On Bowie Read online

  ON BOWIE

  SIMON CRITCHLEY

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

  Serpents Tail

  3 Holford Yard, Bevin Way

  London WC1X 9HD

  www.profilebooks.com

  Text copyright © 2014, 2016 Simon Critchley

  Illustrations © 2014, 2016 Eric Hanson

  An earlier version of this book was published as Critchley: Bowie by OR Books, New York, 2014

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset in New Caledonia and Alternate Gothic to a design by Courtney Andujar/Bathcat Ltd.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the

  British Library.

  208pp

  e-ISBN 978-1782833062

  CONTENTS

  MY FIRST SEXUAL EXPERIENCE

  EPISODIC BLIPS

  THE ART’S FILTHY LESSON

  WONDERFUL

  I AM A HEIDEGGERIAN BORE

  UTOPIAN SOMETHING

  A SEER IS A LIAR

  HOLD ON TO NOTHING

  HAMLET IN SPACE

  DYSTOPIA – GET IT HERE, THING

  LES TRICOTEUSES

  THE MAJESTY OF THE ABSURD

  ILLUSION TO ILLUSION

  DISCIPLINE

  DISAPPEARANCE

  YEARNING

  YOU SAY YOU’LL LEAVE ME

  GIVING UP ON REALITY

  PLAYING ON GOD’S GRAVE

  NOTHING TO FEAR

  SUN, RAIN, FIRE, ME, YOU

  SAYING NO BUT MEANING YES

  WHERE THE FUCK DID MONDAY GO?

  LAZARUS, NEWTON, GRACCHUS

  SHEILA, TAKE A BOW

  LET ME BEGIN WITH A RATHER EMBARRASSING confession: no person has given me greater pleasure throughout my life than David Bowie. Of course, maybe this says a lot about the quality of my life. Don’t get me wrong. There have been nice moments, some even involving other people. But in terms of constant, sustained joy over the decades, nothing comes close to the pleasure Bowie has given me.

  It all began, as it did for many other ordinary English boys and girls, with Bowie’s performance of “Starman” on BBC’s iconic Top of the Pops on July 6 1972, which was viewed by more than a quarter of the British population. My jaw dropped as I watched this orange-haired creature in a catsuit limp-wristedly put his arm around Mick Ronson’s shoulder. It wasn’t so much the quality of the song that struck me; it was the shock of Bowie’s look. It was overwhelming. He seemed so sexual, so knowing, so sly and so strange. At once cocky and vulnerable. His face seemed full of sly understanding – a door to a world of unknown pleasures.

  Some days later, my mother Sheila bought a copy of “Starman”, just because she liked the song and Bowie’s hair (she’d been a hairdresser in Liverpool before coming south and used to insist dogmatically that Bowie was wearing a wig from the late 1980s onward). I remember the slightly menacing black and white portrait photo of Bowie on the cover, shot from below, and the orange RCA Victor label on the seven-inch single.

  For some reason, when I was alone with our tiny mono record player in what we called the dining room (though we didn’t eat there – why would we? – there was no TV), I immediately flipped the single over to listen to the B side. I remember very clearly the physical reaction I felt listening to “Suffragette City”. The sheer bodily excitement of that noise was almost too much to bear. I guess it sounded like… sex. Not that I knew what sex was. I was a virgin. I’d never even kissed anyone and had never wanted to. As Mick Ronson’s guitar collided with my internal organs, I felt something strong and strange in my body that I’d never experienced before. Where was suffragette city? How did I get there?

  I was twelve years old. My life had begun.

  THERE IS A VIEW THAT SOME PEOPLE CALL “narrative identity”. This is the idea that one’s life is a kind of story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Usually there is some early, defining, traumatic experience and a crisis or crises in the middle (sex, drugs, any form of addiction will serve) from which one miraculously recovers. Such life stories usually culminate in redemption before ending with peace on earth and goodwill to all men. The unity of one’s life consists in the coherence of the story one can tell about oneself. People do this all the time. It’s the lie that stands behind the idea of the memoir. Such is the raison d’être of a big chunk of what remains of the publishing industry, which is fed by the ghastly gutter world of creative writing courses. Against this, and with Simone Weil, I believe in decreative writing that moves through spirals of ever-ascending negations before reaching… nothing.

  I also think that identity is a very fragile affair. It is at best a sequence of episodic blips rather than some grand narrative unity. As David Hume established long ago, our inner life is made up of disconnected bundles of perceptions that lie around like so much dirty laundry in the rooms of our memory. This is perhaps the reason why Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique, where text is seemingly randomly spliced with scissors – and which Bowie famously borrowed from William Burroughs – gets so much closer to reality than any version of naturalism.

  The episodes that give my life some structure are surprisingly often provided by David Bowie’s words and music. He ties my life together like no one else I know. Sure, there are other memories and other stories that one might tell, and in my case this is complicated by the amnesia that followed a serious industrial accident when I was eighteen years old. I forgot a lot after my hand got stuck in a machine. But Bowie has been my soundtrack. My constant, clandestine companion. In good times and bad. Mine and his.

  What’s striking is that I don’t think I am alone in this view. There is a world of people for whom Bowie was the being who permitted a powerful emotional connection and freed them to become some other kind of self, something freer, more queer, more honest, more open, more exciting. Looking back, Bowie was a kind of touchstone for that past, its glories and its glorious failures, but also for some kind of constancy in the present and for the possibility of a future, even the demand for a better future. Bowie was not some rock star or a series of flat media clichés about bisexuality and bars in Berlin. He was someone who made life a little less ordinary for an awfully long time.

  AFTER ANDY WARHOL HAD BEEN SHOT BY Valerie Solanas in 1968, he said, “Before I was shot, I suspected that instead of living I’m just watching TV. Since being shot, I’m certain of it.” Bowie’s acute ten-word commentary on Warhol’s statement, in the eponymous song from Hunky Dory in 1971, is deadly accurate: “Andy Warhol, silver screen / Can’t tell them apart at all.” The ironic self-awareness of the artist and their audience can only be that of their inauthenticity, repeated at increasingly conscious levels. Bowie repeatedly mobilises this Warholian aesthetic.

  The inability to distinguish Andy Warhol from the silver screen morphs into Bowie’s continual sense of himself being stuck inside his own movie. Such is the conceit of “Life on Mars?”, which begins with the “girl with the mousy hair”, who is “hooked to the silver screen”. But in the final verse, the movie’s screenwriter is revealed as Bowie himself or his persona, although we can’t tell them apart at all:

  But the film is a saddening bore

  ’Cause I wrote it ten times or more

  It’s about to be writ again.

  The conflation of life with a movie conspires with the trope of repetition to evoke a mel
ancholic sense of being both bored and trapped. One becomes an actor in one’s own movie. This is my sense of Bowie’s much-misunderstood lines in “Quicksand”:

  I’m living in a silent film

  Portraying Himmler’s sacred realm

  Of dream reality.

  Bowie displays an acute awareness of Himmler’s understanding of National Socialism as political artifice, as an artistic and especially architectural construction, as well as a cinematic spectacle. Hitler, in the words of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, was ein Film aus Deutschland, a film from Germany. As Bowie put it, Hitler was the first pop star. But being stuck inside a movie evokes not elation but depression and a Major Tom-like inaction:

  I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought

  And I ain’t got the power anymore.

  In “Five Years”, after having received the news that the Earth will soon die, Bowie sings, “And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor.” Similarly, in one of my all-time favorite Bowie songs, “The Secret Life of Arabia” (outrageously and ferociously covered by the late, great Billy Mackenzie with the British Electric Foundation), Bowie sings,

  You must see the movie

  The sand in my eyes

  I walk through a desert song

  When the heroine dies.

  The world is a film set, and the movie that’s being shot might well be called Melancholia. One of Bowie’s best and bleakest songs, “Candidate,” begins with a statement of explicit pretence, “We’ll pretend we’re walking home”, and is followed by the line, “My set is amazing, it even smells like a street.”

  Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in which we live and confront us with the reality of illusion. Bowie’s world is like a dystopian version of The Truman Show, the sick place of the world that is forcefully expressed in the ruined, violent cityscapes of “Aladdin Sane” and “Diamond Dogs” and, more subtly, in the desolate soundscapes of “Warszawa” and “Neuköln”. To borrow Iggy Pop’s idiom from Lust for Life (itself borrowed from Antonioni’s 1975 movie, although Bowie might well be its implicit referent), Bowie is the passenger who rides through the city’s ripped backside, under a bright and hollow sky.

  WHAT WAS THE SOURCE OF BOWIE’S POWER TO connect with ordinary boys and girls, maybe particularly the slightly alienated ones, the ones who felt bored and deeply awkward in their skin? The obvious answer is given in “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”, the final track on Ziggy Stardust and the song that Bowie used to close many of his shows. This is the song’s climax:

  Oh no love! You’re not alone

  No matter what or who you’ve been

  No matter when or where you’ve seen

  All the knives seem to lacerate your brain

  I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain

  You’re not alone

  Just turn on with me and you’re not alone

  Let’s turn on with me and you’re not alone

  (wonderful)

  Bowie-as-Ziggy refused the dominant norms of existing society society: boy/girl, human/alien, gay/straight. He was the outsider, the alien, the visitor (the latter was the name that the humanoid alien Thomas Jerome Newton gave to his album – a message in a bottle back home – when Bowie played him in The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1976). Here was Ziggy in his suicide song reaching out to us in our dumb, tangled-up, self-lacerating suburban confusion and saying that we were wonderful. Millions of self-conscious mini-Hamlets living out their loveless hells in scattered, sundry hamlets, towns and cities heard those words and were astonished at being forgiven. We just needed to reach out our hands. We did. We bought the album.

  IF BOWIE’S ART IS INAUTHENTIC, IF IT IS F FOR Fake, as Orson Welles might have put it, then is it also F for Falsehood? I remember reading an interview many years ago with Robert Fripp where he talked about watching Bowie in the studio in the late 1970s. Bowie was listening to a track or a tape loop and was very carefully, repeatedly, quite deliberately, and for the longest time, trying to generate the right emotion in his voice. What could be more contrived and fake than that? Shouldn’t true music come straight out of the heart, up through the vocal cords, and into our waiting, shell-like ears? Yet, as others have observed, Bowie’s genius lies in the meticulous matching of mood with music through the medium of the voice.

  If I were even more of a Heideggerian bore than I am, we could talk about the link between voice (die Stimme) and mood (die Stimmung) as that basic activity through which a world is disclosed to us, and disclosed, moreover, emotionally rather than rationally. Bowie’s genius, then, is one of interpretation in the sense of Auslegung, or laying (legen) something out (aus), making it accord with us or resound for us sonorously in a way that can hit us hard or soft.

  But we need to add an important caveat to this line of thought. Music like Bowie’s is not a way of somehow recalling human beings affectively to a kind of pre-established harmony with the world. That would be banal and mundane, literally. Rather, Bowie permits a kind of deworlding of the world, an experience of mood, emotion or Stimmung that shows that all in the world stimmt nicht – i.e. is not in agreement or accord with the self. In this sense, music is a discord with the world that can allow a certain demundanisation, a withdrawal that might permit us to see things in a utopian light.

  Anyone who has listened to Bowie over the years is completely familiar with the almost vaudeville or pantomime quality of his cast of stock characters. Each character has its distinctive voice: from the cheeky, mockney-cockney Tony Newley or even the bloody laughing gnome to the cherubic, mascara-daubed Anglo-surrealism of Syd Barrett to the dark, gravy-rich basso profundo of Scott Walker to a higher-pitched Iggy Pop (I am not the biggest fan of some of Bowie’s Iggy imitations) to the breathy white soul-boy and on to the quasi-operatic or even hymnal, as on “Word on a Wing”. Variations on these characters, and others, appear on album after album. We are not stupid. We know that they are all fakes.

  So, how, in all this fakery, does something true emerge? One might reply that it just does, and you just feel it (or you don’t – after all, there’s no accounting for taste, particularly bad taste), citing that famous line from “Changes”:

  So I turned myself to face me

  But I’ve never caught a glimpse

  Of how the others must see the faker

  I’m much too fast to take that test.

  To turn yourself to face yourself is not to confront your authentic subjectivity. It is to see nothing, not even a glimpse. Warhol is the silver screen. Hang it on your wall. Nothing is hidden behind. Others may see this as fakery, but Bowie is too fast, as he arrogantly but rather accurately reports. He has already moved on to some new form.

  Bowie’s truth is inauthentic, completely self-conscious and utterly constructed. But it is still right, es stimmt as one can say in German, or it has the quality of feeling right, of being stimmig. We hear it and say “yes.” Silently, or sometimes out loud. The sound of Bowie’s voice creates a resonance within us. It finds a corporeal echo. But resonance invites dissonance. A resonating body in one location – like glasses on a table – begins to make another body shake and suddenly the whole floor is covered with broken glass. Music resounds and calls us to dissent from the world, to experience a dissensus communis, a sociability at odds with common sense. Through the fakery and because of it, we feel a truth that leads us beyond ourselves, toward the imagination of some other way of being.

  Bowie’s genius allows us to break the superficial link that seems to connect authenticity to truth. There is a truth to Bowie’s art, a moodful truth, a heard truth, a felt truth, an embodied truth. Something heard with and within the body. The tone of the singing voice and music is felt in the tonus or musculature of the body. Musical tension is muscular, rising or falling, in progressive wavebeats of pleasure.

  BOWIE INCARNATED A UTOPIAN SOMETHING: some other way of existing in the suburban
shitholes of Bromley, Beckenham, Billericay, Basingstoke, Braintree or Biggleswade. It wasn’t some reflection of life on the street. Why would we have been interested in that? Life was routine, grey, cramped and dull. Our parents were deeply morally confused by the 1960s, having affairs, getting divorced, and wearing flared trousers. We were just bored. BORED. Let the upper-middle classes celebrate street life after their winter skiing trips with their parents or taking the Volvo on a tour of the Dordogne. Bowie represented something else, especially for intelligently disaffected ordinary boys and girls. It was something impossibly glamorous and strange. It rejected the street.

  As Jon Savage rightly puts it, Bowie was not about any sort of realism. His success connected with a latent, low-budget science-fiction exuberance (more Michael Moorcock than Isaac Asimov; more Quatermass and the Pit than Star Trek) that was a template for the ruined landscapes through which the spaceboys and girls of glam, punk and post-punk would run wearing outrageous, often homemade and slightly crappy outfits. It was what Nicholas Pegg calls, in a choice phrase, a “Home Counties apocalypse”, complete with milk floats and the mental hospitals that encircled London at the time.

  As others have pointed out, Bowie spoke to the weirdos and the freaks. But it turned out that there were a lot of us. It left you wondering: who exactly were the insiders? Much, much later, Bowie found a new word to name them: heathen. We simply didn’t want to be heathen.

  CONSIDER BOWIE’S LYRICS. IT SEEMS THAT – right from the beginning – we could not help but read them autobiographically, as clues and signs that would lead us to some authentic sense of the “real” Bowie, his past, his traumas, his loves, his political views. We longed to see his songs as windows on to his life. But this is precisely what we have to give up if we want to try and misunderstand Bowie a little less. As we know all too well, he occupied a variety of identities. His brilliance was to become someone else for the length of a song, sometimes for a whole album or even a tour. Bowie was a ventriloquist.