Why Bowie Matters. Will Brooker
Bowie – only my own internal Bowie – but that year, I met a lot of people who’d known him personally.)
I experienced what felt like genuine grief, as if a family member had died. Many fans felt the same: maybe you did, too. I stayed indoors, and retreated inside myself. I’d been working with a tribute band, the Thin White Duke, taking the place of their lead singer, but it was months before I performed with them again – not until May, towards the end of my research year, and by that point it felt like time for a celebration rather than mourning. The gig was packed with long-term fans in their fifties, mixed with younger people of undergraduate age. When we sang ‘Starman’ as an encore, everyone joined in. I still have the footage, panning over the crowd of faces as they chant the final chorus. It’s a picture of pure, shared joy. We were all thanking our own version of Bowie, and it felt like he was there with us.
As I approached May 2016, and the end of my project, I saw a counsellor for six sessions. I felt I needed a bridge of my own: a way to transition out of this intense research and back into everyday life. We started by talking about Bowie, and progressed to my own family, my personal history and what I’d inherited from previous generations, like my granddad in the Navy, who never talked about what he’d seen in conflict. Bowie, born just after the war, and growing up around Brixton bombsites, was about expression, creativity and release, an antidote to English repression. He was about the bravery not to care if you fitted in with the norm, about the boldness to push past your own limits. He wasn’t the best singer – Freddie Mercury soars above him on ‘Under Pressure’ – and he certainly wasn’t the best dancer. He tended to play himself, as an actor, and he was only ever an amateur painter. But he did it anyway. And, because I had to, because I’d committed to my research project, I did things I wasn’t the best at, too.
As well as taking up film and photography again, using various formats from digital to 1960s vintage kit, I experimented with painting, because Bowie did it during his Berlin period. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I wasn’t very good at first, but I got better. I started going to portrait classes every week, and continued to improve. I began singing lessons, too, and while I’ll never be the best, after four years of vocal training I’m not so bad. I have folders on my computer now titled ‘painting’ and ‘singing’, where I save my own work and track its progress. I have Bowie to thank for that. I didn’t become Bowie – nobody can – but by aspiring to be more like him, I became a better, brighter, bolder version of myself.
I am a Bowie fan, but I am also a professor, and those two sides of me are bridged rather than separate. I’ve published scholarly articles and an academic book about Bowie, which were informed by both critical theory and my decades of fandom; and I became more deeply invested in Bowie through my writing and research, as I learned more about him and studied his work more closely. I even taught a class on Bowie and stardom, enjoying the way twenty-one-year-old students, who were born around Bowie’s fiftieth birthday and the Earthling album, both appreciated and criticised his star persona.
Those twin approaches – fan and academic – come together in this book. For me, critical theory and philosophy are only useful if they serve us as tools; if they offer us a new understanding and a valuable perspective. So the use of theorists like Fredric Jameson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in this book is not to try to elevate Bowie’s popular work to some loftier academic plane – to show that he is worthy of serious analysis and that his name can be mentioned with theirs. That, to me, goes without saying. Their theories are here as tools to give us a different angle and context for Bowie’s creative expressions, identity transitions and cultural references. They can offer us a new way of seeing, which is surely what Bowie was all about.
If you love David Bowie, you already know why he matters. You have your own reasons, bound up with moments from your own life when his songs intersected with your experiences and provided the perfect soundtrack. But this book will suggest different reasons, approaching from new directions and new angles: new ways of connecting the dots and mapping a path through the mosaic of his life.
On 25 March 2018, a statue of Bowie – or rather, of several Bowies, because it morphed multiple incarnations into a bronze chimera – was unveiled in the market square of Aylesbury. Its title is Earthly Messenger. The aesthetic was criticised, but the name passed without comment, because it perfectly fits the new persona that has evolved posthumously around David Bowie: the idea of an otherworldly being who descended to our planet in January 1947 and departed it in January 2016.
‘Ziggy is Stardust now’, was the caption on one memorial cartoon, showing Aladdin Sane’s face as a new constellation: and indeed, the ‘Stardust for Bowie’ campaign named a lightning-bolt pattern of stars in the vicinity of Mars after him. Others evoked Major Tom: an astronaut stepping through the Pearly Gates, or a weeping Ground Control sending unanswered messages to the lost spaceman. One artist drew Bowie in delicate watercolours, in the style of the Little Prince: Ziggy standing on his own tiny planet in space, titled The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Time, in turn, published a commemorative edition called ‘His Time on Earth’. Blogs, articles and tweets repeated the phrase ‘Goodbye, Starman’, elaborating on the theme with each anniversary: ‘A year ago, the Starman David Bowie said goodbye to our planet to start his “Space Oddity”,’ an online fan noted in January 2017, while Vice marked ‘a year since David Bowie ascended’. ‘It’s been two years since David Bowie left us for his home planet, and we haven’t been the same since,’ suggested the Consequences of Sound site in January 2018, under the headline ‘Remembering the Man Who Fell to Earth, Two Years After Bowie Returned to the Stars’.
Of course, Bowie provided the raw material for this final media incarnation, which joins the dots of various songs and characters – Starman, Lady Stardust, Blackstar, Major Tom, the Man Who Fell to Earth and, more fundamentally, the idea of Ziggy as messiah – into the picture of an uncanny visitor from outer space, an ‘Earthly Messenger’, whether alien or angel. Fans can hardly be blamed for extending Bowie’s career-long fascination with outer space into a comforting image – somewhere between religion and science fiction – of him not dead, but departed to another world; he even advised them on his final album to ‘look up here, I’m in heaven’. But even at the time, this idea felt to me like a misreading, understandable as a coping mechanism but disrespectful to his mourning family – Duncan Jones, I guessed, did not think of his father as an extraterrestrial who’d returned to his home planet – and misrepresentative of the Bowie I felt I knew.
My own sense of Bowie was not of an uncanny creature who had descended, fully-formed, to treat us to his art before leaving us again. I saw ‘Bowie’ as a persona originally conceived by the young David Jones, who struggled for success and worked hard to maintain and develop it. Part of the point of Bowie, to me, is that Jones was, contrary to the popular myth, an ambitious, frustrated and creative young man from an ordinary environment, who created something extraordinary through sustained effort, dedication and drive in the face of repeated failure. To see him as a creature who effortlessly came and went from the stars diminishes that other side of the story: to my mind, this more complex version is the truer story, though, as we’ll see, the truth of Bowie is elusive.
The Aylesbury statue points to another, contradictory way of seeing Bowie that emerged after his death. He was supposedly from elsewhere, but he was also from, or associated with, specific places on earth, and those places wanted to claim him for tourism. Aylesbury’s boast was that the Ziggy Stardust album had debuted there – though Ziggy himself first performed at the Toby Jug in Tolworth, down the road from me – and argued that its Market Square, the site of the statue, inspired the first line of ‘Five Years’. South-east London maintained that Bowie was ‘Our Brixton Boy’ – the slogan appeared on the Ritzy Cinema just after his death – and has its own mural, now repainted and protected with a plastic cover, around