WHAT BOWIE DID

The most glaring problem that David Bowie posed to music reviewers, it seems, were that his albums varied so much in style, approach, influences. The Thin White Duke was a manically and magnificently eclectic as many great artists have and are, quickly moving onto to the next set of projects and the fresh set of ideas and techniques they entail. 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 didn't easily fit into existing catagories that made discussing and judging an artists work a simpler task. Bowie rather took over genres, changed, destroyed them, created entirely new ways of thinking about pop music altogether. He was one of those who didn't  change the game as much as blow it up. Anyone desiring to be taken seriously since his arrival on the big stage , artist and critic, had to rethink 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,brilliantly. He brought the elements to bear on the music created, which was mesmerizing, challenging, subtly, artfully layered with a crosscurrent 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 theater, 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, “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 pretend 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 licks, reshuffling the influx of music styles heard, assimilated, until there is a sound where constituent parts of rock drums, jazzy 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 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 formalism 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 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.

DAVID BOWIE AND LOU REED: TRAFFIC IN THE INTERZONE

 Lou Reed’s Street Hassle or David Bowie’s Station to Station, which album do prefer, love more, pick if you were going to be stranded on a desert island? A question to that effect appeared on one of the odd corners I visit on the internet, looking for intelligent conversation on art and matters of concern that cannot be calculated by conventional metrics of worth. So, an interesting question, even if the choice between two superb albums makes one asks why these two, which are wildly dissimilar in their respective greatness. Compare and contrast? Perhaps Reed’s album New York, his inspired two-sided screed against the insoluble cruelty that inhabits the deeper and darker corners of a great city, compared and contrasted against Bowie’s Tin Machine project, an angular, Cubist kind of hard rock rage highlighting Bowie’s theatrical pronouncements against human creation of a misery index set against and appealing assault of shrapnel percussion and blood splatter guitar work? A more focused conversation, perhaps, but I remained with the question that was posted.

I would choose Street Hassle if one desires street credibility and genuine amounts of poetic brilliance, both of which Reed, despite his well-known habit of overestimating his overall musical genius. His musical punch was from his words wedded with the simple, scraping movement of his chords wedded with his especially acute and minimalistic detailing of lives in the streets, the doorways, the alleys of New York and its vast underbelly of fallen souls. Reed, at his best, had a feel for the characters in these unapologetic environs--sympathetic but not glorifying, poetic but not conventionally “beautiful” by more timid sensibilities--and on Street Hassle his greatest virtues, as such, are in full force.  Reed was a writer before anything else, living in the shadows of a city that punished its geniuses with poverty, drug addiction and the contempt of the public, the authorities, and even the cast of good souls charged with taking care of them. This was fine with Reed and many of his cohorts; he was a man in the city, a maker of an invisible scene where the atonal heart of the experimental arts were in a social sphere so on the outs with whatever the hip community imagined itself as being that even the most vocally revolutionary of the millionaire rock and rollers and painters and filmmakers of the period wished they would simply evaporate and vanish in a dissipating gust of steam. Reed, Herbert Huncke, Burroughs, Henry Miller, in the belly of the beast, writing poetry, drinking, talking, painting at the outskirts of high towers of a city that provided with cold water flats and long, cold shadows to hide within. This is what Reed saw, wrote about, live among.

Bowie wanted some of that, to be all of that, but he was a tourist and didn’t stop being a mere borrower until Station to Station. Bowie coveted that kind of brutalism, evident in his band Tin Machine, which tried to be street, noisy and savant gardish in the shrieking sense of the Velvet Underground but which were undermined by Bowie's autodidactic habits and Anthony Newlyesque vocalisms, reminding you that he was, above all else, an actor. Bowie’s overt theatricality often made me roll my eyes, but he was a man who knew how to turn what can be used against him critically into an asset that elevates his art when his inspiration moves him to do so. He was a far superior synthesizer of many styles and moods and texture, and had a genius for texture and color in the studio. Philip Glass, Brian Eno, funk, disco beats and plenty of chomping, comping guitar made this a revolutionary fusion masterpiece; Bowie, as well, reined in his persona to a dimension that suited him, that of a post WW2 soul,,, weary unto death, a witness to yet another large and irreparable crack in the foundations of a great and honored culture and attending traditions. Bowie was always musically more ambitious than Reed. That's pretty self-evident and not really worth the bother to point out unless your preference is competence over the kind of brutalism Reed specialized in. Reed's lyrics, in my view, have a substantial edge over Bowie, who was plagued by a prevailing sense of who wanted to sound like. The atmospherics and production garnishes of Station to Station did free Bowie from any obligation to sound like he was trying to say anything that could be interpreted as philosophical. His words became more diffuse, full of associative leaps, ellipsis, images that were and remain private mysteries so far as what they reference but which provide a rich and vaguely mystical and definitely European tone to the inspired constructions he released from this point onward. As a lyricist, as a writer, as a storyteller, Reed was the authentic genius here; he was a blend of a mind that made equal use of his library card and his street smarts and provided a skill to be expansive while maintaining a hard, stripped-down veneer. Bowie the tourist became Bowie the innovator with Station to Station and, in his way, achieved parity with Reed as an expressive artist.

I think for all the comparing of the two over the last four decades, I'm inclined to think that the similarities are slighter than one might think and that it is their differences that make them both equally enthralling and perplexing. Bowie was pretty much a trend jumper as much as he was a trendsetter, someone with an ear to the ground and finger in the wind to see where the new breezes were blowing in from. He was eclectic, performance oriented, obsessed with texture, image, and atmosphere. Investigating almost of his regards in the post-Ziggy career shows someone who could synthesize music forms that wouldn't go together in prior decades but who could, courtesy of superb musicians, brilliant production and an exquisitely developed ear for sounds (as well as fascinating imagination for layering all the qualities he made use of). I also find an element of pretense, pretending, a certain showbiz fakery that goes along with his aesthetic; he was an actor above all us, by his own accounting, and the variety of personas and the music he collaborated on to make them effective both as record and concert experience were certainly evocative often, often to the level of genius, but I always regarded him as more evocative than wholly authentic. To that end, I can't take much of his lyric writing seriously--he was a splendid arranger of musical styles but not a particularly interesting or insightful wordsmith. Reed was a writer over everything else, a man in love with songwriting forms, in love with old doo-wop, blues, rhythm and blues, and, though he did wander into explicitly abrasive avant gard noise making, I consider Reed to be a genuine artist, a true poet, a man whose best work was minimalist, Reed, from accounts in articles and books, was typically a prick, an asshole, but there was an amazingly soft, reflective and occasionally sentimental side to him, both facets of which he gave equal expression to. There is a tension to Reed's songs, genuine conflicts 

 One is better positioned when approaching Bowie if they have it in mind not to believe that he was laying out a philosophy beyond that of style and certain aesthetic for the short attention span. He seemed to jump from project to project, musical style to musical style more as a means of proving that yeah, he could do that too, only better, smarter, snappier. Not unlike the way I imagine Quentin Tarantino's working aesthetic as a film writer and director, someone who loves movies but seems obsessed with taking up genres and forcing him to his will. Tarantino's films are overblown, overpraised and have an ongoing monotony to them--there are stylistic moves and devices he goes to each time regardless of plot, period, genre, and excruciating lengths of verbosity that defuse the bright ideas he does have. In contrast, though, Bowie's music will always sound like Bowie, but in each release, he has a sense that he may be repeating himself. He worked hard to avoid the impression that he was a human assembly line, snapping on parts where he can fit them. 

Both  were obsessed with creating art objects, stand-alone items that the results as much of virtuoso endeavor as they were of imagination. Indeed, there is something of an icy sheen around Bowie's music that prevented me from warming up to it even more; perfectionist I might think I am, Bowie was a shade too ruthless in achieving his wonderful constructions. Ironically, that is also a large part of what currently attracts me to his work. Lou Reed was a man of letters, un homme de literature, indeed, that rare thing, an actual poet expressing the ironies, cruelties, celebrations, and catastrophes of urban life, a view of existence mere steps from the curb, from an apartment window overlooking an alley, through the steam smeared window of a coffee shop whose sign has half its letters burned out, with the other words blinking weakly, clinging to what life remains. There was more than enough material in Reed's body of work to say he was unreasonably cruel, putatively blasé or too willing to engage in cootie monger bathos as a means to get from points A to C when his imagination lagged, but then again I remember that he was extraordinarily creative, vital and often times simply amazing in his late work, with discs like The Bells, THE BLUE MASK, and MAGIC AND LOSS, among other worthies, showing an artist dealing with age, loss, political skulduggery, and love above all else. There is much to nitpick with Reed's work, but I think he was the more forthright of the two men we're talking about. Bowie's impatience caused him to “make things happen”, as it were, and fortunate for us, he had a massive talent for such a helter-skelter method. Reed's greatness comes from a more natural evolution. He's learned from his experience, mistakes and all, and deepened as a thinker more than a little.