Future Nostalgia

Performing David Bowie

Shelton Waldrep

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781623569938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Although David Bowie has famously characterized himself as a "leper messiah, " a more appropriate moniker might be "rock god": someone whose influence has crossed numerous sub-genres of popular and classical music and can at times seem ubiquitous. By looking at key moments in his career (1972, 1977-79, 1980-83, and 1995-97) through several lenses-theories of sub-culture, gender/sexuality studies, theories of sound, post-colonial theory, and performance studies Waldrep examines Bowie's work in terms not only of his auditory output but his many reinterpretations of it via music videos, concert tours, television appearances, and occasional movie roles. Future Nostalgia looks at all aspects of Bowie's career in an attempt to trace Bowie's contribution to the performative paradigms that constitute contemporary rock music.

1

Introduction: The Pastiche of Gender

Over the course of a long career, lasting from the 1960s until the first decade of the twenty-first century, then after a ten-year hiatus to recover from a heart attack, until now, David Bowie (David Jones) has been not only a major force in popular music but a major artist as well. We are only now coming to terms with some of the influences he has had on the arts in general, as interdisciplinary studies allow us to appreciate someone who has not only come from the “low” art form of rock and roll but who has also affected so many forms of art simultaneously—not just music, but acting, directing, costume design, and dance choreography as well. Bowie has been as much a visual artist as an auditory one, and his unique position as a ubiquitous influence on contemporary popular music comes out of his ability to affect so many different media at once. Bowie’s career sums up and amplifies the work of pioneering sixties artists who focused on transforming rock music into its own art form—from the Beatles to the Who—and bringing an art school sensibility to blues-based fifties rock. Bowie carried this direction further into the realms of pop art, fusing a commercial sensibility with high-art pretension.

David Bowie is the name given to the performance of self by the real person David Jones. As Bowie, Jones has long performed himself performing an alter ego who himself frequently performs as someone else—Ziggy Stardust, Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke, et al. At the core of Bowie’s performance is always a persona, though spinning out from this core, like so many concentric circles, are various other performances. While the musical text is always the primary one, there are the secondary visual texts of the album cover, the costumes (on stage and off), the music videos, and the concert sets, staging, and choreography. Allied to these visual performances are other aural ones as well, as the original songs are frequently reworked for the concert stage and, after the 1980s, remixed and reimagined by other artists as extras to be included on CDs and later releases of albums. While many of these examples of performance are givens in the commercial world of popular music, in Bowie’s hands they often become something more than mere rote advertisement for the musical product. They instead become their own works of art or interpretations of his songs and personae that refract the album that is being promoted in new and interesting ways.

While Bowie’s sudden end to his Reality tour in 2004 created a hiatus in his career that was luckily broken by his reemergence with The Next Day in 2013, the album came with a rethinking of Bowie’s long career. His new album, the first in ten years, debuted at number two in the United States and at the number-one spot in twelve countries. Several new books on Bowie were published at around the same time, such as Paul Trynka’s David Bowie: Starman (2011) and The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie in the 1970s (2012) by Peter Doggett, and, most significantly, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London held a major retrospective exhibit of artifacts from Bowie’s personal archive that emphasized not only his music but his contributions to fashion, set design, and music videos as well.¹ Now is the time, in other words, to reassess Bowie’s contributions, especially as he has made it clear that his new album does not signal a return to touring. He has stated that he wants only to create new records and is not interested in interviews or promotion of any kind. Still, Bowie’s new music has been accompanied by new music videos and at least some miscellaneous journalism on Bowie’s part, and while he is hardly presenting us with the full-scale media attention that some of his albums have had before, he is producing new material while at the same time encouraging (or allowing) a more thorough reassessment of his past than ever before.

While Bowie has long been a subject of journalistic scrutiny and certainly one of the most photogenic rock stars of all time, the amount of serious work on him as a musician and an artist has actually been limited. In their pioneering David Bowie: The Illustrated Record (1981), Charles S. Murray and Roy Carr created a prescient roadmap for future Bowie scholarship, all the more astonishing for being written at a time when it would be difficult to have much distance on Bowie’s dense and complicated seventies career. Work on Bowie since then has taken the form mostly of biographies, all unauthorized, themselves based upon articles and interviews of Bowie and his cohorts over the years. Unfortunately, many of these books have tended to repeat the same errors and, arguably, failed to shed a great deal of critical light on Bowie’s actual artistic production. The trend in these books has gone from those that might be considered little more than fanzines whipped together at key points of commercial success (mainly, the early eighties) to books that at least provide some new material for better understanding Bowie in the form of interviews with people who worked with Bowie such as Trynka’s book and, to a lesser extent, Marc Spitz’s Bowie: A Biography (2009). This genre has occasionally been supplemented by books that concentrate on a particular era within Bowie’s career. Two of the most helpful are The Pitt Report (1985) by Bowie’s first influential manager, Ken Pitt, and Hugo Wilcken’s Low (2005), which says much about Bowie’s Berlin trilogy in a short space. The latter book itself formed the basis of Thomas Jerome Seabrook’s Bowie in Berlin (2008), which represents a renewed interest in Bowie’s late-seventies period in particular. Unfortunately, that book, like many others, repeats much of what has come before, and does so without referencing the work of others so that one cannot even trace the references. Of much more help are Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman’s The Bowie Companion (1996), which collects many of the more interesting reviews of Bowie’s albums, and Nicholas Pegg’s The Complete David Bowie (2011), which not only traces every Bowie song, album, video, concert, and film role, but comments, however briefly, on it with at least some insight. The biographies provide the linear (temporal) story of Bowie’s life and career while the annotated discographies spatialize Bowie’s work and organize it as something to be dipped into as one prefers. This buffet-like structure is perhaps good for both the novice fan and the completist, but it works against creating a sustained analysis of any of Bowie’s work. Actual work on Bowie as an artist, while now, finally, beginning to be generally acknowledged, is more assumption than reality.

I believe that the time has come to begin a major reassessment of his career in the form of a book-length study devoted to him as a performer. Future Nostalgia is an overdue intervention into our understanding of Bowie and his multifaceted influence on a number of media and art forms. This book looks at key moments in his career (1972, 1977–79, 1980–83, and 1995–97) through several lenses—theories of subculture (Dick Hebdige and others); gender/sexuality studies; theories of sound (Roland Barthes, Simon Frith); postcolonial theory; and performance studies (in the art-historical sense). I try to make sense, not only of Bowie’s auditory output, but also his many reinterpretations of it via music videos, concert tours, television appearances, and occasional movie roles. In terms of the book’s methodology, I would like to emphasize that while musicological analysis is a part of the book, this is not primarily a musicological study, since that is not my training. Instead, I discuss Bowie’s music as the foundation for a larger set of performances, the totality of which one must understand in order to make sense of Bowie at any particular moment in time. Much as Raymond Williams described the notion of culture as “structures of feeling,” I try to tease out some of the ways in which Bowie’s career is made up of interacting aural and visual tropes and influences that reflect and refract both high and low culture at a given moment.

All of the work in the following chapters builds upon and expands observations that I first made in the last chapter of Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie, entitled “The Phenomenology of Performance: David Bowie.” The argument of that chapter emphasizes Bowie’s performativity, his merging of art with life. I trace some of Bowie’s queer tutelage under Lindsay Kemp and the Asian influences on Bowie’s creation of his Ziggy Stardust persona. The chapter moves on to discuss the separate media in which Bowie has distinguished himself—performance in songs, films, music videos, and on the Internet. In the section on sound, I emphasize the inherent virtual nature of the creation of rock music as a genre and the development of Bowie’s use of personae as a way to feel comfortable on stage. This approach to rock also broke with the notion of rock and authenticity—that the singer-songwriter is presenting a coherent self. His use of personae in his concert, film, and video work is a natural extension of his approach to writing and performing music.

In many ways Future Nostalgia unpacks, updates, and extends those discussions while staying close to my original thesis—that Bowie gives us a way to understand the vicissitudes of performance, aestheticizing the link between rock music and everyday life by calling attention to the artificiality of both.

The chapters that follow focus on Bowie’s influence on mass culture as he has developed his own uniquely personal approach to music and the visual aspects of music culture. The introduction includes an overview of Bowie’s career and a discussion of why the notion of performance is key to understanding Bowie’s oeuvre. I situate Bowie in terms of avant-garde performance in the twentieth century and then move on to discuss the importance of his performance of gender specifically. Beginning with an overview of Bowie’s historical antecedents in the nineteenth-century cult of the dandy, the discussion in the second chapter broadens to include his influence on twentieth-century subcultures and, more recently, visual artists. I deal specifically with Bowie’s appeal to the middle class in Britain and the United States and how this appeal was connected especially to the medium of television. Chapter 3 focuses on the musicological analysis of individual songs from different moments in his career, but especially from Hunky Dory (1971) through Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980), and changes in how he approached the construction of his music in terms of harmony, melody, and rhythm. The chapter also looks critically at the idea of the concept album, especially in terms of his most famous LPs, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) and Scary Monsters. Chapter 4 continues to look at his songwriting with a discussion of his songs as autobiographical texts, especially during the latter half of the 1970s, when his work was seen as experimental and seemingly at its least personal. This chapter includes an analysis of Bowie’s voice and, specifically, his aural output using theories from Roland Barthes’ seminal Image-Music-Text such as “the grain of the voice,” but also his theory of “musica practica” as it applies to how we listen to music and what actually constitutes the “text” of music—especially important concerns for Bowie and his work. Chapter 5 takes up his work after the long seventies, when his 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. In this chapter I talk about Bowie’s attempt to fuse what he had learned in the seventies about avant-garde art and theater with the dictates of a more popular style that he experienced on the album Let’s Dance (1983). My discussion here is informed by postcolonial theory and how it plays into his interest at the time in the Orientalizing of his own work on “China Girl” and elsewhere. Chapter 5 also analyzes Bowie’s interest in Asian culture generally by reading that interest through the concept of “Orientalization” put forth by Edward Said. The book concludes with an in-depth look into Bowie’s interest in and relationship to science fiction and fantasy. Chapter 6 focuses on a discussion of the representation of queer disability in Lady Gaga’s recent video for her song “Paparazzi” from her debut album, The Fame (2008). I discuss the video as it references other examples of queer disability in popular music. Drawing parallels between Bowie and Gaga’s fusion of the mechanical and the human, I also discuss the work of William S. Burroughs and J. G. Ballard, whose science fiction often deals with the biomechanical erosion of the inside with the outside, the beautiful with the horrific, which I believe correlates with Bowie’s central aesthetic. This chapter also places Gaga’s and Bowie’s work in relation to Rob McRuer’s “crip theory” on queerness and disability. Taken as a whole, the chapters attempt to intertwine notions of performance as it relates across the spectrum of Bowie’s work, especially as it provides an architecture for understanding the personal nature of his experimentation.

The title of this book refers to a phrase promulgated by Bowie at the time of the release of Scary Monsters. Bowie said that his album represented “future nostalgia . . . a past look at something that hasn’t happened yet.”² While this description is an apt one to describe the specific setting for the album’s title song, it is applicable to Bowie’s aesthetic generally as well. As Bowie seemed to begin to acknowledge in the mid-nineties, around the time he made the albums Buddha of Suburbia (1993) and Outside (1995), he has always been postmodern avant la lettre.³ The distinctive way in which Bowie seems always presciently to forecast the future is often tinged with a sense of futures that never were, or alternative timelines that are just as likely to result in a dystopia—“we have five years left to die in”—as a utopian dream of a “better future.” The ...