The band that David Bowie thinks “created modern music”
The musical landscape we know today most likely wouldn’t exist without David Bowie. Across multiple decades, ‘The Starman’ reinvented himself with every album he put out, taking chances until his death with the release of Blackstar. Although Bowie had the creative ingenuity that most other rock stars would kill for, he owed most of it to one of the founders of alternative rock music.
When Bowie was first getting the ball rolling, his trademark style was anything but boundary-pushing. On his first official release under his new moniker, Bowie was known for playing vaudeville-style rock and roll influenced by baroque pop, with tracks like ‘Rubber Band’ and ‘Love You Till Tuesday’ sounding much closer to the sounds of a dance hall than a rock and roll show.
After taking inspiration from acts like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Bowie began to find his calling on his proper debut, Space Oddity, where the world was introduced to the musical alien that fell to Earth. Although the singer had a style all his own, the inspiration from The Velvet Underground could not be overlooked.
Storming out of New York City amid the Summer of Love, The Velvet Underground’s debut album exposed the rock world to the darker side of music. Instead of songs about basking in the sunshine and promoting peace at every opportunity, Lou Reed wrote songs with a far more dangerous angle, talking about waiting around for a drug dealer on ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ or begging to engage in whatever S&M activity suits his fancy in ‘Venus in Furs’.
While the early days of the British Invasion shifted rock and roll on its head, Bowie thinks that modern music would have sounded very different without The Velvet Underground, saying, “It was the fringe, strange bands that nobody ever bought, like The Velvet Underground, that actually created modern music. In reality, modern bands are much more into ‘I’m Waiting for The Man’ than ‘Penny Lane’. The artists make culture, not the critics.”
It didn’t take long for the grimy atmosphere of The Velvet Underground to work its way into Bowie’s music, either. After testing the limits of his heavier side on The Man Who Sold The World, Hunky Dory boasted several tracks indebted to Reed’s songwriting, from the swagger of ‘Queen Bitch’ to namechecking the band’s artistic guru on ‘Andy Warhol’.
Although Bowie would eventually incorporate songs like ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ into his live show, Reed would find a musical brother in ‘The Thin White Duke’. As he moved on to a solo career, Reed worked alongside Bowie and Iggy Pop, with the former contributing production and cameos throughout the album Transformer.
It’s not like Bowie was wrong about the massive influence of The Velvet Underground, either. As the garage rock revival began in the early 2000s, acts like The Strokes made their first inroads to success using the same disaffected cadence that made records like ‘Heroin’ and ‘Sunday Morning’ so endearing. It’s easy to see The Beatles as a massive influence on the rock landscape, but in terms of experimentation and impact on the culture, The Velvets deserve a spot among the Fab Four.
