“The most I’ve seen since me”: David Bowie on the most eclectic artist of the 1980s
Nothing that David Bowie ever did could be considered predictable. From the moment that he arrived on the British music scene in the late 1960s, what he did was all about going against the grain, whether that meant becoming a glam-rock icon with Ziggy Stardust or trading in his famous red hairdo for the clinical look of ‘The Thin White Duke’ during Station to Station. While ‘The Starman’ had no problem slipping on his dancing shoes for some pop music in the 1980s, he thought that the decade did have one of the most eclectic artists he had ever seen among the other pinup stars.
That’s not to say that Bowie sold out during this period, though. There were certainly some albums that felt less genuine compared to his early work, but no one kicks off their MTV career with ‘Ashes to Ashes’ without having a few outsider ideas compared to the average fan of Def Leppard or Whitesnake.
Even when Bowie did manage to go pop, it was still about creating a hodgepodge of different musical styles. He had already flirted with everything from glam-rock to krautrock to blue-eyed soul music, so working with Nile Rodgers was another musical genre that he mastered during that decade. Then again, what Prince did wasn’t all that different when he started gaining traction in the early 1980s.
Despite having his start in the late 1970s, Prince did everything that Bowie amplified to 11. Throughout his early material, ‘The Purple One’ managed to toe the line between R&B, soul, funk, and rock and roll within the span of a single album and never sound too scattershot, which is nothing short of superhuman when you realise that he wrote most of the material himself and play all the parts in the studio.
Even when he started making his superstar albums like Purple Rain, none of that eccentric energy went anywhere. For an album that was meant to be made in conjunction with a movie soundtrack, hearing Prince flipflop between rock god on ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, electronic cyborg on ‘Computer Blue’, and then soulful balladeer on the title track is what makes the record one of the best pieces of art to come out of the decade.
Bowie still had a lot of classics already under his belt, but he knew that he had seen a legend in the making when watching Prince’s run in the 1980s, saying, “He’s probably the most eclectic artist I’ve seen since me. I think he’s a great stealer. I have a tough time with a lot of black music now– it’s all a bit dance-y, and there’s no real underbelly there. I think Prince is probably the best of the current crop.”
If Bowie thought that Prince was eclectic then, though, there was no telling where he would be by the end of the decade. Outside of Sign O’ The Times being one of the most eclectic collections of songs by a major artist, everything from the Batman soundtrack to his triple album Emancipation to flirtations with jazz on later albums like The Rainbow Children showed that Prince was cut from the same cloth as Bowie, always looking to find that one extra sound that he had never heard before.
Even though it’s hard to get a handle on what he sounded like from one album to the next, it never became too much of a problem, either. Because for Prince, it was a matter of what he could do within the span of three minutes rather than questioning whether he could pull off a certain style.
