In reaction to the release of his latest album, Lorna Irvine reflects on the cultural impact of David Bowie.
In the 1970s, no three men in the music industry were cooler than the Unholy Trinity of drinking/drugging/creating/destroying/deconstructing buddies Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and David Bowie. Fast-forward to 2013 and Lou can be seen in carpet slippers onstage with Gorillaz, looking like a befuddled shell of his former self, mumbling incoherently like a lost old man at a bus stop. Iggy is still getting his increasingly walnut-like ass out on stage and selling car insurance in naff, faux-ironic adverts. Mr Bowie, the one written off a few years back, has the fastest selling album of the year and a retrospective at the V & A Museum in London, which has already sold-out advance tickets.
So, why Bowie? Why here and now? Why is he still cool and iconic where the other two have lost their appeal?
Perhaps it's because he still looks cool. Reed just looks perma-grumpy and Iggy cavorts around like a man half his age, which would be great if they were both still making interesting music. Bowie is elegant and has never felt the need to be anyone other than himself. Remember, he doesn't do “fa-fa-fa-fa-fashion.” He keeps a low profile, which only adds to the enigma. You will never really 'know' him, or second-guess his next move.
Or maybe it's the fact that new album The Next Day, produced by long-term producer and collaborator Tony Visconti, is actually excellent, both modern and classic Bowie. It's immediate and moody, the first single wrong-footing everyone in its gentle paean to Berlin; the rest of the album as strange and belligerent as always. Plus, he released it oh-so-quietly, which is really cool.
Lady Gaga may rip off his style by painting the lightning bolt on her face, but she lacks ideas. Bowie transcended all of his influences, whether soul music or the mime of Lindsay Kemp, Brecht or Kabuki theatre. He took these as reference points but put his own distinctive oddball English stamp on them. Bjork and Tilda Swinton, the latter as androgynously beautiful as Bowie in his prime, have both appeared in his recent videos for, respectively, “Where Are We Now?” and “The Stars Are Out Tonight”. Imagine Gaga collaborating with such talents—they would creatively and intellectually dwarf her.
His work, above all, still stands up some thirty-forty years later. “Hunky Dory” has baroque pop, glam, music hall and country swagger in its arsenal. Young Americans , Ziggy Stardust, Heroes , Lodger, Low: not one weak song among them...if you find one, tell me and I'll sing One Direction songs with a kazoo on the steps of the Kelvingrove every Sunday from next week until 2014.
David Robert Jones, I love you...and I'm not alone in this. We are still loving the alien.
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