split your pretty cranium, and fill it full of air
Hmmm. Apparently even spammers take Christmas off. No-one has offered to enlarge my penis in days.
While on the subject of wild androgyny: David Bowie. I promise I'll only do this once and then shut up about it.
The last two months of immersion have inspired me to let loose the analytic dogs on the Bowie phenomenon, since I think a lot of the pleasure I'm finding in discovering this music is basically analytic. The sound is only the tip of the iceberg, and the songs only really have their full significance when you place them in the complex web of development, influence, persona, image, self-consciousness and intertext which motivate them. This is not, in fact, easy music: for an artist who professes to create by the seat of his pants, it's bloody intellectual.
Part of the pleasure is the extent to which (a) the man is a gosh-darned musical omnivore, and (b) he simply never stops. One of the most frequent words thrown around by reviewers is "chameleon", which is a drastic over-simplification: he seems to have a rather endearing ability to enthusiastically fling himself into new sounds, acquiring and adapting them wholesale. (Not that I have any obvious sympathies with total immersion. Hmmm.) Thus, over four decades of musical production he's gone, in some cases basically defining the genre, from folk to rock to glam rock to soul to German electronica with Brian Eno to 80s pop to alt rock to semi-industrial to drum and bass to classic soft rock, and his latest two albums joyously synthesise any of the above, in spades.
This has been, to say the least, educational. I've always avoided soul and electronica with a ten-foot pole, but in the context of Bowie's other works in genres I do enjoy, and with the distinctive spin he gives the sound, I'm at least intrigued enough to listen. And the interesting thing, to me, is the way that the consciousness of the breadth of his achievement works in two directions. I'm at least inspired to listen to Heathen and Reality because of their pedigree and my fondness for Hunky Dory and Ziggy: conversely, those early albums are the richer and more impressive because you know where they went. Ziggy would have been a far less impressive achievement, in a weird sort of way, if aliens had actually abducted Bowie somewhere after Diamond Dogs. Time, appropriately enough, swings both ways.
Even more interesting, this polymorphous musicality is only really half the story. The other half is purely and simply performance, in the Judith Butler sense - identity as stylisation, repetition and performance. Bowie isn't a rock star, he simply performs being a rock star more compellingly than anyone else I can think of, and thus reveals the intrinsic fakery in the category as a whole. His performance always has a layer of irony which prevents you from ever thinking you've seen the man himself: basically, he's a horrible flirt whose trampy persona disguises the fact that, in fact, he never wholly puts out. You have to be suspicious about the stresses and strains of a rock star's life when the early earnestness of some of the Hunky Dory material ends up so submerged and layered in these incredible shells of persona - they feel to me like a slightly masochistic see-saw between compulsive self-revelation and desperately defensive concealment.
Since the academic dogs wouldn't be loose without the word being invoked, I am forced to say that Bowie was postmodern before the word was hip: conscious, ironic, fragmented, concerned with the building up of identity and meaning as pastiche. Hell, he's into mime, which is the essence of stylisation and denial of realism, and his latter-day lyrics are written by cutting them up and randomly reassembling them. If Ziggy and the Thin White Duke do anything, they also permit the cold emotional distance which is the postmodern response to overwhelming cultural overload - and it's precisely that sense of overload which leads to the apocalyptic nature of so many Bowie visions, their saturation with the science-fiction metaphor which is one of the most powerful ways of making sense of technological culture and change.
His sense of culture as on the brink of disaster, decadent, also plugs straight into the gender performance which is also simply one more facet of constructedness and the slippage of meaning, albeit one made in Judith Butler heaven. In the wild maelstrom of male/female and gay/bi, and his glittery exploitation of his ambiguous, androgynous face and figure and his capacity for camp, he plays similar games to the rock personas: you never quite know what's true, where the real man is. (Watching his incredibly coked-up flirtation with Dick Cavett on the talk show made me laugh until I choked: it threw poor Cavett so badly).
The scary thing about all this is that, despite having reconciled myself to the new job by wantonly acquiring Bowie albums, and with the assistance of YouTube, I don't think I've experienced more than half his music. This will clearly be an ongoing project, and one in which all of the above, like Bowie himself, will be subject to change without notice.
I have to say, though, it makes for hellishly motivational gym music. Intellectually chewy tracks to prevent mindless boredom, and the mad rock numbers for cardio workout. Although people do look at me funny, on account of how Bowie is frequently wicked, and makes me spontaneously grin.
While on the subject of wild androgyny: David Bowie. I promise I'll only do this once and then shut up about it.
The last two months of immersion have inspired me to let loose the analytic dogs on the Bowie phenomenon, since I think a lot of the pleasure I'm finding in discovering this music is basically analytic. The sound is only the tip of the iceberg, and the songs only really have their full significance when you place them in the complex web of development, influence, persona, image, self-consciousness and intertext which motivate them. This is not, in fact, easy music: for an artist who professes to create by the seat of his pants, it's bloody intellectual.
Part of the pleasure is the extent to which (a) the man is a gosh-darned musical omnivore, and (b) he simply never stops. One of the most frequent words thrown around by reviewers is "chameleon", which is a drastic over-simplification: he seems to have a rather endearing ability to enthusiastically fling himself into new sounds, acquiring and adapting them wholesale. (Not that I have any obvious sympathies with total immersion. Hmmm.) Thus, over four decades of musical production he's gone, in some cases basically defining the genre, from folk to rock to glam rock to soul to German electronica with Brian Eno to 80s pop to alt rock to semi-industrial to drum and bass to classic soft rock, and his latest two albums joyously synthesise any of the above, in spades.
This has been, to say the least, educational. I've always avoided soul and electronica with a ten-foot pole, but in the context of Bowie's other works in genres I do enjoy, and with the distinctive spin he gives the sound, I'm at least intrigued enough to listen. And the interesting thing, to me, is the way that the consciousness of the breadth of his achievement works in two directions. I'm at least inspired to listen to Heathen and Reality because of their pedigree and my fondness for Hunky Dory and Ziggy: conversely, those early albums are the richer and more impressive because you know where they went. Ziggy would have been a far less impressive achievement, in a weird sort of way, if aliens had actually abducted Bowie somewhere after Diamond Dogs. Time, appropriately enough, swings both ways.
Even more interesting, this polymorphous musicality is only really half the story. The other half is purely and simply performance, in the Judith Butler sense - identity as stylisation, repetition and performance. Bowie isn't a rock star, he simply performs being a rock star more compellingly than anyone else I can think of, and thus reveals the intrinsic fakery in the category as a whole. His performance always has a layer of irony which prevents you from ever thinking you've seen the man himself: basically, he's a horrible flirt whose trampy persona disguises the fact that, in fact, he never wholly puts out. You have to be suspicious about the stresses and strains of a rock star's life when the early earnestness of some of the Hunky Dory material ends up so submerged and layered in these incredible shells of persona - they feel to me like a slightly masochistic see-saw between compulsive self-revelation and desperately defensive concealment.
Since the academic dogs wouldn't be loose without the word being invoked, I am forced to say that Bowie was postmodern before the word was hip: conscious, ironic, fragmented, concerned with the building up of identity and meaning as pastiche. Hell, he's into mime, which is the essence of stylisation and denial of realism, and his latter-day lyrics are written by cutting them up and randomly reassembling them. If Ziggy and the Thin White Duke do anything, they also permit the cold emotional distance which is the postmodern response to overwhelming cultural overload - and it's precisely that sense of overload which leads to the apocalyptic nature of so many Bowie visions, their saturation with the science-fiction metaphor which is one of the most powerful ways of making sense of technological culture and change.
His sense of culture as on the brink of disaster, decadent, also plugs straight into the gender performance which is also simply one more facet of constructedness and the slippage of meaning, albeit one made in Judith Butler heaven. In the wild maelstrom of male/female and gay/bi, and his glittery exploitation of his ambiguous, androgynous face and figure and his capacity for camp, he plays similar games to the rock personas: you never quite know what's true, where the real man is. (Watching his incredibly coked-up flirtation with Dick Cavett on the talk show made me laugh until I choked: it threw poor Cavett so badly).
The scary thing about all this is that, despite having reconciled myself to the new job by wantonly acquiring Bowie albums, and with the assistance of YouTube, I don't think I've experienced more than half his music. This will clearly be an ongoing project, and one in which all of the above, like Bowie himself, will be subject to change without notice.
I have to say, though, it makes for hellishly motivational gym music. Intellectually chewy tracks to prevent mindless boredom, and the mad rock numbers for cardio workout. Although people do look at me funny, on account of how Bowie is frequently wicked, and makes me spontaneously grin.