The
biggest problem with David Bowie's music was that his songs sounded nothing
alike album to album. Those of us inclined to classify musicians into
categories with definitions that sharply defined (and limited) a discussion of
an artist's range had a hard time with Bowie, who didn't play their game. Bowie
was his own man, listened, read, and viewed what it was he liked in the broad
spectrum of the arts and literature and, surely, skillfully, often brilliantly,
brought the elements to bear on the music created, which was mesmerizing,
challenging, subtly, artfully layered with a crosscurrents of musical
influence. His genius, above all the other talents he possessed, was as a
synthesizer. Apart from most other rock musicians who took from a variety
of sources but seldom rose above the feeling of being merely clever and, Bowie,
in fact, produced something new. Rock, rhythm and blues, folk, Kurt Weil,
science fiction, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby, Philip Glass, Philly soul,
musical theatre, Blue Note-style jazz, the proto-punk of the Velvet Underground
and the Stooges--these were sources that caught Bowie's ear and which he
brought together in relationships that, in their best expression, gave us a
stirring, unsettling, daunting form of pop music that was of itself, a
stand-alone body of work that influenced artists to come. There seemed to be
nothing he wouldn't try, and the results were not always his most captivating
work. I wasn't a hardcore fan either, and was, in fact, annoyed by what I
regarded as his pretentious manner. He seemed, in some sense, an eclectic
master-of-none. But although not an instrumental virtuoso nor a
composer/lyricist of dazzling harmonic and poetic gifts, he radiated the aura
of the divinely inspired amateur, the savant who could be figured out how
matters worked musically and theatrically. He applied what he knew, bits and
pieces and whole swaths of information about varying aesthetic principles and
the styles that fall within the standards and composed something unique. New
sounds emerged, new ways of applying the eternally persistent rhythm of popular
music took hold. I remember a caffeine-fueled bull session in the Mesa
College Cafeteria in the early to mid-Seventies when I offered to the late
Reader music critic Steve Esmedina, a Bowie partisan, that the future Thin
White Duke hadn't had an original musical idea so far in his career. Blubbo,
his preferred endearment, didn't argue the point, stating smartly that what's
fascinating , exciting , worth talking about in hipster circles and beyond was
his particular genius as a synthesizer of genres and emerging trends and taking
command of the materials like any true artist would, deconstructing, reshaping,
fusing styles and sensibilities together into new kinds of sounds, the
influences intact and vital-- Broadway musicals, hard rock, funk and disco
grooves, experimental electronics, William Burroughs and Bertolt Brecht--while
having Bowie's characteristic imprint on it all. My smart-ass assertion was
false from the start, since what David Bowie was creating fusion music in the
truest sense of what "fusion" is, taking different elements together
and coming up with something new, previously unseen or unheard. I could go for
the obvious Miles Davis comparison that's lurking in the wings of this career
praise, but instead I'll stay with the deservedly much-discussed element of
style and fashion in the late artist's work and say that he was one of those
creatures radiating the personality that could try on any outlandish article of
fashion from any designer's rack and wind up owning the style, making it his;
something of great value was added when he liked a style and wanted to work
with it. The famous quote
attributed to Ritchie Blackmore about accusations that he stole guitar riffs
from black American blues artists that "the amateur borrows, the
professional steals" is instructive. The amateur treats what they've
borrowed with too much gentleness and respect, as though they might drop the
expensive China they've dared lay a finger on. The results are a species of
gutless pretentiousness that glutted an awful lot of art rock in the post -Sgt.
Pepper years, music by those who hadn't an idea what they were doing
nor the imagination (or nerve) to pretends they did. The thief likes
something and just takes it without permission, absorbs into his or her being
until it becomes part of their nervous system , adding their own licks,
reshuffling the influx of music styles heard , assimilated, until there is a
sound where constituent parts of rock drums, jazz keyboards, atonal guitar
skronk, horn funk and Euro serial music emerges, a sound that hadn't roamed
over the airwaves or blasted the clubs and concert halls of until the moment
when the Thief, the absconder of musical forms, decides that he or she is
finished in the creation and releases into the world, fresh, loud, moving as no
music before it. This is what Bowie had done, loving art enough to
abuse the formalisms that defined the length and limitations of a genre and
make them do more than most had assumed possible. We are living in a world of
music that has been formed in large measure by Bowie's decades-long search for
new music he wanted to work with. But living long enough to know better
has its benefits, certainly, in that I found myself liking quite a bit of what
Bowie was putting out. If the whole Spiders
From Mars period seemed and arch, overwrought and lumpy collection of
influences associated by force of will rather than inspiration, inspiration
came soon afterward; the songs became looser, his choice of collaborators was
unexpected and gave us music that was unlike that we'd heard before, his sense
of what styles were emerging was always ahead of the curve. Best of all, he was
one of those who could not just bring unlike elements together; rather he fused
them in the true meaning of the word "fuse", he made something new,
unique, unlike anything else. Bowie was pretentious to a degree, but his, after
all, was a career of making the what he imagined become real through music. He
was an artist, a master of artifice, a man who , though revealing little in the
way of self-revelation or even an arguable view of the world listeners could
construe as a philosophy, Bowie's tales of skewed characters relating the
consequences of their life in a world malformed by each one of the seven deadly
sins had a lasting, lingering effect all the same. He wrote for effect, and the
effect was profound. Even so, his music had many more hits than misses and even
the lesser efforts, the slightest of his concepts, demanded attention and truly
did not bore, the cardinal sin any popular artist can commit. It is
Bowie's greatest work we will be playing for the years to come, the decades yet
to pass; his influence will be felt in much of the pop music yet to be written,
sung, recorded and sung again by young men and women looking for a hero. His
influence, I think, is nearly as extensive as that of Elvis, of the Beatles, of
Dylan. He prepared popular music for the 21st century in more ways than I can
count now. His loss is a major one. RIP.
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