David Bowie (born David Jones, but adopted the Bowie stage name due to Davy Jones of the Monkeys already using that name) died of cancer this past week.
I know very little about Bowie. I wasn't a fan of his music, but I was as distant casual observer of his transformation from Ziggy Star Dust in to the Thin White Duke. That is, from somebody who affected a weird alien stage personal to somebody who affected, and perhaps genuinely adopted, a personal reflecting the English upper middle class of the 1930s.
And that, and the public outpouring of sympathy over his death, is what makes his death relevant to the historical topic of this page. In Bowie we see a highly successful example of a modern pop music career, which is in no small part why I'm caught off guard by the massive public reaction to his death. That he had a stage persona epitomizes modern pop music to me, which is to say that, in its early stages, it was . . . fake.
Now, don't take me wrong. I'm not condemning Bowie And I'm not even saying that he lacked musical talent, which would not be true, or that his music was bad, which also wouldn't be true even if I don't care for it. Indeed, I admire the fact that he transformed out of the fake personal into a seemingly real one, when the nutty Ziggy Star Dust one no longer served, or perhaps even in advance of that. He got away with appearing in regular street clothes after awhile. But what we see here has become a type of pop norm. In order to get popular musicians adopt shocking persona's and sport them everywhere. Female singer often go for the absolutely trashiest ones they can affect, to the point now where they are so personally exposed, figuratively and literally, its questionable if they can go back or forward once their youth wears off. That tends to be the attempted time line, however. Shocking personal, that grows more shocking, then softens, then morphs into something trying to recall dignity, as the artist popular in part (at least) for appearance yields to time and nature and tries to base a career on music alone. Not all succeed.
But that this is what is done is very telling.
This wasn't always the case. Musicians have been around forever, and they've always been on the dicier edge of culture to some extent. And they often dressed flashier than others. But the adoption of a completely fake persona is something that has only really been around since the 1970s, although the roots of it were appearing by the 1960s.
It's important to keep in mind in this discussion that I'm not claiming that musicians and singers were the models of civic virtue up until the 1970s, or 60s, or 50s. That would be absurd. On the contrary, most of the vices we associate with the preforming life today were around at least as far back as the 1920s. In the 1920s, when Jazz was edgy, and blues fueled it ,there were plenty of songs written reflecting that. And a study of the lives and wrecked lives of musicians would amply illustrate that. Chances are pretty high that there were as many performers who had messed up wrecked lives then as now, including some whose music I really admire.
But what is different is that there wasn't an attempt to adopt fake persona's as part of the art, until the 1970s. Or, if a fake personal was adopted, it was adopted to hide a vice, rather than declare it as a virtue.
All through the 1920s through the 1940s we rarely see performers, particularly female performers, adopting a stage presentation that departed hugely from the urban dress of the day. There are some exceptions, including at least one huge one I can think of, but the exceptions tended to be fairly mild, and constitute an exaggeration of high class dress of the day, or in the one exception I can think of it reflected something going on in another culture that was in high society regard.
It wasn't until the 1950s that this began to change very much, and even then the change tended to be an exaggeration of standard middle class dress. In the early 60s, however, somebody thought to take that one step further with The Beetles and dress them in a fairly infantile fashion, which didn't last long, but which reflected across the musical scene of the time. That yielded, however, pretty quickly to the really funky style of the 1960s, which musicians took up, as well as a really blue collar looking, or something, style affected by some.
While that change didn't result in many really weird costumes (there were some however) it did lay the ground work for the 1970s. And at that time the totally fake persona took off, and we've had it ever since. Musical artist have launched their careers in some instances by appearing as shocking as they could.
Which all makes it pretty darned phony.
If a person goes to a performance in party to look at weird dress, or bizarre makeup, they're really going to a sort of American and English Kabuki Theatre, but without the cultural background and content backing it up.
And that's sad, really.
Which is, I guess, why I'm continually caught off guard by the post death lauding of figures like David Bowie as cultural icons. I just don't get it. I don't dislike him, but I'm not seeing the contribution to the arts that others see here. I just don't.
Indeed, I fear that we've reached the point where this sort of thing truly reflects the culture in some scary ways. . . i.e., maybe a lot of it is now fake.
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