Some of us listen to music others consider weird, strange, and just plain different music, but we’ve listened to it for so long that it no longer bothers us when they say it’s horrible. Who cares what anyone thinks of the music we play for our entertainment? We might have when we were in high school and college, but most of us left those insecurities behind us when we entered adulthood. We didn’t have anything to do with writing the music or the lyrics of these songs, so when people try to call us out in front of groups, we regard it as equivalent to Yo-Mama jokes. They’re the silly, inoffensive jokes we make about one another at parties and family get-togethers. We don’t make fun of someone’s appearance, their financial stability, or their children. No, we try to find a harmless subject on which the other has little-to-no vulnerability, and we drill down to the core. One guy lands a quality shot, the recipient hits back, and everyone keeps firing someone runs out of ammunition. It’s part of a fun little game we all play with one another.
Repetitive jokes like these only leap the fence from meaningless and harmless to competitive with repetition. When she first said, “You listen to some horrible music,” we laughed as hard as everyone else. We felt no need to respond. She could’ve been a little more creative, but it was a decent shot, and it was funny.
We’ve found some jewels in the rough over the years, but we know that an overwhelming majority will never enjoy the music we do. It’s a thing, or a thang, we’ve known for so long that it doesn’t really matter to us anymore. It used to matter a great deal to us. We used to try to discover bands before any of our friends did, and the excitement we felt when we found such artistic musicians was almost physical. If the recipients of our recommendations grew to love the music, and they attributed it to us in some manner, it was thick and delicious gravy. That pursuit probably started us down these weird, strange, and just plain different musical paths, but whatever the anthropology of it was, when we returned to the chart-topping, traditional music that most enjoy, we were left with, “Is that all there is?”
She would get such mileage out of this joke that she sought any strategic use of it that she could find. People would laugh, big belly laughs, because they knew about our listening habits. We laughed too, for years, until we thought about her music. “Wait a second,” we said. “What do you listen to?”
“Oh, I was just joking with you,” she said.
“I know you were,” we said, “but if you’re going to get in the ring, what you got?”
Nothing.
No one cares what kind of music she enjoys, because she doesn’t love music. It’s background noise to her. It’s what she turns on when it’s a little too quiet. She doesn’t ache for brilliance the way we do, great songs don’t alter her mood, and she’s never used the word masterpiece with emotional exclamation points. She lets a DJ select her music for her. Okay, but to what station does she tune? She prefers trite and simplistic tunes that are as far from difficult and challenging soundscapes as songs get. Her favorite music involves corporate production, computer enhanced vocals and a professional songwriter composing and editing lyrics. We have no problem with any of that on the surface, because we know 90% of the population prefers that music. They don’t seek out unique chord changes and complicated structures that no one else considered before. She’s not a musician or a music aficionado. She just wants a hummable beat that she can strum on her steering wheel. She doesn’t demand artistry from her favorite artists, and we suspect that most of the music we love involves more minds than we’ll ever know. Yet, her repetition suggests that there is some sort of psychological game going on that she’s won, because we considered this game so silly that we’ve yet to fire a shot.
That’s where the “What do you listen to?” snark was born. It’s fine if you crack on our music. We don’t defend our music, because we don’t think it needs defense, and because we find it silly to defend something we had no hand in creating. The only reason we said anything at all was because she spent the whole game on offense, and if we were going to find out if she had any game at all, we thought we should test her defense.
***
Someone stepped into her silence and stuck up for her. He was a gentleman who saw a woman flopping on the shore. She wasn’t embarrassed, and we didn’t really make her look bad, but he apparently felt the need to fill a void she couldn’t.
He preferred important artists who created important music. He preferred cultural scribes who wrote meaningful music. He preferred musicians Rolling Stone told us that we’re supposed to like. As he spoke, we thought of all the articles that centered around the theme, “Why it’s okay to like this artist now.” This guy preferred to listen to the martyrs, the prophets, and philosophers of music who told us what to think. We told him that we sought our philosophical mainframe in other venues. He asked where, we told him, and we both viewed the other’s path to philosophical truths as simplistic.
“[My artist] has witnessed carnage and mayhem firsthand,” he said, “and he writes about it. He writes about tragedies, foreign and domestic, and he does so with heart-wrenching and illustrative prose and poetry.”
“It’s poetry without a punchline. He writes subjectivity as if it’s objectivity.”
“But he’s been there,” he said in a tone that suggested we don’t get it. The you-don’t-get-it crowd gets a lot of mileage out of that line without saying it. The power lies in the inference.
“On the yellow brick roads provided by the undersecretary of tourism development.”
“But he writes from the soul,” he said. “His lyrics are deep and meaningful.”
“[The artist] regards it as the truth, but it is his truth. He regards it as challenging. It’s his important music. It’s the college thesis paper he never wrote, because he never attended college. It’s his “I’m smart. Not like everybody says … like dumb … I’m smart and I want respect!” moment.”
“This is where you and I differ,” he said, “because I find his lyrics so intellectually stimulating that I consider him important.”
“But did he write it to be important?”
“Why does that matter?” he asked.
“My favorite artists don’t strive for importance in this vein, and when an artist does, it always sounds contrived to me. Did your favorite artist write your favorite important song for the purpose of artistic interpretation, or did he do it to be a star?”
“I doubt that anyone writes a song with the hope that someone, somewhere will consider it important,” he said. “I’ve never written a song, and neither have you, but I have to imagine that it’s so hard to write a song that if you strive for a hit, or the level of importance that we’re talking about, you probably end up chasing your own tail.”
“You can hear it in the song,” we said. “You can hear it in the emotional triggers he uses to evoke and provoke. There’s nothing wrong with it of course, but it doesn’t move the needle for me. Listen, every musician wants to be successful at what they do, but what do they do to get it? I respect anyone who knows their limitations and battles them from within. Do some artists reach a peak of creative brilliance, and they witness the other guy constantly outdoing them? Does this idea that they can’t outdo their rivals compel them to go down the intelligent and important roads? I don’t know. Does the idea that they’ll never reach their creative peak again compel them to do it? I don’t know, but I can tell you that no musician has ever changed my mind on anything, and I find the never-ending attempts to do so a little tedious at times.”
“So, who’s the music snob here?” he asked.
Our initial thought, after this conclusion of this conversation, was that this man was attempting to turn the tables on us. He chuckled after saying it however, and it was a reflective chuckle that suggested he was laughing as much at himself as he was us.
Everything you believe in is some trumped up idea developed to foster your illusions. Don’t believe me, I’ll prove it. Give me something you believe in. Anything. Big or small. What defines you? What drives your passion? What makes you tick? Great, now back up and give me some room, because the shrapnel flies when I start in on dispassionate observations.
Led Zeppelin was one of the greatest band of all time right? Yeah, they’re frauds, and I was onto them at a very young age. I knew there was no way one guy could come up with all that brilliant music. I know, the other guys came up with some of the music, but most of the credits for writing the compositions go to Jimmy Page. I knew, even at a very young age, that there was no way one man could come up with that much brilliance. I was a dumb kid at the time, so I thought he sold his soul to the devil. I was eventually vindicated when we all found out how much material he stole. They say he only stole some songs and some riffs. I read a report that suggested that of the first four albums, he/they stole ten songs by some measure, debatably, arguably, and whatever qualifiers we need to use to avoid incriminating lawsuits. I say we don’t know the full extent of his/their theft. I say they’re damned thieves who probably stole more than we’ll ever know. Look it up, there are lawsuits all over the place for infringements, unauthorized borrowing, and outright theft. I was so excited when I read that. It was vindication. All you silly idiots who believed that they were geniuses were wrong. Look at you! Are your crying? I enjoy the taste of tears. I don’t know if disappointment makes them extra salty, or if I just enjoy the taste of victory. Do you mind if I lick them off your face?
Who’s your favorite actor? You know what, don’t answer that. We tell our people our favorite actor with pride. We talk about the best movie from their catalog, and we say that it was their movie. Have you ever seen the list of credits listed in your average movie? There are at least hundreds of names? How many people were responsible for that movie? What percentage of that movie’s success was due to the actor you love? They’re vehicles for the lines, the action, and the drama, but how much time do they sit in vehicles before they’re called upon to do a scene? They don’t call it the-hurry-up-and-wait industry for nothing.
The production crew hates calling the lead actor to the set, so they spend most of their day readying the scene for them. They hire stand-ins to get the shot right, and they work with the screenwriter to make sure the lines won’t cause the actor to have a hissy fit. The actor steps from their trailer, says the lines a couple times, and they all move on. Most actors hate walking onto an ill-prepared set. They don’t want to stand around to make sure the lighting is right, and the scene is perfect, so the production crew stresses each other out to make sure everything is perfect for the entrance of the actor. The actor finally enters and delivers the line, as if it’s on the fly. It’s not my intention to suggest that convincing a group of people that you’re another person is easy, or that I could do it. I’m talking about the audiences reaction to it. I’m talking about how we immerse ourselves in movies to such a degree that we believe they said the line they read. We do that. We all do it. We say, “You know it’s like Jack Nicholson says …” He said it, sure, but he read it. He memorized the line, but he didn’t think it up. A screenwriter thought up that line. Now, Nicholson probably said it with more flair and charisma than the screenwriter could’ve, but how many takes does the production crew have to sit through before he got the line just right? They’re frauds perpetuating a myth that we love.
My favorite recording artist was “hardly there” in the production of my favorite album. “What?” It was largely a creation in the minds of a producer, the guitarist, an expert mixer, and a number of other credited players who helped my favorite artist produce the product I’ve loved for decades. I learned an important lesson the day I read that: Ignorance is bliss. If we want to continue to love an artist, particularly an actor or a musician, we shouldn’t read websites or watch documentaries that dive deep into our favorite artistic creations from them.
How about Stephen King? Do you read him? Yeah, he stole the idea for one of his most popular books Misery from an Erik Keene’s dead aunt? Our initial inclination is that Erik Keene was a delusional whack job looking for a way to harass King and his family, and while that might be true with Keene, how many struggling writers submit rejected ideas to publishers only to have the core idea of that rejected manuscript show up in that publisher’s favorite author’s library? How many authors simply run out of ideas? How many writer’s blocks have ended with a stolen manuscript? How many big time authors were so frustrated by their writer’s block that they threatened to retire? How many desperate publishers, bent on keeping a big name, help them come up with ideas? Where did they get those ideas? Have they ever sorted through the slush pile of rejected compositions and come up with an idea for your favorite author. I’m saying this happens all the time, I’m not, but has it ever happened? Does it happen more often than we know?
How about Walter Payton? If you love football, you know he’s declared one of the greatest running backs in NFL history. Have you ever seen the guys from the 70’s and 80’s trying to chase him down and tackle him? They’re so little. With the size, strength, and speed of the NFL today, Walter Payton would probably be a third-down, situational back, nothing more. You might think that’s idiotic, but this is what we do when we attempt to tear down everything you believe in. We take your favorite bands, your favorite authors, and your favorite athletes, and we tear them apart. Nugget by nugget, brick by brick. This is our way of saying we don’t believe in you anymore, and we’ve broken free of any shackles we once had by believing in you. We have nothing to rebel against anymore, all of our parents are dead, so rebelling against you and everything you believe in gives us gas to dispel that feeling of individuality we never strove for in our teens in the manner most kids did.
There’s poetry in baseball, and baseball is poetry, punctuated by plays like “The Catch”. Willie Mays made “The Catch”. It was poetic right? Wrong. I’ve watched that catch so many times over the years, trying to figure out the big deal. I know it happened in the World Series and all that, but people say it was one of the greatest catches of all time. Have you seen that catch? I thought it was barehanded for whatever reason. It wasn’t. It was just a catch, and a catch we probably see a couple of times a year in major league baseball. Hell, I think I did it once in softball. It wasn’t a special catch by any means.
You might not care about Willie Mays, but do you care about the Nebraska Cornhuskers? Yeah, they’re frauds too. You probably still celebrate the years they won three national championships in four years, but I say the only reason they won them is that they had such an easy schedule. Admit it, they were frauds. Everything you believe in is fraudulent.
Demystify the past? What are you talking about demystify the past? I’m talking truth here brotha. I have no skin in this game. I want to know the truth? Why don’t you? You and the collective ‘we’ have trumped up these otherwise marginal people and accomplishments, and it sends a tingle up my leg when I’m able to pop a hole in your delusions. You’re all so ridiculous. You believe in things, and it makes you happy. Your passions breed a sense of fulfillment, even when what you know they’re false. That’s why I feel the need to correct the record. I don’t allow myself to believe in false things. Why do you? You can try to turn this back on me, but what are you going to squash? I don’t believe in anything. I have no passions, so good luck. It makes me feel smarter to know more than you and all of your silly idiot friends who believe in things and develop passions.
The past wasn’t as great as you romantic types thought. It’s a narrative for the romantics. You’re not a romantic? Look at all the silly people you believe in. Why do we believe in people? Why do we trump up their rather routine accomplishments, because they’re about us. We’ve found a way to live vicariously through their accomplishments to idealize who we wish we could be. We treat diminishment of their accomplishments as a personal insult.
What’s the flip side of the coin? You think that by diminishing others’ accomplishments, I hope to relieve myself of any disappointments I have in my life? All right, I’ll admit that my life didn’t turn out the way I thought it would but who’s has? I have some accomplishments in life, but they pale in comparison to these false gods you worship. They’re silly people. You’re silly, and we’re all quite boring, so we assign poetic majesty to the little things and these little people did who supposedly did big things, so we have something to believe in.
I see what you’re doing though. You’re trying to find a super-secret part of me to analyze. You’re trying to find my motivation, so you can dismiss my findings. Go for it. Smarter people than you have tried. They were wrong, and you’ll be wrong. This is not about me. It’s about you. I’m a blank slate, an empty vessel, like the actors you adore. Have you ever heard the theory that the more devoid of a core personality an actor is, the better they are at filling that void with a fictional personality? That’s me. I have no motivation, except to prove you, and your fellow romantics, wrong. I find that so satisfying that it quenches a need. I don’t get passionate about silly things. Why do you? Why do you believe in anything? I seek to question that which you believe in, until it leads to an ultimate deconstruction, and I hope to help you ultimately reach a higher sphere of consciousness where nothing is real. It’s about you. It’s not about me. I have no skin in this game. I’m a dispassionate observer who believes that you romantics who seek poetry and majesty in the past are just plain silly. In the battle between mind and heart, most of us know that our passions will not withstand scrutiny. I dismantle these beliefs, because I think intelligence dispels belief.
“He’s just so weird,” my mom said when David Bowie took the stage on a 1970s, variety show called The Midnight Special. Before the marketing teams learned how fascinating weird could be to us, being weird was not a good thing. We strove to avoid the weird, so no one would call us weird. I didn’t want my mom to think I was weird, I didn’t want my friends to think that, and I didn’t want to be seduced into thinking I could be weird if I watched him, so I shut it off. We writers love to rewrite our past to suggest that we were so hip that we were bucking the system at eleven-years-old, so we can fortify our artistic bona fides. I wasn’t. I was a normal eleven-year-old who wanted to learn how to be more normal, so other kids would like me, and my primary conduit to absolute normalcy was my mom. So, when Bowie walk out onto the stage, I was floored by his appearance. My mom must’ve sensed how confused I was, so she quickly told me to turn the channel. I asked why, she said, “He’s just so weird,” and I turned the channel.
David Bowie was weird, there’s no point trying to argue, minimize, or qualify it. He even admitted as much, telling TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek to, “Stay Strange.” Thanks to artists like David Bowie, we’re all a little weirder, stranger, and everything outside the mainframe. The typical narrative might depict me in front of that TV, experiencing an epiphany, with a “That’s me, mama,” explosion of excitement that she never could quell. It might just be me, but I needed to establish a solid foundation of normal before I could start exploring the weird, strange and just plain different avenues of my otherwise immature and fragile psyche. So, before we continue, let me send out a shout out to my mom for all the effort she put into giving me the most normal upbringing she could before I could explore the other side with more maturity.
David Bowie feared he was a weird person at a very young age. He believed that he was susceptible to the schizophrenia that haunted his half-brother, Terry Burns. We can only guess that before he embraced the fears of falling prey to that mental disorder that haunted his mother’s side of the family Bowie sought the comfort of normalcy. This duality, as anyone who has worked their way through Bowie’s catalog can attest, would affect his artistic output.
“I’m not so sure how much of it is madness,” Bowie would ruminate to Yentob. “There’s an awful lot of emotional and spiritual mutilation that goes on in my family.”
He was “too weird” for my people. He was even too weird for me when I was too young to fight that two-word condemnation. My mom told me he was “too weird”, and even if I had the moxie to fight everyone else, I couldn’t fight her. I was too young to know how different I was, and even I if did, I wouldn’t acknowledge it, because I didn’t want to be weird. I wanted to have friends, and when my friends told me something was not only weird, but “too weird,” I backed away, into them, and their more comfortable groups.
High brow, low brow, or no brow?
David Bowie shocked in an era that didn’t want to be shocked. Shock value was not commodity in Bowie’s peak years. The New York Dolls were shocking people in New York, Marc Bolan was doing it to England, and Alice Cooper and KISS were putting it to the United States, but shocking people was not yet part of an artist’s marketing package. Those guys tapped into a tongue-in-cheek definition of the weird, but it was all a part of their schtick. There was something unnerving about Bowie’s strain of strange that made it feel a bit more organic. When we saw it, we could tell he wasn’t having a laugh. It was a part of him, the alien part, and perhaps the schizophrenia part.
Watch the shows of David Bowie on YouTube, circa 1972, and try to put yourself in that audience. It’s hard to do now, now that we’re so accustomed to performers playing around in the more customary borders of shock value now, but in 1972 Bowie had people actively avoiding him and his alien nature.
Even after I made it past my mom’s “too weird” block, I still wasn’t attracted to him artistically. I thought he sang songs to make tons of money, become a rock and roll star, and then become a celebrity. All the power to those who do that, but it wasn’t for me.I thought he was the artistic equivalent of a beautiful person who is fun to look at, but doesn’t have much more to them. My attraction to his music is a love story, and to sum up that story, it wasn’t love at first sight. It took him a long time to win me over, but I have been in a relationship with David Bowie’s music for about 30 years now.
I already knew most of his hits by the time I discovered Bowie, so I wasn’t blown away by those songs. The genius of his deep cuts did not blow me away either, in the manner the Beatles’ deep cuts did. I don’t know how anyone else characterizes Bowie’s genius, but it wasn’t immediate for me. His subtle artistic creativity required repeated listens, until I found myself working through his constructs when I wasn’t listening to the music.
I now liken listening to Bowie to sliding a foot into a great pair of socks. I’ve never met anyone who was absolutely blown away by a pair of socks. Slipping into a great shirt, and finding a pair of pants that fit just right can be mind blowing, but I never went nuts over a pair of socks, not when I slipped them on for the first time anyway. There are some socks that fit so well that when we put them on, they just feel like us, and we begin wearing them every day. When I began seriously listening to Bowie on a daily basis, I found philosophical artistry that fit me like a great pair of socks. Art is relative of course, and I’m sure some identify with Elvis Costello in the same ways, but I’ve heard numerous people recognize Costello for who he was in the music world for decades. Up until about the last ten years, very very few listed Bowie in their elite artists’ discussions. It didn’t affect what I thought of him, but I couldn’t understand it. The only answer I could come up with was that he was just “too weird”.
***
I appreciated Bowie’s reincarnation on MTV from afar, as a kid, but the Let’s Dance, China Girl songs seemed more like period pieces in the Madonna/Whitney Houston mold. Pop stars buy great songs from great songwriters, I thought, but a weird, music freak seeking deep, multi-faceted artists doesn’t dive deep into the catalog of pop stars like David Bowie. We wait until the radio stations play their singles. I thought David Bowie was just another good-looking pop star who bought great songs that were probably written by someone else. It was important to me, even back then, that an artist write their own music, because, to my mind, that was the difference between a star and an artist. I thought Bowie was just another 80s pop star who had a 70s catalog that I had no real interest in exploring, until an unusually perceptive friend of mine, named Dan, dropped this line on me.
“This crazy, weird musical path you’re on all points to one man, David Bowie,” Dan said.
“David Bowie?” I asked with disdain. “The Let’s Dance, China Girl guy?” I couldn’t believe Dan, the guy who had a long history of introducing me to deep, powerful music, was now saying I should be listening to an 80s pop artist. I’d been on the other end of his “if you like those guys, you’ll love these guys” suggestion so many times that I always gave his recommendations a shot. Over the years, Dan proved to be one of the few people I’d ever met who knew more about music than I did, but he didn’t know “my music”. He introduced me to Miles Davis, King Crimson, and Frank Zappa in the past, and while I liked and respected those incredible artists, they didn’t reach me on that other, “my music” level.
“I’m telling you,” he added, “Bowie is T. Rex, Hanoi Rocks, and Roxy Music, and that music is Bowie in a way that you won’t understand until you hear this.” He handed me a copy of a Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (AKA Ziggy) compact disc. I’m not going to rewrite this section either and suggest that that compact disc glowed or that there was a sound equivalent to Heaven’s Gate opening when he handed it to me, but that is how I now remember it. “This is David Bowie 101, and when you start loving the alien, I’ll introduce you to other elements of the alternate universe he created.”
I thought Ziggy was a quality album when I first heard it, but I couldn’t get passed the pop artist and “too weird” hang ups I had with Bowie. Those hang ups led me to think the single Ziggy Stardust was so immediate that it might be too immediate. After repeated spins, I started zeroing in on the other songs on the album, and I started dissecting them in the “parts are greater than the whole” mindset. Soul Love was the first song that nabbed me, and I put that song on repeat numerous times. At the end of that week, I forgot to return the disc to my friend. The music on Ziggy Stardust became “mine” in so many ways that I forgot the actual, physical disc was not. When he reminded me that I forgot to return his disc, I did and went out and bought one of my own.
I was already a Ziggy freak by the time Dan suggested I listen toHunky Dory and Diamond Dogs. I was hesitant, thinking Bowie might be a one-album wonder. After a couple weeks, I was hooked on everything Bowie. The “too weird” notions I had of Bowie began to fall away, and I stopped borrowing the discs from my incredibly perceptive friend. I bought them. I did something different with my Bowie-obsession than I did with every other artist to whom I became obsessed. I bought a Bowie album, and I inhaled it. I lived each album, until I knew just about every lyric and every beat of those albums. I thought there was something different to know, feel and experience on each album that I never had before with any other artist. Each album was so different that I could see what everyone was saying when they said he was too weird, but by this time, I recognized that I was a little too weird too, and I began to think David Bowie was singing about me. I listened to each album as an art enthusiast might when examining a painting, slowly ingesting every little nuance until they discovered what it meant to the artist.
When my excitement to buy another album overrode my good sense, I moved onto the next album, only to discover I wasn’t as done with the previous one as I thought I was. Bowie, I realized, was one of the very few musicians who could have one foot planted in the pop world and another in the world of art. My peers told me the man was weird, “too weird”, and I listened. Soon after taking a deep dive, I regretted how much I missed by refusing to listen to him for so long. There are very few artists that affect me so much that I regret not listening to them sooner. I thought of all the years I wasted listening other artists when I could’ve been listening to Hunky Dory, Alladin Sane, and Diamond Dogs. I thought he could’ve changed my world just a little bit sooner back then, and I know that sounds silly, but the effect of his music on me was that profound.
When I finally made it past the obsession, I had with what some now call the Five Years chunk of his catalog (Man Who Sold the World through Diamond Dogs), I graduated to his Berlin Trilogy; Low, Lodger, and Scary Monsters. We listen to music, albums, and artists for a variety of reasons, and I’ve had so many obsessions that I don’t have enough fingers or toes to count them, but there was something different about my obsession with David Bowie. We could label his music in all the pedantic ways, deep, meaningful, and spiritual, but that “not just weird, but too weird” characterization that influenced my refusal to listen to Bowie became the primary reason I listened to him in my adult years.
Whereas most singers sang about love, sex, drugs, and rocking out, Bowie sang about estrangement, an alien nature, and various other themes we deem “too weird”. In places where an artist might go over the top, and be weird for the sake of being weird, Bowie displayed restraint. In places where an artist should shows restraint, Bowie went over the top. He could write a song that that would live on in the history of FM radio (Space Oddity, Changes, and Heroes), and on the same album he would leave a deep cut to cure our longing for great, weird, and offbeat music that only aficionados love (Alternative Candidate, It’s no Game (part 1), and Lady Grinning Soul). Bowie was the consummate artist who found a way to reach me as few artists could. Most music aficionados don’t intend to downplay the effects of hits, but most quality artists have some hits in their catalog. The difference between Bowie and most quality artists is that he spent as much time perfecting his deep cuts as he did his hits. He had a conventional side and an artistic side, as most of us do, but unlike the rest of us, David Bowie managed to cultivate his normal side, coupled with the “emotional and spiritual feelings of estrangement” from his mom’s side, and this duality led him to craft some excellent pop songs and some brilliant, “too weird” deep cuts.
I started listening to David Bowie obsessively about 30 years ago, and I bought his new releases on the date of their release. I enjoy a majority of them, but Bowie captured magic in a bottle during the Five Years albums and the Berlin Trilogy. Hours…, Reality, and Blackstar were my favorite late Bowie albums, but they couldn’t compare to the great eight.
Years before his death, David Bowie experienced something of a rebirth. All of a sudden, and seemingly out of nowhere, I began hearing his peers begin listing him as one of their primary influences. I heard one or two artists do this before, but not to this degree, and I was paying attention. Fans began listing Bowie just a bit outside the greatest artists of his era. They called him revolutionary, a pioneer, and all that stuff we’re accustomed to hearing now, but save for a few artists here and there, I didn’t hear the adoration society crown him in a way he richly deserved for most of my life. I’ve often wondered why, and how, this happened.
If an artist moves into the pulse of the zeitgeist after decades of being on the outer rim, we can usually pinpoint when and where this happened. The artist probably had that one song, movie, or another momentous event that put them over the top. Unless you consider Nirvana’s acoustic cover of The Man who Sold the World that momentous event, it did not happen with Bowie for most of his career. Some of the albums in the “back nine” (or in Bowie’s case the back eight– Outside to Blackstar) of his career were good, but they weren’t so great that they should’ve moved the needle on a retrospective analysis of his career. Before I get to the primary reason I think Bowie moved from just another artist putting out music to a cultural touchstone in the zeitgeist, there were years after 1980’s Scary Monsters and before 1995’s Outside when Bowie got lost in the artistic wilderness. Having said that, I don’t think Bowie moved to us as much as we moved to him in a cultural appreciation of everything he accomplished throughout his glorious career. I think we, as a culture, became more weird, or at least we embraced the weird far more in 2002 (roughly) than we did in 1972. As I wrote, I was already a Bowie fanatic by the time Heathen came out, but others were suddenly calling Heathen his best Bowie disc since Scary Monsters. I liked, and still like Heathen, but I didn’t think it was as good as Hours…. and I didn’t understand how everyone missed what I consider the Great Eight albums from Man who Sold the World and Scary Monsters.
If you’re one who remains on the sideline for whatever reason, I suggest that you cast that cloak aside for as long as it takes to make an individual assessment of his material. My bet is that he reaches you on a level you’ve never considered before. Music, like every other art form, is so relative that his artistry might not appeal to you on the level he did me, but if you’re anything like me, you now know, as my friend Dan predicted it would for me, my definition of “my music” all goes back to Bowie.
Other than providing me an excellent entry point to David Bowie, with Ziggy, Dan was notoriously poor at providing me an entry point to the artists he loved. To introduced me to Frank Zappa, for example, but he loaned me an advanced Zappa album that he loved as someone who had been listening to Zappa for decades. I eventually grew to love that album, but it took me a while. I needed to start at a better entry point to appreciate what Zappa did throughout his career. With that in mind, I thought about an entry point to David Bowie. I would compile the albums Hunky Dory and Ziggy into a playlist, and I would cut the songs Eight Line Poem and It Ain’t Easy (personal preference). Best of Bowie is another great place to start to learn the more normal side, as most people prefer normal pop songs, or hits, as a point of entry, and if you’re not familiar with those songs, it’s an excellent starting point. For those who know those the hits so well that they seek deep cuts, or songs beyond the hits, I’ve compiled a list of those songs that have made it onto so many of my Bowie playlists. Some of them were marginal hits in their era, but I still consider them so deep and meaningful that I had to include them.
1) Alternative Candidate (It’s no longer on Spotify for some reason. It’s on YouTube though.)
2) It’s no Game (Part 1)
3) Lady Grinning Soul
4) Sound and Vision
5) Kooks
6) African Night Flight
7) Soul Love
8) Dodo (This song is also not on Spotify. Here’s the YouTube capture.)
Rilaly 