Watched a few programmes, collectively “The Genius of Bowie” from the BBC IPlayer on Bowie last night. The first was just obtuse: a 30 minute tribute quickly thrown up with disposable presenters, fans in various conditions of grief and adulation, and no real content overall.
The second had more depth: a doc from 2013 looking at five key years in DB's life Telling footage in this programme such as Bowie posing for a Warhol movie portrait at the Factory. He’d written a song about Warhol of course (which AW hated) and would play the pop artist, presumably with a touch of parody, in Julian Schnabel’s biopic of the doomed graffiti artist Basquiat.
The last was best, a programme on Ziggy Stardust with contributions from august rock stars like Elton John, jaded journos like Charles Shaar Murray, and members of the Great One's entourage. John was good on the arty side of Bowie, and it put me in mind of my encounter with the Man on one of his tours. Rock and roll aggression, Berlin cabaret, mime troup, Japanese kabuki, New York bohemia. I was lucky enough to see some of these shows, and shows of later performers like Kate Bush who had much the same kind of blend of theatre, art and music. All of this 70s kind of pop concert was derivative of Bowie. In fact as one author said, you can track the pop of the 70s and other decades all the way from 72 and the Ziggy Stardust era. I bailed out after "Scary Monsters" in the 80s, just after the Tories won and a new cultural ice age settled over everything. Modern culture has never seemed so cold with art schools dying out, museums turning into commercial emporiums, university art departments under threat. I won’t go on, just say that Bowie’s death makes it seem even chillier. When I heard about his death on Monday, I had his music on continuous play which was a kind of mourning for a time and spirit that is irremediably lost.
What is sometimes forgotten are the years of travail, the pre-history of Ziggy Stardust: Bowie tried everything from Simon and Garfunkel pop folk to Anthony Newlyisms before launching "Space Oddity." And even that and the album “Hunky Dory” wasn't the breakthrough, not until some kind of will to power propelled Bowie to America with the goal of kidding the yanks he was a huge star before he was. All this ending in a pragmatic kind of tribal sacrifice to appease the gods of reinvention and fashion, so Ziggy was killed off on tour. One of the greatest self-cancellations of the 70s, but it turned out to be a gesture of affirmation, defining the self by denying it. Well, he was into Buddhism initially. Listen to the song “Quicksand” on “Hunky Dory.” Doubtless there will be other tributes and even post-mortems of the post-mortems when the cultural surveyors tire of this apotheosis and media after-life. There was an interesting and contentious Guardian article by a C of E minister who is incurring a lot of flak for his apostasy. You’d better believe it: most pop music has a quasi-religious function.
For some reason Bowie’s death got crossed in my mind with the Etruscans who also knew a thing or two about turning death into a work of art. In their late archaic period they start to appear, almost as free-standing sculptures, rearing up on the lids of their cinerary urns. It worked! Lords and ladies of Chiusi and Tarquinia are still there smiling and even gesturing to the beholder from the receptacles that hold their remains, or what’s left of them. Rarely has death been so successful, in artistic terms. Death as the engine of stylistic growth since the art of death drove the culture forward. Look out for a series of posts on Etruscan art on this blog soon.
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