Bowie David - Experiencing David Bowie : a listeners companion

Titles in The Listeners Companion provide readers with a deeper understanding of key musical genres and the work of major artists and composers. Aimed at nonspecialists, each volume explains in clear and accessible language how to listen to works from particular artists, composers, and genres. Looking at both the context in which the music first appeared and has since been heard, authors explore with readers the environments in which key musical works were written and performed.

Experiencing David Bowie: A Listeners Companion, by Ian Chapman

Experiencing Jazz: A Listeners Companion, by Michael Stephans

Experiencing Led Zeppelin: A Listeners Companion, by Gregg Akkerman

Experiencing Leonard Bernstein: A Listeners Companion, by Kenneth LaFave

Experiencing Mozart: A Listeners Companion, by David Schroeder

Experiencing Rush: A Listeners Companion, by Durrell Bowman

Experiencing Stravinsky: A Listeners Companion, by Robin Maconie

Experiencing Tchaikovsky: A Listeners Companion, by David Schroeder

Experiencing Verdi: A Listener's Companion, by Donald Sanders

A Listeners Companion

Ian Chapman

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chapman, Ian, 1960

Experiencing David Bowie : a listener's companion / Ian Chapman.

pages cm. (Listeners companion)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-3751-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-3752-0 (ebook)

1. Bowie, DavidCriticism and interpretation. 2. Rock musicHistory and criticism. I. Title.

ML420.B754C53 2015

782.42166092dc23

2015010350

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Ben, Mia, and Arlo

The goal of the Listeners Companion series is to give readers a deeper understanding of pivotal musical genres and the creative work of their iconic practitioners. Contributors meet this objective in a manner that does not require extensive music training or any sort of elitist shoulder-rubbing. Authors of the series are asked to situate readers in the listening environments in which the music under consideration has been or still can be heard. Within these environments, authors examine the historical context in which this music appeared, exploring compositional character and societal elements of the work. Positioned in real or imagined environments of the musics creation, performance, and reception, readers can experience a deeper enjoyment and appreciation of the work. Authors, often drawing on their own expertise as performers and scholars, are like tour guides, walking readers through major musical genres and the achievements of artists within those genres, replaying the music for them, if you will, as a lived listening experience.

I still recall a day in the 1970s when my tween-aged self swiped an older brothers copy of Circus magazine long enough to ogle at the striking image on the cover. I had never seen anything like the penetrating stare and spiked orange-rust hair of pop star David Bowie. He looked out from the coversickly, gaunt, brutally sincere, unapologetically rakish, and deliciously attractive to my twelve-year-old sensibilities. He was a beautifully young non-American and I, without any sullied adult ideas blocking the doorway, knew immediately that to look and act just like him was the epitome of cool. I even went so far as to take the picture with me on my next trip to the barber and ask: Can you make my hair look like that? The reply: What do you think you are, kid, Japanese? Racial insensitivities aside, the barbers comment aligned with a common issue among the music journalists, fans, and record companies in those daysjust how do you categorize the Bowie package? He embraced, some might even say defined the essence then of what it meant to be a rock star. And yet his music would eschew many of the most recognized elements of rock. He dangled his thoughtfully marketed persona for all the world to see but the general public knew little about him offstage. And throughout his career, he would cross and blur the lines between acting, producing, songwriting, recording, and performing. He bedded the various aesthetics like so many enamored and willing concubines. David Bowie was and remains a singular entity in the history of rock music, one of the few to successfully avoid any sort of ossified categorization while simultaneously topping the charts of those same categories. In the movie version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, its angry protagonist describes the importance of Bowie among his contemporaries:

Late at night I would listen to the voices of the American masters: Tony Tennille, Debby Boone, and Anne Murraywho was actually Canadian working in the American idiom. And then there were the crypto-homo-rockers: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and David Bowiewho was actually an idiom working in America and Canada.

The description, couched in satire, is wickedly precise in referring to Bowie as his own idiom. Categories of art bend and distort in order to accommodate Bowies workand not the other way around, as is so often the case with pop-star success stories. Conveying Bowies unique standing in the development of popular music requires the deft hand of a writer keenly skilled at bringing together the full story of the artists work and delivering it to the reader within its proper contemporaneous context. As a fan of Bowies music for over forty years, I can say that Ian Chapman nails it. A full-time professor of music at New Zealands University of Otago, Chapman has delved into the iconography, history, and social implications of popular music at great length, resulting in excellent writing on Bowie, Kiss, Bow Wow Wow, and various Kiwi-related topics. I had the pleasure of serving as first reader of his drafts and anxiously devoured each new submission. I never did get Bowies hair, but the music is still with us, and Chapman has now made it all the more approachable for all of us.

Gregg Akkerman

As a lifelong fan my primary acknowledgment most gratefully goes to David Bowie. Over the course of decades youve had me alternately inspired, bewildered, delighted, intrigued, disappointed (once or twice), gob-smacked, alarmed, amazed... but never, ever, uninterested. You have provided a soundtrack to the lives of millions of people, resplendent with twists, turns, and thought-demanding crunchy bits. Im thrilled to be among their number.