I gotta tell you something, of all the rockers I knew Bowie would age best for one real simple reason: he wasn’t from this planet.
I was reading a review of a Bowie book last week and some guy was saying how Bowie had no melodic sense, was more cracked actor than musician, and was only happy after “Let’s Dance” zoomed him to thru the stratosphere. Which hits me as twiggin’ the mainman completely wrong.
Here’s the cliff notes:
1) Sure, he could go to sleep at night as a rock and roll star but so what? yes, he wanted stardom, but in an otherwordly, self-dramatizing, three times removed from manner… ps even from the get go, even from “The man Who fell To Earth”.
2) Bowie can’t write melodies? Bowie? That’s the sorta crap you hear from guys who can’t nail the circular melodic chord progression of “Young Americans” in their minds ear, they get unstuck on the bass/drums which sounds like bass/drums, which sounds like Gamble and Huff and not Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman.
3) He’s faking it. And then some. Station To Station, Low, Lodger -Bowie is like the robot in 2001: A Space Oddysey. It’s like if you pretend to love a girl to make another girl jealous and end up falling in love with the first girl. Bowie is like the robot in A.I. -he thinks he’s human. And the mistake makes him more human than human’s are.
4) Bowie sucks live: Sometimes. I saw him on the “Glass Spiders” tour and he was dreadful but then again I saw him with the Bobby Nevin memorialized on this very blog Roseland gig a coupla decades ago and he was great. Both Lady Gaga and Madonna are children of Bowie. And like Bowie sometimes they get overwhelmed by the special effects. Sometimes they don’t.
5) Bowie hasn’t recorded anything worth listening to in over a decade. Yeah, more or less, his cover of Jonathan Richman’s “Pablo Picasso” was knock out. And, if Bowie wanted it to happen, Arcade Fire could do for him what dirty Projectors do for david Byrne. But even Bowie’s stiffs are not entirely crappy. The songs might not be there but the arrangements on Reality were fresh as a daisy and the sound though it didn’t dig in far enough wasn’t a U2 like blur of production.
So David Bowie is the youngest sixty-seven year old on the planet. With Bowie sixty-seven is the new thirty-four. Come back Zig -we miss ya!!!