A lot of people owe a great deal to David Bowie. Pop/rock stars come and go with regularity; it’s the nature of the beast. They generally shine for a time in a flavour-of-the-month/year/decade kind of a way, providing an era-specific product and service to their fans that sits on a line of continuum ranging from light-weight escapism (and there’s nothing wrong with that) right through to being an invaluable conduit to making sense of an ever-changing, confusing and turbulent world.
The latter of course is, or should be, the ultimate aim and function of the exciting and wide world of the arts. David Bowie dwells there. When suitably talented people pick up a microphone, a guitar, a pair of drumsticks, a paintbrush, a camera, a handful of clay, put on a mask, take a pen to a blank page of a manuscript, step on a stage . . . they help spread the message that just maybe humankind’s base survival instinct of picking up a weapon the moment they find something challenging or threatening might one day become a thing of the past. There are other ways to work things out. Leading by example, the best stars teach expansive thinking, tolerance for others, acceptance of change, and the embracing of difference rather than the fearing of it. Like their celestially-derived name suggests, stars metaphorically act like a match struck in societal and cultural darkness or gloom and the world is a better place for their presence and their efforts.
On July 6, 1972, a pale and skinny young London musician with a penchant for interdisciplinarity like no other before or since struck just such a match when he performed his song "Starman" on Britain’s Top of the Pops TV programme and ignited something within a generation (and beyond) of young people the world over. That something was . . . hope. David Jones, whom the world would better come to know as David Bowie (complete with a closet full of performative alter-egos), had flirted with being a mod and also a hippy prior to undergoing his magnificent sparkling makeover and re-emerging into glam rock superstardom.
Three years earlier, in 1969, he’d tasted fleeting success with the single "Space Oddity", only to be subsequently largely dismissed as a novelty act due to the song’s evident ride to the upper echelons of the charts on the back of the space fever engendered by the successful Apollo 11 Moon landing mission. Many people who were in the UK at the time of the "Starman" broadcast – wide-eyed kids sitting in front of their tellys on that game-changing night as their parents tut-tutted and sputtered into their cups of tea – have written or spoken about that electrifying four minutes on Top of the Pops. Such people include Boy George, Marc Almond, Morrissey, Bowie biographer Dylan Jones, and a host of others. For many, "Starman" on Top of the Pops was the 1970s version of the Elvis-on-the-Ed-Sullivan-Show moment of the 1950s, another game changer. During the broadcast when David Bowie put his arm around the neck of (divine) guitarist Mick Ronson he shook the very foundations of prevailing notions of sexuality and gender, totally destroying the seemingly impenetrable edifice of cock-rock in the process. And when, with mocking uber-confidence, he broke the fourth wall of theatre by staring down the throat of the camera and pointing directly into lounges and living rooms to the north, south, east and west of the UK while singing the line “I had to phone someone so I picked on YOU”, his highly personalised message went far beyond the physical limitations of the BBC broadcast zone.
While those outside the UK might have been denied that penny-drop moment of personal contact, the Bowie message nevertheless spread with ripple-like effect throughout the world. Melting estrangement, alienation, bullying, and marginalisation like a hot knife through butter, a new generation of pop/rock fans suddenly had their hero. They, and he, were very, very, different to what had gone before. Suddenly ‘difference’ was sexy and appealing; to stand out became a thing to be valued and not shunned or hidden. Those who’d traditionally dwelt on the outside, their noses pressed against the glass as they looked in upon the lucky, now found themselves on the inside, accepted unconditionally within a community of the like-minded. With table-turning magnificence, the outcasts were now the cool kids. That one action during "Starman" when Bowie pointed, smiled, and made eye contact with his fans (effectively touching them), has analogously come to stand as the moment in time that Ziggy Stardust (and thus Bowie) touched down from the heavens and re-wrote rock’n’roll. And it also showed what rock’n’roll could achieve beyond the music itself in terms of societal change. Albeit just one of innumerable iconic ‘Bowie moments’ that one could pick out through the five decades plus of his remarkable career, today in numerous writings and reminiscences about the artist it remains a justifiably immortalised touchstone. In the unlikely event that you haven’t seen that footage, I urge you to check it out (above).
Radical change is usually actively avoided within popular music because of the risk factor; it can often be tantamount to the kiss of death. A deep-seated fear of alienating fans and thereby losing the generous spoils of their wallets means that an average artist who tastes success will cook with the same recipe again and again and again with only subtle deviations, if at all, in an attempt to keep her/his stocks high for as long as possible. Having hit the heights that Bowie did with Ziggy Stardust, many artists would have stuck precisely to that winning formula, churning out Ziggy parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and onwards over the decades to come, caking the makeup on thicker and thicker until the release of the inevitable, flabby, middle-aged jazz or Broadway covers album signaled complete irrelevancy had been achieved. But with David Bowie, change was the whole point! Don’t settle. Don’t stop pushing the boundaries. Reinvent. Reinvent. Reinvent. Fear of alienating fans? Sheesh – what if your fans are your fans precisely because of their sense of alienation in the first place! Witness Blackstar. Bowie never stopped pushing/shredding the envelope right until the end. He went looking for change, not living in fear of it. How we love him for this career-long, life-long, quality. What a blueprint for living a GREAT life.
Read more: Ziggy Stardust - Life In Pictures
Personally, I owe David Bowie a hell of a lot. I stumbled upon him back in 1973 when I was aged thirteen and in the throes of a personal nadir, a horrid and sudden antithesis to my previously happy and charmed young life; a perfect storm of heavy and unpleasant circumstances drawing me into an “all-time low”. Simultaneously, twelve thousand miles away David Bowie was hitting the heights of glam rock superstardom as that glittering alien androgyne Ziggy Stardust, the fictitious guitar-toting super-hero whom he’d launched a year earlier in 1972. For me it was love at first sight. A case of “Wham, bam thank you, ma’am.” Even though the notion of Ziggy coming to Earth to save us – from the imminent apocalypse outlined in "Five Years", the album’s opener – was pure science fiction, actually he did save many of us. Just as the Apollo 11 man-on-the-moon mission in 1969 had transformed science-fiction into science-fact, now an artist had appeared that would change the very essence of the biggest and most important phenomenon of youth culture of the twentieth century: rock’n’roll. The notion that rock’n’roll could/would be a game-changing transformative tour de force in the world had been heavily promised throughout the psychedelic counter-cultural dream that was the 1960s. And sure enough, rock seemingly hit the peak of its promised potential amid the peace, love, and mud of Woodstock in August 1969. A matter of mere months later, however, in December of that same year, everything was dashed to pieces at the bloodbath that was the free concert held at Altamont Speedway featuring the Rolling Stones. Gimme Shelter, indeed. By the time The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was released two years into the new decade, the countercultural dream was well and truly over. Flagbearers Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix were all dead, and the mighty all-conquering Beatles has broken up amid acrimony, flinging the last of that hippy mud at each other in an embarrassing mire of “he said/she said” unseemliness.
Enter David Bowie: a shining “satin and tat” example of self-empowerment and personal reinvention tailored to perfection for a new era and a new rock audience comprising the younger brothers and sisters of the sixties generation. Bowie pulled back the curtain and struck a pose, Mick Ronson hit the iconic fanfare-like opening riff of "Suffragette City" and BAM! My life was changed. There I’d been, deep in the depths of my just-turned-teen personal cess-pit, and then along came this mascara’d message of artistic personal transformation such as the world had never seen before. Turns out you didn’t have to merely, meekly, settle for what life had handed you after all. The David Bowie motivational model taught self-empowerment and demanded that you be pro-active and not reactive. You could turn yourself into your own idealised image and, just as the faux star Ziggy Stardust had made him a real star in the real world, here was absolute proof that life could indeed follow art instead of vice versa. Dream it and you can be it. Act it and you can become it. This message was a profound and life-changing one. There’s just no other way to put it.
I know with absolute certainty that I am not alone in considering David Bowie to be a life-changer because many people have told me their own personal David Bowie stories and their sentiments have so often mirrored my own. “He gave me a license to play” say some. “He made me feel accepted”, say others. “He gave me the courage to embrace my difference and not hide it”, say yet more acolytes. I fully concur with these commonly heard views. Ok, it’s also true that there are many people who haven’t delved that deeply into the David Bowie raison detre and regard him as just another run-of-the-mill popular music artist to be enjoyed amid the general “classic hits” melee. And sure, it’s ok to like him in that way if that’s your bag. (His music was fricken’ awesome, after all.) But, to hijack an infamous quote from his good friend John Lennon, for many of us, David Bowie was “Bigger than Jesus”. For a legion of us fans, the “Leper Messiah” from South London wasn’t just a rock star. He was a motivational whizz-kid with a sorely needed message that he delivered in emphatic fa fa fashion and made our lives much the better for it.
David Bowie’s influence went far beyond his glorious Ziggy Stardust incarnation, of course. If he had retired in 1974 after Diamond Dogs (his final glam album) and never become the Plastic Soul Man of Young Americans, the Thin White Duke of Station to Station, and everything else that came afterwards as he played will-nilly with the entire stylistic dress-up box of popular music, changing the rules and making numerous styles his own as he went, he would still have made a respectable enough and highly unique mark on popular music. Being an actor pretending to be a star and thereby changing the rules of the game would have been enough of a legacy to leave the world. But, as I said earlier, he never, ever stopped. Never. We can, and should, learn from that.
So yes, I owe David Bowie a hell of a lot. How about you?
Dr. Ian Chapman is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Convener of the Performing Arts degree programme at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. A life-long popular music fan he has written eight books to date, including two on David Bowie, Experiencing David Bowie: A Listener’s Companion (2015), and the forthcoming David Bowie FAQ (publication early 2019). Having also written both his Masters and PhD theses on the artist, he has given papers and talks at many events and conferences around the world. A popular free-lance motivational speaker, Ian’s specialty is the transformative power of the performing arts, drawing upon techniques (as espoused by artists such as David Bowie) that can be used in everyday life to develop self-empowerment and self-confidence. https://www.ianchapman.co.nz
Read more: Take The David Bowie Quiz
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