David Bowie biography

Synopsis

To call Bowie a transitional figure in rock history is less a judgment than a job description. Every niche he ever found was on a cusp, and he was at home nowhere else—certainly not in the unmoneyed London suburb where his childhood was as dingy as his adult life would be glitzy. While this born dabbler's favourite pose was that of a Great Artist beguiled by rock's possibilities as a vehicle, in truth he was more a rocker drawn to artiness because it worked better than any other pose he had tried (not that he was not eclectic—he admired Anthony Newley and Jacques Brel and studied mime with Lindsay Kemp). During the mod era of the 1960s he fronted various bands from whose minuscule shadow he—having renamed himself to avoid confusion with the singer of the Monkees—emerged as a solo singer-songwriter. “Space Oddity,” the science-fiction single that marks the real beginning of his career, reached the Top Ten in Britain in 1969 but did not become an American radio staple until some years later, though Bowie had cannily pegged its original release to the Apollo 11 Moon mission. His first album of note, The Man Who Sold the World (1970), a prescient hybrid of folk, art rock, and heavy metal, did not turn him into a household name either. Not until Hunky Dory (1971) did he hit on the attractively postmodern notion of presenting his chameleonism as an identity rather than the lack of one.

At once frivolous and portentous, this approach was tailor-made for the 1970s, Bowie's signature decade. In the wake of the counterculture's failure to achieve utopia or even a workable modus vivendi, Bowie concocted a series of inspired, nervily grandiose pastiches that insisted on utopia by depicting its alternative as inferno, beginning with the emblematic rock-star martyr fantasy The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). In the process he stayed so hard on the heels of the zeitgeist that the doomsaying of Diamond Dogs (1974) and the disco romanticism of Young Americans (1975) were released less than a year apart. Bowie also became the first rock star to turn a confession of bisexuality into a shrewd career move (and also the first, some years later, to suspect that times had changed enough for recanting to be an even shrewder one). Yet all this took a private toll.

By 1977 Bowie had decamped, ditching his idiosyncratic version of the mainstream for the avant-garde austerities of Low, a collaboration in Berlin with Brian Eno, the most eggheaded of the several musical helpmates that Bowie always knew how to put to good use, including guitarists Mick Ronson and Carlos Alomar and ace nouveau-funk producer Nile Rodgers for “Let's Dance” (1983), when he needed a hit. As music, Low and its sequels, “Heroes” (1977) and Lodger (1979), would prove to be Bowie's most influential