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crossorigin="anonymous"></script>In this fall time of year, I’m usually pretty big on twee pop — The Lemonheads, Oasis, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Beach House, etc. For whatever reason, today, I just didn’t perceive any auspicious new artistic avenues opening up in my mind in terms of the outputs of any of these bands, so I just kind of sat there doing nothing, thinking about going to the skate park even though I can’t skate and don’t have a board. For some reason that book On Bowie by Rob Sheffield popped into my head, which conveniently came out right after Bowie died, within a sort of popularity boom for said artist. One thing I learned about Bowie from that book is that he got his start in the industry through Marc Bolan, who disdained him, by working as a mime on one of his tours. One thing I know in general about Bowie is that, while most of his pithy British brethren, like T. Rex, were on independent labels, Bowie, ironically, was major, despite what he likes to pass off as a penchant for going against the grain. Another general thing I know about Bowie is that every conversation about him inevitably dissolves into one of fashion and not of music, which should, generally, indicate in what way he ever successfully made the mythological practice of “going against the grain.”
Another thing I know about Bowie is that all this apparent rancor I’m dishing out against him here really isn’t for complete lack of affinity, by and large. In fact, I still remember hearing his deep ’90s cut “I’m Afraid of Americans” and finding it really original and exciting, a song which according to Wikipedia he co-wrote with Brian Eno. That song “Fame” really grew on me and “Modern Love” is straight-up great. And unlike is the case with the Meat Puppets selections on Nirvana’s unplugged album, I actually like Bowie’s original version of “The Man Who Sold the World” — it’s got that cool guiro for percussion and in general kind of aligns with my twee pop craving I typically get around this time of year. And hence was rendered my current quest for new material of Bowie’s I haven’t heard, with Aladdin Sane to me striking as really inconsistent and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars coming across as a bunch of above-average fast food jingles, more or less.
In general, too, just to sustain this little bit**ing tirade toward just bulbous, unwieldy proportions, even in light of all the solid music I’ve just named, I still don’t really know what kind of artist Bowie IS. I mean, it doesn’t all gel to me into anything signature, distinct or common. It’s just a collection random songs that happen to be good and if the total amount of good songs Bowie has is fewer than, say, Neil Young, Lou Reed or John Lennon, this might be part of why. But I mean, what made him go, besides, obviously, wanting to be a rock star and taking an unscrupulous effort toward said endeavor? Neil Young is a guitarist who happens to do vocals, piano and harmonica, too. This much was established with ample authority on Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. Lou Reed was a street poet. John Lennon was a key contributing member of the Beatles, the best band of all time [1]. David Bowie wrote fast-food jingles although, as I allude to earlier, I must admit that they’re undeniably above-average fast food jingles. But from Peter Frampton on the Howard Stern show we get this faggety rant about how Bowie would change his hairstyle and Stern bowing obediently with the stock quip of “He didn’t give a fu**,” despite the fact that in all likelihood, such an event would signify that Bowie in fact DID give a fu** — felt insecure about his appearance and saw fit to change it in order to meet other people’s standards. I mean, you can just see Neil Young over there, with his scraggly, unwashed and forever-unchanging long hair, rolling a joint and audibly scoffing at the idea of such nonsense rhetoric from these fancy-boy city slickers.
The first two songs on that The Man Who Sold the World album from 1970 will generally corroborate what I’ve already been talking about — that Bowie can be a pretty solid songwriter but lacks tactile identity as a musician. The guitar solo in the first track, “The Width of a Circle,” will unfortunately do minimal toward disproving this gripe. Actually, what is integrally made clear to me by this project and its position within time is that Bowie was pretty much trying to capitalize on the present crazy of “glam rock” around then. Just take “All the Madmen” — this could have been such a cool number if he’d just left it soft, acoustic and ethereal, sort of like a pastoral Zeppelin tune like “That’s the Way” or “The Battle of Evermore.” But then, that’s why Zeppelin is Zeppelin and Bowie is Bowie — Page and company had the practicing musicianship to when to leave a song in its primordial skin, hence grafting it as something unique and meaningful, rather than pandering to the currently most popular style sweeping the Billboard charts. Another annoying thing to me about Bowie is what seems to me like this annoying habit he has of utilizing his British accent like a Trevor Noah or that fruitcake who hosted that other show as something that’s like automatically intelligent, dramatic and humorous. This would, of course, explain his annoying habit of never shutting up or seeming to do anything MUSICAL, just for music’s sake. Tune in next week, anyway, when I’ll detail everything that annoys me about when little kitty cats lick themselves and romp around outside the skate park.
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[1] I’m choosing for these proceedings to defend this outlandish, noxious claim with the tidbit that three Beatles songs eventually became television sitcom theme songs, and, for all I know, no other band in history has had more than one, with the next most prominent figure in this enterprise being, of all bands, Citizen Kane.