SUBVERSIVE BOWIE?
by Pete Sturman (written in 1991)
"I wanted a truism about cutting through lies."
-David Bowie on choosing his pseudonymi
"Everything begins to revolve around the cut of
your trousers."
-on being a rock starii
After spending the eight years from 1964 to 1972 moving from record
label to record label, David Bowie is now an international star with
a guaranteed income if he never makes another record.
His RCA back
catalog has recently been reissued on the Rykodisc label and he has
once again generated press coverage with his latest venture, Tin
Machine.
This
uncommercial
band's
sound
frequently
marks
Bowie's
political
attempt
to
lyric
content
return
to
and
making
"underground" music after his 1983 release Let's Dance confirmed his
status as a worldwide pop superstar. The time seems ripe to ask whether
Bowie's career, now accepted as a model of the avant-garde, father
to Johnny Rotten's punk stylings and many offspring in half a dozen
other genres, could ever have been considered subversive or avant-garde,
given his $17 million record deal with EMI in 1983.
On the surface, it appears very easy to pinpoint subversive
moments in his career, from his appearance in a dress on the cover
of The Man Who Sold the World (1971) and his 1972 proclamation "I'm
gay and always have been," which was a top story in British papers
and has prompted photographer Mick Rock to profess that Bowie "was
rock's most important contributor to the Gay Lib Revolution."iii
Or
there is rock critic and Bowiephile Robert Hilburn's diagnosis that
Bowie "shook the rock'n'roll epicenter more than any other single
figure in that period."iv Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray's account,
moreover, contends that the Orwellian Diamond Dogs LP (1974) is quite
politically subversive in its content.v
1977's
Low
LP,
which
chronicled
Finally, we could pinpoint
solipsistic
depression...