David Bowie and Transmedia Stardom

Ana Cristina Mendes, Lisa Perrott, Ana Cristina Mendes, Lisa Perrott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000682410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

Addressing the interart, intertextual, and intermedial dimensions of David Bowie's sonic and visual legacy, this book considers more than five decades of a career invested with a star's luminosity that shines well beyond the remit of pop music.

The book approaches the idea of the star David Bowie as a medium in transit, undergoing constant movement and change. Within the context of celebrity studies, the concept of stardom provides an appropriate frame for an examination of Bowie's transmedial activity, especially given his ongoing iconic signification within the celestial realm. While Bowie has traversed many mediums, he has also been described as a medium, which is consistent with the way he has described himself. With contributions from a wide range of disciplinary areas and countries, each chapter brings a fresh perspective on the concept of stardom and the conceptual significance of the terms 'mediation' and 'navigation' as they relate to Bowie and his career.

Containing a multitude of different approaches to the stardom and mediation of David Bowie, this book will be of interest to those studying celebrity, audio and visual legacy, and the relationships between different forms of media. It was originally published as a special issue of Celebrity Studies.

Constellating stardom, Berlin-style: Bowie, Christiane F, Hedi Slimane

Susan Ingram

ABSTRACT

This article charts the importance of Berlin in the constellation of Bowie’s success and probes what stardom means in the context of Berlin. It links what Berlin meant to Bowie with what Bowie’s connection to the city has meant to Berlin in its establishing itself as the ‘poor but sexy’ clubbing capital of Europe. In order to get at the stylistic implications of this form of stardom, I bring together Bowie’s Berlin experiences with those of two countercultural personalities the city brought him together with, who are black stars in their own right: Christiane Felscherinow and Hedi Slimane. In ascertaining that Felscherinow and Slimane share with Bowie a dark aesthetic, which is also a politics and ethics of time and space, I probe the German Romantic lineage of the concepts of constellation and elective affinity and their critical potential via the writings of Berlin-born Walter Benjamin to show that this aesthetic is characteristic of the kind of stardom that the city of Berlin is struggling to maintain in the face of gentrifying pressures. Its appeal, I conclude, lies in the potential it offers for a lifestyle counter to the hegemonic, heteronormative, nuclear-family one of bourgeois modernity.

This article builds on recent work to probe the stylistic implications of Bowie’s dark stardom in the context of Berlin. Rather than providing a reading of the music in Black Star or any of Bowie’s albums, something that, as a non-musicologist, I am not competent to undertake, I chart a constellation previously unidentified in scholarship. Namely, I bring Bowie’s Berlin experiences – lived, remembered, and recreated – together with those of the two countercultural personalities that the city brought him together with, who are black stars in their own right: Christiane Felscherinow, the child of Bahnhof Zoo, whose teenage experiences with drugs and prostitution were turned into a bestseller and a cult film memorably featuring a Bowie concert and soundtrack; and fashion designer and photographer Hedi Slimane, known for his ultra-skinny, heroin chic looks for Dior and the rebranded Saint Laurent. I demonstrate that Felscherinow and Slimane share with Bowie a dark aesthetic, which is also a politics and ethics of time and space, and then by probing the German Romantic lineage of the concepts of constellation and elective affinity and their critical potential via the writings of Berlin-born Walter Benjamin, I conclude by suggesting that this aesthetic is characteristic of the kind of stardom that the city of Berlin is struggling to maintain in the face of gentrifying pressures and that its appeal lies in the potential it offers for a lifestyle counter to the hegemonic, heteronormative, nuclear-family one of bourgeois modernity.

Bowie and Berlin

In calling himself a black star on his last studio album, Bowie was, one final time, creating a multivalent symbol for himself that could bring together a myriad of associations and resonances. One of the aspects Bowie was directing us towards with this symbol was the importance of dark imaginaries in his oeuvre. Given the colourfulness of Bowie’s world (Buckley 2016), not to mention the colourful nature of the Bowie images in circulation, especially the iconic lightning bolt image from Aladdin Sane that was chosen for the bright orange David Bowie Is catalogue (Broackes and Marsh 2013),¹ Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ could be seen as an admonition not to be seduced by the glitz of performativity as well as a reminder that Aladdin Sane was actually a much darker character than Ziggy Stardust. As Rob Sheffield (2016) described it in Rolling Stone, ‘Just a year after seducing the world with the saga of Ziggy, Bowie killed him off to invent a new glam character – a much darker one, with a new hairstyle and a lightning bolt painted over his face’. Nicholas Greco (2015) has looked at darkness in 1. Outside and Bowie’s late work, while for Simon Critchley (2017), darkness is one of the integral components of Bowie’s creation:

Bowie has always had that ability to cross over – to have a huge audience and to give that huge audience some taste of something else, some darkness, some experimentation. Bowie makes a world that is a rich, dark, strange, and beautiful world, full of culture and oddity, available to largely working-class boys and girls. (Critchley 2017)

Integral to Bowie’s darkness is his association with the city of Berlin. Bowie’s time in the city has hardly gone unnoticed in scholarship. No self-respecting Bowie biographer would dare leave it out, and two studies devoted expressly to that period of Bowie’s creation were published, both in 2008: Thomas Seabrook’s Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town (Seabrook 2008) and Tobias Rüther’s Helden: David Bowie und Berlin (Rüther 2008).² Bowie’s bond with Berlin is something he himself drew attention to, singling out his Berlin triptych of Low, ‘Heroes’, and Lodger as special:

For whatever reasons, 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 in those three. They are my DNA. (cited in Buckley 2015, p. 215)

Possibly for that reason Bowie returned to Berlin in his 2013 comeback. As is by now well known, the city figures prominently in the lyrics and images of the surprise-release ‘Where Are We Now?’ while for the cover for its album, The Next Day, after considerable consideration of previous album covers a repurposed version of ‘Heroes’ was chosen, the album of his most associated with the city and, as Will Brooker reminds us that David Buckley reminds us, the only one actually made in the city (Brooker 2017, p. 109). However, there seems to be general acceptance of Tony Visconti’s claim that ‘Where Are We Now?’ ‘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)’ (Buckley 2015, p. 215). Indeed, as the title of Tiffany Naiman’s article suggests, the real question seems to be not ‘where’ but ‘when’ are we now (Naiman 2015), while Brooker’s detailed examination reveals that Bowie’s general engagement with place was rather minimal: ‘Bowie’s mentions of London suburbia were sparse, despite the decades he spent there, and… his references to New York, where he apparently felt most at home in his later years, were also surprisingly modest and minimal’ (Brooker 2017, p. 108). Indeed, ‘Neuköln,’ the one song on ‘Heroes’ named after a place in Berlin, was misspelt (Brooker 2017, p. 111), just as the place names in the subtitles of the ‘Where Are We Now?’ video are (Ingram 2014, p. 235). The answer to Brooker’s query as to where Berlin is in Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy turns out to be a question not of where but of what: it is ‘the city-sized canvas onto which Bowie projects… internal conflicts’ (Brooker 2017, p. 114), ‘a conceptual map, through which he could explore the emotional issues that he’d acquired during his manically accelerated fame then locked in to fester during his period in Los Angeles’ (Brooker 2017, p. 116). Brooker makes a strong case that Berlin ‘was less important in [Bowie’s] work in its specificity that in its concept and its identity: what it represented to him, the ways in which he could map that onto his experience and then, in turn, express it through the albums’ (Brooker 2017, p. 120).

Whatever the city meant to Bowie, the fact remains that, as Shelton Waldrep notes in his 2015 Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie, ‘Increasingly in recent years critics and fans have lavished praise on the Berlin period, which has perhaps begun to eclipse the Ziggy one’ (Waldrep 2015, p. 9). Buckley revisited Bowie’s Berlin for the 2015 edited collection David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (Buckley 2015), and there are a number of contributions on Berlin in the 2015 volume Enchanting David Bowie edited by Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond: Jennifer Otter Bickerdike and John Charles Sparrowhawk look at Bowie tourism to Berlin (Otter Bickerdike and Sparrowhawk 2015), something the David Bowie Tours one can now go on in the city were developed to cater to; Darryl Perrins analyses ‘Where Are We Now?’ in terms of video art practice (Perrins 2015); Naiman reads its melancholy as a critique of neoliberal capitalism (Naiman 2015); and, in a different venue, I further this critique by drawing on the triad of pornography, nostalgia, and montage that Slavoj Žižek established in Looking Awry (Žižek 1992) to compare ‘Where Are We Now?’ with Comrade Couture: Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie (2008, dir. Marco Wilms), ‘a documentary made by a former East German fashion model about the underground fashion scene on the other side of the Wall from Bowie’s Berlin’ (Ingram 2014, p. 228). The four-stop Australian ‘Bowie in Berlin’ tour (of Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth) in January 2017 to mark the first anniversary of Bowie’s death, the fortieth anniversary of the release of Low, and what would have been his seventieth birthday would seem to indicate that interest in the Bowie-Berlin nexus is far from abating.

Bowie, Slimane, Christiane F

Close readers of the David Bowie Is catalogue will already be aware of the Bowie-Slimane connection. In ‘Changes: Bowie’s Life Story,’ Oriole Cullen includes a quote by Bowie ‘[d]iscussing his approach to fashion in 2005ʹ: ‘Explaining that he was currently wearing clothes by one particular designer, he said, “I just rely on Hedi Slimane… I’ve always been extremely lucky that there’s always been some designer or other who wants to give me clothes. For the last little while Hedi Slimane has wardrobed me”’ (Cullen 2013, p. 258). Cullen then provides a bit of background for readers:

Slimane, who is currently head designer at the house of Saint Laurent Paris [something no longer true as of March 2016], received global acclaim for the slim, tailored menswear he created for Christian Dior Homme in the early 2000s. Bowie was se...