Who’s the closest we have left to a David Bowie - Lady Gaga? I like Gaga, she has talent and guts and humour. It thus seems faintly unbelievable that there ever could be such a performer as David Bowie. Pop music has become, by and large, what it was before Bowie’s generation arrived: it has defaulted to its ordinary commodified state. I’m sure your mind is probably, as mine is, reeling with Bowie moments you had never snapped together into a complete picture: I think of him popping up on Saturday Night Live with his delirious auto-destructo Tin Machine combo, or walking off with Ricky Gervais’s “Extras” series. (Even the word “transgender” sounds like a Bowie-ism.) He played a minor role in the end of the Cold War. The transgender moment of 2015 is unthinkable without forerunners of stylish androgyny like Bowie. To gay men David Bowie is effectively a saint. Article contentĪnd that’s before reckoning with any of his deeper social and political resonances. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. It had something to do with ’50s abundance and promise following on the heels of austerity and crisis. It had something to do with the weird English progressive schools and art academies that recur in the biographies of the greats, including Bowie. It had something to do with English kids suddenly being fed American popular culture through a fire hose. Person shooting big gun doodle war how to#If we understood how to reproduce such a flowering of ability, someone else would have done it. (Has any single person, in retrospect, done so much to make Germany cool? They need to give Bowie a monument the size of the Hermannsdenkmal.) It can’t just have been the bombs, even if Bowie did use the V-2 as a metaphor on the Heroes LP. Somehow the seeds of war fell on England and sowed giants. This cluster of neighbours took black American folk music and electric instruments and used them to hammer out a musical language whose vocabulary and power eventually rivalled that of the old Western orchestral tradition. When we look at the enduring core of what we still awkwardly refer to as “rock music,” what we find is bizarre: a group of people born between about 19, mostly on one island. The next issue of NP Platformed will soon be in your inbox. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. Manage Print Subscription / Tax ReceiptĪ welcome email is on its way.
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