trying to fix the final and lasting image of that person as seen in their very best light. The mortician and the eulogist are in the same business really.

Amid the collective outpouring of grief and gratitude for Bowie’s sonic and style innovations, his personae shifts and image games and the sheer drama of a career played out on the stage of the mass media, there was understandably scant inclination for a close examination of less wholesome or impressive sides of his work. Like that alarming phase in the mid-Seventies during which Bowie talked in fascist terms of the need for a strong leader and called for an anti-permissive crackdown on liberal decadence. Or all those credulous and indiscriminate flirtations with magic and mysticism that ran through much of his life (again reaching an unsightly climax in the cocaine-crazed years circa 1974-76).  People likewise didn’t dwell much on the long period during which Bowie’s Midas touch failed him: the years of the “Blue Jean” mini-film, the Glass Spider tour, Labyrinth, Tin Machine and the beard…  A period that if you were being honestly harsh constituted (give or take the occasional quite cool single) an unbroken desert of inspiration and direction that lasted two whole decades: 1983 to 2013, from the last bars of Let’s Dance to the first of The Next Day. I distinctively remember that through much of that time, Bowie dropped away not just as figure who frequented the pop charts or commanded attention, but even as a reference point, something that new bands would cite as a model or touchstone. 

It makes sense that the least compelling phases or most questionable aspects of Bowie’s life wouldn’t figure in the immediate post-mortem reckoning. Speaking ill of the recently dead is not a good look. But something of Bowie’s complexity – his flaws and his follies– got written out with the concentrated focus on his genius achievements, personal charm, and acts of generosity. 

Maybe it’s my age, but I’m sure I can’t be alone in feeling that important pop cultural figures are dying off at an accelerated rate. Then again, perhaps this is an illusion created by the sheer overload of coverage triggered by each passing: the internet and social media create so much opportunity and space for remembrance, and the profusion of outlets fuels a competition to offer ever more forensically deep or differently angled takes on the departed artist. There seems to be a widespread compulsion felt by civilians as well as professional pundits to make an immediate public statement: the news goes out that an icon has gone and Facebook teems with oddly official-sounding bits of writing that often read like obituaries with a slight first-person twist.

Sometimes I’ve felt that people protest a little too much about their intense relationship with the extinguished star. Where did all these people come from with their lifelong and surprisingly deep acquaintance with the oeuvre of Tom Petty?  Who knew there were people who bothered with the three George Michael albums after 1990’s Listen With Prejudice Vol.1? And surely I’m not the only one out there who – while fully cognizant and wholly respectful of the world-historical eminence of Aretha Franklin – only ever owned her Greatest Hits and – if I’m honest – really only ever craves to hear “I Say A Little Prayer”?

The truth of pop for most people, I suspect, is that we use the music to soundtrack our lives, but in a fairly fickle, personal-pleasure attuned way, and – apart from a few formative exceptions, the kind of teen infatuations that shape worldviews – we seldom engage with the totality of an artist’s work and life. Tom Petty, for me, boils down rather brutally to the urge to turn up the volume when “Free Falling” and “Don’t Come Around Here No More” come on the radio (in other words, he’s on the same level as The Steve Miller Band and Bachman-Turner Overdrive). Unfair or not, George Michael reduces to a couple of nifty Wham! singles plus “Faith” and “Freedom! ‘90”. A few moments of unreflective pleasure in the lives of millions of casual listeners is no small achievement, although it wouldn’t have been enough for these guys, who craved to be Serious Artists on the level of those they venerated: Dylan and the Byrds, for Petty…  someone like Stevie Wonder or Prince, for Michael. No amount of earnest reassessment or auteurist reappraisal could persuade me to dig deep into their discographies for those lost gems tucked away on Side 2 of a late-phase album.

You’ll get no argument from me about Bowie, of course: career doldrums and dodgy opinions aside, he’s as major an artist as rock has produced, worthy of taking as seriously as anybody (which is why the fascist flirtations and the half-baked occultism are troubling, as opposed to something you’d laugh off in a lesser figure). And Bowie also did what almost no fatally ill or otherwise declining pop star has ever managed, which is to go out on an artistic high. Beyond their musical daring and desperate expressive intensity, Blackstar and the videos for “Lazarus” and the title track made for a fitting last statement because of the sheer care that went into them. This was so utterly characteristic of Bowie and the way he went about things. Who among us - facing the final curtain, sick in body and frail of spirit – could have summoned the  obsessive energy and psychic strength to meticulously craft their artistic farewell to the world?  Who, confronting oblivion, would have been so concerned about how they looked and sounded at the end? Only Bowie.

As I found writing Shock and Awe, the beginning of Bowie’s public life was faltering, a series of false starts and fumbled career moves. It took Bowie eight years of dithering and stylistic switches to really become a star. In contrast, the closing of his career was immaculately executed. What some sceptics always regarded as his core flaws – cold calculation, excessive control – triumphed at the end.  Bowie organized a grand exit so elegant that it fixed forever our final image of him, rendering all eulogies superfluous. 

Kanye, "the Black Bowie"

So it is revealed that KW originally wanted to give his 2018 album Ye the title  Hitler.  Which inevitably brings to mind David Bowie's "I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I'd be an excellent dictator" comment from 1976.  Apparently in a 2015 business meeting Kanye also described Hitler as a "marketing genius", which mirrors Bowie's impressed comments about Goebbel's skills in the advertising / propaganda realm and Hitler's as master showman who "staged a country". 

Here below is a review of Pablo where I do the West / Bowie comparison.

But first, crikey, look here's a piece from 2011 on Kanye comparing himself to Hitler! Apparently at the Big Chill Festival, he said this to the audience: "I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I’m ... insane, like I’m Hitler. One day the light will shine through, and one day people will understand everything I ever did." The LA Times journo consults a psychologist and psychiatrist, who posit plausibly that "For Kanye West to compare himself to Hitler in that way, it suggests a certain level of narcissism. To empathize with someone responsible for the deaths of millions of people, it can indicate a lack of sensitivity to how other people are going to feel about your comments. And, again, it can be a sign of narcissism.’ and ‘Kanye West’s referencing of Hitler is about narcissism and identifying with people in positions of power." 

Not that you need professionals to diagnose narcissistic personality disorder - you just have to listen to the records. 

KANYE WEST

The Life of Pablo

The Wire, April 2016

by Simon Reynolds

A journalist recently asked me whether I agreed with his thesis that the Rock Star is a dying breed – literally dying off, with high-profile 2016 extinctions like Bowie and Lemmy. My thought was that if you understand rock narrowly as electric-guitar music, then yes, resources are depleting rapidly; it’s a minority-interest sound now, incapable of supporting mythic-scale personalities. 

But think of “rock star” in a less tethered-to-genre way and it’s surely obvious that the archetype is alive and kicking elsewhere. Above all, rap is where you’ll find that public theatre of ego-drama, unbridled excess, and artistic over-reach, the car-crash personalities and epic sagas of anti-heroism.  If Future is our era’s Iggy – vocal tone of pained ecstasy, lust-for-life turned toxic - then Kanye West amply fills the Bowie role. There’s the same torturously conflicted relationship with fame, the same restless chasing of the cutting edge balanced by a compulsion to command the centre stage of pop culture.  

Like Bowie, West is a mediatician as much as a musician.  So while the audio content of his seventh album intersects with the soundworlds of TriAngle or LuckyMe, it doesn’t make sense to approach The Life of Pablo in the way that 98% of the releases covered in this magazine get treated – as a primarily audio experience. Pablo resists being disentangled from the vortex of discourse - gossip, leaks, forensic analysis, public melt-downs - that imbricates its every texture and lyric.  Tempting as it is to hack exasperatedly away at the thicket of context and subtext – from the month-long cavalcade of “spaz in the news Kanye” (to quote a lyric from the album) to the way that virtually every sound and line seems hyperlinked – in order to get through to the Work itself, the truth is that the surrounding swirl is the Work, or at least an outer but un-detachable layer to it.

The fact that there’s no solid-form incarnation of Pablo, that the album can only be heard as a stream from the hi-fidelity streaming service Tidal, practically incites you to listen connectively, with other windows open on your browser: checking reviews, consulting rap-nerd annotation sites, monitoring Twitter and Facebook reactions. This is Pablo’s, and Kanye’s, proper domain: the hubbub of the internet.

Pablo is an Event, then. But it’s also an assemblage of moments, aesthetic decisions, accumulated over three years of studio work (with a few elements dating even further back, to the 2010 sessions for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: the album before the previous album).  How could a coherent vibe possibly emerge from such a piecemeal process? The simple answer is that it hasn’t.  It’s not just that this album as a  (not-)whole feels loosely collated and arbitrarily sequenced. Many individual tracks seem like they could easily dis-assemble into constituent parts – there’s a segmental feel to the way that guest raps, vocal cameos, samples, intros and codas slot into their provisionally allotted place. You sense a governing logic of additive and subtractive unrest that has yet to subside. West tweaked tracks up to the last minute and indeed beyond the last minute. It’s conceivable that there will never be a definitive shape to The Life of Pablo.

The album’s mode of construction invites deconstruction: breakdowns of the credits, inventories of samples, a fever of instant-response exegesis.   This is how we tend to envisage creativity operating these days: as recreativity, the marshalling of influences,  allusions, evocations, self-reflexive references. Kanye is an exemplar of the modern ideal of the curator as creator. He rose to fame through deft use of samples, often amounting simply to re-presenting the music of others with his lyrics over the top and a turbo-boosted beat underneath. That technique felt inspired and glorious on the Chaka Khan-lifting “Through the Wire”, his debut solo smash in 2004; it felt empty and crass with the Curtis Mayfield-molesting “Touch the Sky” and Daft Punk-depleting “Stronger.”  Pablo is littered with startling sample-choices, but who even knows if Kanye, a man over-extended on multiple fronts, actually found them all? Perhaps he’s now obliged to delegate tasks like this to his diffuse squad of producers, what’s been described as the Kanye Think Tank.

Just as Pablo dismantles the conventional understanding of the Album as a finished work, authorship becomes moot here as well.  “Famous” is typical, crediting no less than sixteen writers (although some of these are the composers of the samples) and eight producers. It’s a drastically racheted-up version of the way Bowie made records, except that each of his albums drew on a finite team of players and a single producer or co-producer. Here, each individual song deploys a different line-up.

As you’d expect, then, Pablo is bitty. It’s an album of good bits and shit bits, all jumbled together. Nearly every song contains at least one great sound or rhythm idea. In “Famous,” it’s a sequence of what sounds like electro-Bollywood, but is actually Eighties dancehall queen Sister Nancy. In “Feedback”, it’s a gnarly loop distantly related to an Iranian disco song by Googoosh. In “FML”, it’s Section 25’s “Hit” drastically reprocessed into a psychedelic dirge of fluorescent bass and gargoyle vox.  Other delights come from guest collaborators or producers, like the too-brief interlude of Laurie Anderson-like cyborg chorale from composer Caroline Shaw in “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 2,” or the lachrymose texture-swirls and echo-misted beat of “Real Friends,” built by Frank Jukes and Boi-1da.     

But every good bit is marred by its proximity to a shit bit, and nine times out of ten, the latter involves a gross sentiment or a mewling, sloppy delivery emitted from the brain and mouth of West himself.  Perhaps the most grating adjacency of beauty and beastly is “30 Hours”, where the blurry-souled mumble of Arthur Russell from World of Echo is accompanied by the self-regard and spite of a Kanye punch-drunk in the media echo-chamber.  After a swipe at an ex’s supposedly fading looks and a  jab about a blow job being better than having no job, the song degenerates into barely written drivel barely synched to the beat – the seeming off-the-cuff realism underlined by the interruption of a cellphone call and Kanye’s mumbled “I’m just doing an album track right now.”  

Pablo grips your attention through an attraction-repulsion effect: the attraction largely pertaining to the sonics, the repulsion manifesting almost entirely in the lyrics. Despite the album’s disparate provenance and huge cast list, Kanye’s personality is overpoweringly present, oozing from every pore of the record. If there’s a thematic, it’s spiritual unrest and a longing for wholeness. Fractured and insatiable, Kanye confesses “I just wanna feel liberated” - freed from his own self, from the chains of appetite and vanity.   At his core is a hungry hole that can be filled not by trophies and transient thrills but by God’s love alone.

Kanye has touted Pablo as a gospel album (its original working title was So Help Me God) and as a musical form gospel pops up several times, mostly early on. Featuring a squeaky-voiced 4-year old preacher and swells of choir, opener “Ultralight Beam” pleads for serenity and sanctuary. “‘Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1,” the next track, uses samples from a 1976 gospel record by Pastor T.L. Barret and Youth for Christ from West’s hometown Chicago. “Low Lights” takes a long passage of female testifying about the Lord’s inspirational power from “So Alive”, a track by house producer Kings of Tomorrow. Not for the first time, I was struck by the childish conception of the Almighty that seems to figure in hip hop: no trace of the Old Testament God of Thou Shalt Not, or the New Testament God who warns that the rich will have a tough time getting into heaven. This is a forgiving and indulgent deity, who offers ego-reinforcement and motivational uplift, unsurprisingly close to the all-American God who figures in prosperity theology a/k/a the gospel of wealth. 

Entreaties to the Sky Daddy have featured in Kanye’s work from the start. “Jesus Walks”, on the debut The College Dropout, introduced his “at war with myself” shtick: torn in twain ‘tween venality and virtue, lowly libido and higher purpose. Except it didn’t seem like shtick then; it felt strikingly original. West continued to present himself as a divided soul – most movingly on Late Registration’s exquisite “Addicted” – and opened up the terrain occupied by the likes of Kendrick Lamar with songs like “Bitch, Don’t’ Kill My Vibe” (where Lamar identifies as a sinner while admitting “I’m probably gonna sin again”). A secular version of this woozy confusion came from Drake,who became a  superstar by reveling in the fruits of fame and fortune while simultaneously complaining about the hollow-inside tristesse that followed.

These self-medicating and self-loathing (never enough to change or stop, of course) MCs constitute a late phase of rap I think of as its decadence. Where hip hop once thrilled with the barbarian rapacity of its hunger for success, now the genre – all conquering, sated – succumbs to a sickly malaise of self-doubt and overshared “sensitivity”. An inner void has become virtually a status symbol, like being player-hated once was: the true mark of having triumphed now is to feel like the treasure is worthless.

Kanye pioneered this brand of anhedonic numbness, complaining about feeling unreal when he sees himself on TV in the “Pinocchio Story,” the mawkish finale to his emo-rap album 808s & Heartbreak.  As the listener ventures deeper into Pablo, the gospel concept dissolves both musically and thematically: the sonics are suggestive by turns of IDM, trap, and “21^st Century hipster”, and lyrically any striving for higher ground gives way to the profane fare of paranoia and self-pity.  “Famous” is supposedly Kanye  “breaking-up” with Fame, (a temptress personified here by Rihanna) but he still manages to squeeze in some instantly-infamous jibes at Taylor Swift along with a legion of haters “mad they still nameless.” “Feedback” confesses “I’ve been out of my mind a long time” only to brandish that fact as support to his claim to be a modern Picasso: “name one genius that ain’t crazy.” “Real Friends” recycles laments first aired on 808s about the impossibility of leading a normal life: back then it involved a relative’s wedding and having to leave before they cut the cake, here it’s about always being in a hurry and not knowing how old his friends’s children are. The only new element is the dissing of a cousin who stole West’s laptop.

That crime and the “dirty motherfucker” responsible crop up a second time on “No More Parties in LA”, one of Pablo’s most cohesive and enjoyably groovy tracks: a Dilla-like throwback to underground rap’s hyno-loop aesthetic, with Madlib producing and guest verses from Kendrick Lamar. One sample source is “Suzy Thundertussy”, Junie Morrison’s funk track about a super groupie.  The original song starts with the line “Los Angeles is a lonely sort of place”, but in “No More Parties”, the first two words - Morrison’s oozily enunciated “Los Angeles”  - is turned into a recurrent refrain that sounds like “lost in lust” or, even more mystically, “lost in lost”. Like Lamar’s own “Swimming Pools”, the song sounds dissolute, the parties blurring into each other in a memory-haze of Hollywood Hills decadence. More than anything, “No More Parties” reminds me of “Hotel California” and Don Henley solo songs like “The Last Worthless Evening”: rock stars having their coke and critiquing it.  

Since at least 808s & Heartbreak being a Kanye West fan has resembled a dysfunctional relationship where one partner keeps pushing the other away, constantly testing their limits. Where Drake exists “somewhere between psychotic and iconic,” the discomfort zone for Kanye is somewhere between mess and messianic, desperation and despotism. An asshole who knows he’s an asshole and tells you he’s an asshole - “a 38-year-old 8-year-old with rich nigga problems” is how he self-diagnoses on “No More Parties” - is still an asshole. Even if he keeps managing to find ever more audaciously upfront and often laugh-out-loud ways -- on this album, “I Love Kanye” -  of telling you that.  

Equal parts scattershot genius and splattershit grotesquerie, Life of Pablo is a reminder of rap’s enduring paradox:  here’s an entertainment form based on personalities that in real life you would avoid like the plague - monologists, braggarts, slimeball lechers, pullers of rank.  You wouldn’t want to be with these people; you wouldn’t want to be these people. To circle back to the start, that then raises the question:  why do we need rock stars? (The “we” is rhetorical: I know many, perhaps most readers of this magazine either never felt such a need or have long out-grown it). At one point, there was interest and even illumination to gleaned from watching their megalo-melodrama from afar. Their misadventures and vision-quests made exhibitionist art out of the paradoxes and impasses of “living without limits” (as West phrases it on the most haunting song here, “FML” - an acronym for Fuck My Life).  Stars showed how ascending to that scale of freedom could become its own trap.  But we’ve seen this story acted out too many times. Fame-as-pathology, fame-as-catastrophe – it’s a script now.

Pablo’s final song “Fade” pivots around some classic house music samples -- Hardrive’s “Deep Inside,” Mr Fingers’s “Mystery of Love”- along with two different versions of “(I Know) I’m Losing You”  by Rare Earth and Undisputed Truth.  Guest Ty Dolla $ign voices what sounds like Kanye’s personal plaint about needing attention to feel alive: “When no one ain’t around... Ain’t nobody watchin’... I just fade away”. When Barbara Tucker’s wondrous vocal lick from the Hardrive track – “deep deep down inside” – enters, it sounds blurrily processed, probably indecipherably so for listeners unfamiliar with the original garage anthem. I hear it as “deep deep down I’m stuck”. That’s Kanye West and that’s pop culture in 2016. 

Putting the 'pop' in populism: Glam Rock and Trump

Is politics the new glam rock?

The Guardian, 14 Oct 2016


by Simon Reynolds

Look back at the history of glam rock, and you keep running into things that seem like premonitions – previews of the scary and dangerous man running for the American presidency right now. In his mid-1970s interviews, David Bowie talked about “a strong leader” destined to “sweep through” the western world: a charismatic superhero who might emerge not from conventional politics but from entertainment. Sometimes Bowie’s tone was ominous. At others, he’d make it seem like a necessary corrective to a Weimar-style state of decadence, talking with seemingly approving anticipation of “a rightwing, totally dictatorial tyranny” that would clean up all the mess made by the permissive society.

At his most extreme, unguarded and cocaine-addled, Bowie proposed himself as a candidate for the job, whether as British PM, as the “first English president of the United States”, or maybe even as ruler of the world.

Another future-spectre of Trump was Alice Cooper’s pretend run for the presidency in 1972. It took the form of the single “Elected” and its hilarious, delirious video, but nonetheless had a curiously convincing tone of megalomaniacal demagoguery about it, as Cooper boasted that he and his “young and strong” followers would take “the country by storm”.

On the surface, Trump and the glam era’s stars couldn’t be further apart. What does Trump have in common with Ziggy Stardust, apart from orange hair? The Donald is a bigot, a macho bully, a philistine, a proud ignoramus. Bowie and the brightest of his peers were androgynous aesthetes, intellectually hungry and sexually experimental.

And yet there are some unlikely affinities, as I discovered while researching Shock and Awe, my history of glam. As signaled by his gilded tower on Fifth Avenue, Trump surrounds himself with glitz. Trump and the glam rockers share an obsession with fame and a ruthless drive to conquer and devour the world’s attention. Trump actually plays “We Are the Champions” by Queen (a band aligned with glam in its early days) at his rallies, because its triumphalist refrain – “no time for losers” – crystallises his economic Darwinist worldview.

A mirror of oligopoly capitalism, pop is a ferociously competitive game that sorts the contestants into a handful of winners and a great mass of losers. Propelled by a stardom-at-all-costs drive, many of glam rock’s principal characters nimbly reinvented themselves and in some cases trampled others on their way up. They willed their fantasy selves into existence. This same ethos of “Don’t dream it, be it” (as articulated by The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Dr Frank N Furter) could be seen in the type of fandom that glam inspired. It had an imitative quality never really seen before in pop: audiences dressing up, copying the hair and makeup. Roxy Music’s fans, responding to the sophistication of the group’s image and artwork, to audience flattering lyrical winks such as “sure to make the cognoscenti think” – costumed themselves as members of a make-believe aristocracy. Bryan Ferry recalled how some would turn up to the shows in full black tie, as if attending an Oscars ceremony.

Trump’s appeal is generally seen in terms of his doom-laden imagery of a weakened, rudderless America. But there is something else going on too: an admiring projection towards a swaggering figure who revels in his wealth, free to do and say whatever he wants. Trump is an aspirational figure as much as a mouthpiece for resentment and rancour.

“I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal, explaining the role of bravado in his business dealings. “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” He and co-writer Tony Schwarz coined the concept “truthful hyperbole”. That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it cuts to the essence of how hype works: by making people believe in something that doesn’t exist yet, it magically turns a lie into a reality. As the saying goes, fake it till you make it. Bowie’s manager Tony Defries used this technique to break the singer in the US: travelling everywhere by limo, surrounded by bodyguards he didn’t need, Bowie looked like the star he wasn’t, until the public and the media started to take the illusion for reality.

Early in his career, Trump grasped that – like a pop star – he was selling an image, a brand. Licensed out, the Trump name gets affixed to buildings and businesses that he doesn’t own, let alone run. He’s an extreme version of what people on Wall Street call a “glamour stock”: an investment that outperforms the market based on an inflated belief in its growth potential or on even more intangible qualities of cool and buzz. Twitter has been described as the ultimate glamour stock, its attractive image vastly out of whack with its ability to make money. A glamour stock will keep on winning right up until it loses – when the gulf between its perceived value and actual wealth-generative potential gets too huge, when reality finally disrupts the reality distortion field surrounding it.

Self-reinvention was the strategy used by glam stars such as Bowie and Marc Bolan. You can see the same chameleon-like flexibility at work in Trump’s career. Once upon a time he was a Democrat, on genial terms with the Clintons. Years ago he used birtherism as the launch pad for a political career; now he’s dropped it, as a political liability. It’s the same with his recent rabble-rousing rhetoric about “building a wall”. Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer analyses the agility with which Trump evades attacks by discarding ideas: “He merely creates new Trumps.” Bowie conjured up new personas to stay one step ahead of pop’s fickle fluctuations and keep himself creatively stimulated. With no fixed political principles, Trump’s only consistency is salesmanship and showmanship: the ability to stage his public life as a drama.

And it’s the drama that holds the public’s attention – the edgy promise of a less boring politics. The New York Times recently quoted a voter who confessed to flirting with the idea of voting for Trump because “a dark side of me wants to see what happens… There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen.”

Emerging after the earnest, authenticity-obsessed late 60s, glam was a period in which rock rediscovered a sense of showbiz and spectacle. Pop history has repeatedly cycled through such phases of glam and anti-glam: Bowie/Roxy razzle-dazzle was supplanted by scruffy pub rock and street-credible punk, which in turn was eclipsed by the neo-glam of the new romantics. A similar shift occurred in America when glitzy hair metal was displaced by grunge’s mud-slide sound and earth-toned clothes.

You can see similar dynamics at play in today’s politics. Hillary Clinton sits squarely in the unglam corner: a worthy but dull public servant, supremely accomplished at everything required of a leader except what the public perversely craves – being an entertainer. She’s a “value stock” – one of those companies that over time doggedly outperform the glamour stocks, but simply don’t inspire spasms of irrational exuberance.

The real anti-glam leader of our age, though, is Jeremy Corbyn. Bearded and low-key, he’s the UK political equivalent of Whispering Bob Harris, the presenter of The Old Grey Whistle Test, who couldn’t hide his distaste when visually flashy, image-over-substance bands such as Roxy Music, Sparks and New York Dolls appeared on the TV program.

Corbyn is viscerally opposed to – and fundamentally incapable of – political theatre, the very thing that has carried Trump so close to the White House. Corbyn tried to change the format and feel of prime minister’s questions, saying he wished to “remove the theatre from politics”. In one particular PMQs, he responded to Cameron’s slick pre-scripted gags with the schoolmasterly reprimand: “I invite the prime minister to leave the theatre and return to reality.”

As for oratory, Corbyn seems instinctively averse to all those elements of spoken language – cadence, musicality, metaphor – that sway the listener irrationally. But as Gary Younge argued recently, his plain-spoken delivery is taken as a token of sincerity by his followers, who “have not come to be entertained; they have come … to have a basic sense of decency reflected back to them through their politics”. This is how a personality cult has built up around him, despite his honest and accurate admission: “I’m not a personality.” It’s very indie, very alternative rock, the way that the absence of charisma has become the source of a curious magnetism.

Once in a blue moon, a politician comes along who combines pop star allure and all the less glamorous qualifications such as temperament, competence and knowledge. Barack Obama has both kinds of cool going for him: perfect comic timing at the White House correspondents’ dinner, calmness and clarity during moments of Oval Office crisis.

Politics without any element of charisma is certainly a dry affair. But the cult of personality can be dangerous outside the realm of showbiz, its proper domain.

“I could see how easy it was to get a whole rally thing going,” Bowie said in 1974, recalling the height of Ziggymania in Britain a few years earlier. “There were times when I could have told the audience to do anything.” In another interview of that era, Bowie spoke of the way Hitler “staged a country”, combining “politics and theatrics” to create the ultimate spectacle. “Boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience … [Hitler] created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those 12 years. The world will never see his like.”

Let’s hope the Trump show will be cancelled next month.

David Bowie circa The Next Day and David Bowie Is @ the V&A

DAVID BOWIE

New York Times, March 6 2013

by Simon Reynolds

On “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”, the new single from David Bowie’s comeback album The Next Day, one line jumps out:  “We will never be rid of these stars.”  The original typed lyric sheet, recently posted on Bowie’s Facebook page, features a hand-scrawled annotation sketching out an idea for the video:  “stars like Greek gods, cruel and controlling”.  The promo turned out slightly differently, although at the start  Bowie, looking and sounding like a doddery old gent, enters a grocery store and catches sight of a celebrity gossip magazine called Pantheon. The singer and actress Tilda Swinton play an elderly couple whose “nice life” is disrupted by a pair of demonic stars, who  stalk and spy on them, then  invade the house and  control them like marionettes.  

 But the song itself is less literal.  “The Stars” portrays celebrities as an overlord class of vampiric and tyrannical beings “soaking up our primitive world,”who “burn you with their radiant smiles”and “trap you with their beautiful eyes.”  But stars are also faintly pitiable creatures, “jealous” of the quiet lives and grounded existence of nonentities.  “I hope they live forever”, Bowie sings, a nod to the notion of fame as immortality, the compensation for its otherwise distorting effects.  Death and fame are closely braided themes shadowing The Next Day, a dark, melancholy and surprisingly harsh-sounding album that’s receiving acclaim as Bowie’s strongest effort in decades.

A superstar critiquing celebrity culture could be taken as somewhat hypocritical, of course. Especially given Bowie’s full-spectrum assault on the public’s attention this year.  For most of the 21^st Century, Bowie had disappeared from view, even as the glam theatricality and gender-bending he pioneered in the 1970s was dominating pop through figures like Lady Gaga. Most assumed that he’d effectively retired, physically exhausted after a life-threatening heart attack and surgery in 2003 and creatively spent after four decades of self-reinvention. But in a brilliantly organized stealth attack, Bowie returned without warning in January with “Where Are We Now”, the herald for The Next Day.  That album, his first in a decade, asserts Bowie’s continued relevance as a musician. 

Meanwhile, his stature in pop history as the performer who has most convincingly bridged the gap between the worlds of art and rock is being shored up by a retrospective at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a celebration of his mastery of all the non-audio aspects of pop, from clothes and stage sets to record artwork and video.

Bowie has always had an ambivalent attitude to fame. His biggest American hit of the Seventies, “Fame” was a harrowing dispatch from inside the paranoid bubble of superstardom. He’s returned to the subject frequently, from his 1999 album Hours, an exploration of “fame as injury” according to  Bowieologist Nick Stevenson,  to his new album’s “(You Will) Set the Earth on Fire,” the sales pitch of a svengali to a potential protégé.  Bowie’s career has been governed by a bi-polar rhythm, alternating between relentless pursuit of the limelight and shattered retreat from it. Now, after his longest period of seclusion ever, the 66 year old Englishman and New York resident is back for what could well be his last blast, the supernova of his stardom.

Yet while Bowie himself has been virtually absent for a decade, the Bowie-esque has been omnipresent.  After the Nineties, a period dominated by the authenticity and “real-ness” of grunge and gangsta rap, the 2000s saw the return of glitz and artifice. All the things that Bowie, alongside fellow glam rockers like Roxy Music and Alice Cooper, explored to the hilt during the early 1970s— over-the-top theatricality and spectacular staging, extremist fashion and sexual androgyny—became the defining principles of 21st Century pop.

Lady Gaga is the most visible inheritor of Bowieism, from her freaky costumes to her gender games (the male alter-ego Jo Calderone, the artfully concocted rumor that she’s a hermaphrodite).  But there have also been figures like Adam Lambert, the American  Idol star, who called his first major tour Glam Nation, and, on a more alternative level,  cult performer Amanda Palmer and her punk cabaret outfit The Dresden Dolls.  You can see Bowie-like currents in recent black pop too, from rappers like Drake who make their own fame the primary subject of their music, to the sharply styled theatricality of Janelle Monae, to Beyonce’s Ziggy Stardust-like gambit of creating the alter ego Sasha Fierce as a vehicle for her walk-on-the-wild-side impulses. Above all, there’s Nicki Minaj, who has her own alter-ego, the gay male character Roman Zolanski.  While it’s unlikely that Minaj is directly influenced by Bowie, the parallels between his serial personae and her constant image changes are clear. As one presenter on a video pop channel put it, “there isn’t a single ‘Nicki Minaj’...  she says she’s just being herself, but who she is changes every day.”  

Among Bowie’s most famous pronouncements in his early career were “I feel like an actor when I’m on stage, rather than a rock artist” and “if anything, maybe I’ve helped establish that rock’n’roll is a pose.” Before Bowie came along, rock defined itself against show biz and Hollywood. There was meant to be a more or less direct correspondence between the performer and their real-life personality.  But Bowie talked about playing characters, such as the fictional rock god Ziggy Stardust, or the cold, remote Thin White Duke.  Like a movie star taking on different roles that refract a fundamental unchanging charisma, Bowie was paradoxically the same and yet different each time he came before the public with a new album and tour.

Bowie embraced metamorphosis from the start. In his pre-fame 1960s, he hopped through five bands and a variety of musical styles and looks before connecting with the public circa 1970.  Once his career took off, the shape-shifting took on a new urgency.  Pop taste is fickle. Some stars manage to become hardy perennials, but most are lucky to eke out a living playing their hits to an audience of nostalgic diehards. Bowie circumvented pop’s cruel turnover by turning himself into the New Thing, again and again. As he said in 1977, “my role as an artist in rock is rather different to most, I encapsulate things very quickly...  my policy has been that as soon as a process works, it’s out of date. I move to another area.”  Perhaps the fashion world has so lionized Bowie (Gucci co-sponsored the Victoria & Albert exhibition) not just for his cutting-edge style, but because he’s so thoroughly assimilated fashion’s own logic of remorseless supercession.

But there’s more to Bowie’s compulsive self-reinvention than a career strategy.  It’s an artistic impulse (the desire to challenge oneself) and it relates also to existential anxiety (a fantasy of perpetual rejuvenation).  What Bowie was really developing during his Seventies heyday was a new postmodern psychology based around flux and mutability.  His great precursor and influence here was Andy Warhol, the inspiration for his song “Andy Warhol” and a role he would actually play in the 1996 movie Basquiat.  Analysing Warhol, the critic Donald Kuspit wrote of “the protean artist-self with no core”—a description that fits Bowie perfectly.  Likewise David Bowie Is, the intransitive title of the V & A exhibition, signifies “how wondrous ‘tis to live in a world that contains this polymath genius!” but also “fill in the blank space”. His career has seen that emptiness filled up, then erased, then filled up again, repeatedly.

But living like a cross between a chameleon and a magpie (Bowie is a voracious assimilator of influences and borrower of ideas) has its downsides.  Read the biographies or the vintage interviews, and it’s striking how often intimations of hollowness occur, the sense of a man who is outwardly super-confident but who battles feelings of self-loathing and doubt.  “I honestly feel that there is something incredibly lacking in my life”... “I’m not an innovator. I’m really just a Photostat machine. I pour out what has already been fed in.” ... “When I heard someone say something intelligent, I used it later as if it were my own. When I saw a quality in someone that I liked, I used it later as if it were my own”.   As much as artistic hunger or artful career management, a continuing, returning feeling of inadequacy over what I've done” has propelled the restless remaking of self, the endless switches of sound and style.  

Perusing the lavish book that accompanies David Bowie Is, with its dazzling procession of poses and images and its weighty critical essays tracking the dense cross-references to pop culture and high art, you get a sense of how much hard work it must be to be Bowie.  Director Julien Temple, who made some videos for Bowie and cast him as an advertising executive in his 1986 movie Absolute Beginners, has spoken of the “grueling nature of reinvention... the huge creative surge required to do that again and again. It takes its toll, psychically.”

During the Nineties, Bowie did seem to be running almost on empty. (Indeed it’s noticeable that David Bowie Is features little material from after the mid-Eighties). For a while he subsumed himself in the collective identity of a hard rock band, Tin Machine. Then he tried reverting to earlier successful stages of his career. For Black Tie White Noise, Bowie reunited with Chic’s Nile Rodgers, the producer of his 1983 blockbuster Let’s Dance.  For the adventurous but confused Outside, he re-enlisted Brian Eno, his foil during the experimental mid-Seventies Berlin trilogy of Low, ‘Heroes’, and Lodger.  Switching strategy, Bowie attempted to refuel using cutting-edge electronic dance ideas on Earthling, a charming if semi-successful dabble in drum and bass. Finally he regrouped with Tony Visconti, the producer on several of his classic Seventies and Eighties albums, for the solid but subdued Heathen and Reality, records on which he seemed to reach a kind of settlement with himself.

The Next Day sees Visconti at the helm again, but this time Bowie seems galvanized by a desperate energy that over-rides the frailty palpable in his haggard vocals.  Imagery of decay, debility and dejection pervade the record: “here I am/not quite dead/my body left to rot in a hollow tree”, “just walking the dead”, “I gaze in defeat at the stars in the night/the light in my life burned away/there will be no tomorrow.” Some of the morbidity-- references to “a room full of bloody history” in “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die”—may be influenced by books on Medieval tyrants that Bowie has reportedly been reading obsessively.  But elsewhere the imagery seems obviously inspired by his own brush with mortality.

The Grim Reaper is no stranger to the Bowie songbook. He covered Jacques Brel’s “My Death, while his big UK hit “Ashes to Ashes” derived its title from the Anglican burial service.  “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” on Outside, addressed “the fact that life is finite,” Bowie has explained. “That realization, when it comes, usually later in life, can either be a really daunting prospect or it makes things a lot clearer.”

But judging by The Next Day, Bowie’s close encounter of the near-fatal kind has only muddied things. There is little evidence of serenity or enlightenment.  The climactic song, “Heat,” is a homage to the existentialist balladry of Scott Walker, who covered “My Death” before Bowie did and whose own recent work includes songs about the human body’s abject vulnerability and doomed dictators like Mussolini and Ceaucescu. “My father ran the prison,” Bowie intones enigmatically, moving through ominous lines about missions grown dark and worlds ending, before confessing “ I don’t know who I am” and “I am a seer/But I am a liar”. 

Warhol believed “superstitiously” that fame could “keep at bay” Death, claims Donald Kuspit. When Bowie declares “I hope they live forever” in “The Stars”, it this a gesture of bitter solidarity with “the dead ones and the living”, all those stars who believed and who still believe in fame as salvation? You can reinvent yourself over and over, but Death, the Great Uninventor, will catch up with you. The naked torment of such apprehensions has shaped David Bowie’s twilight masterpiece.