David Bowie has a justly earned rep as a karma chameleon, repackaging himself as Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, the Man Who Fell to Earth, and various other disguises. But his enduring persona, the one that owns him body and soul, is Major Tom, the glam-rock space cadet, too beautiful for physical desires, who floats above the audience in a ghostly satellite. Major Tom's space capsule is where Bowie found a safe synthetic place to explore his gay and bi identities, in his "Space Oddity" and "Ashes to Ashes." Bowie's influence on modern music can be measured by the dozens of songs rewriting the tale of Major Tom, from Peter Schilling's "Major Tom (Coming Home)" to Joy Division's "Disorder," from Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love" to U2's "Bad," from Spacemen 3's "Come Down Easy" to Nirvana's "The Man Who Sold The World." Bowie gave punk its most pernicious beautiful-loser myths as well as some of its most provocative poses. He can't sing worth a damn, of course, but then, neither could C-3PO.
With
Ziggy Stardust, Bowie reinvented himself as a glitter-rocking starchild, composing an eleven-song operetta on the subject of the rock star as isolated aesthete, hopelessly in love with distant objects and, ultimately, distance itself. Nobody has ever really deciphered this sucker-- who the hell are all those spiders, anyway?-- but Bowie came up with catchphrases worthy of Mick Ronson's electric guitars, from "making love with his ego" to "let the children boogie," not to mention the useful idiom "she's a total blam-blam."
1 comments:
In some ways, this album is a lot deeper than that, and in some ways, it's a lot more shallow. I think Bowie is fascinating, and he's my favorite musician. And I think he can sing rather well actually.
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