Did David Bowie make rock and roll pretentious?
If we’re honest, every rock and roller is in danger of becoming pretentious at any moment. While it’s easy for anyone to get used to playing the kind of music that fans want to hear, it becomes questionable the minute people start to get on their soapboxes and lecture their audience rather than play the hits. Although the likes of Bono seem to be the punching bags for that kind of behaviour, David Bowie was one of the first to raise his hand as being pretentious during the ‘Ziggy Stardust’ era.
Granted, it’s not like anyone was really lining up to bash Bowie for what is arguably the greatest alter ego in popular music. Bowie already had tried on different sonic outfits every time he went into the studio, and by putting a character over top of himself, he gave himself the freedom to make something far different from anything he could have thought during his Space Oddity era.
There was still the space angle, but hearing him embrace the sounds of glam rock and spectacle turned him into the kind of rock star that picked up where the 1960s had left off. Those were the days of hippie freedom, but Bowie was the glittering rock messiah who would show the rest of the world where rock could go.
When you start playing that persona too long, it’s bound to wear on you, and Bowie’s willingness to shed his skin led him in the opposite direction. Right before his time in Berlin, Bowie rechristened himself as ‘The Thin White Duke’, which saw him making a lot more experimental music while also managing to stand upright with an ungodly amount of cocaine in his system.
During an interview with Rolling Stone right before he began work on later albums like Low, Bowie was more than willing to call himself out for being a little bit too full of himself, saying, “I consider myself responsible for a whole new school of pretension. I’m quite serious about that. The only thing that seems to shock anybody anymore is something that’s pretentious or kitsch. Unless you take things to extremes, nobody will believe or pay attention to you. You have to hit them on the head, and pretension does the trick”.
While certain elements could have been a bit overblown by Bowie’s standards, his way of soaking in every character he made brought theatre back into the rock world. There had been spectacles like Kiss that came up around the same time, but Bowie was one of the few who actually had the classic songs to back him up. No matter how many times someone like Gene Simmons talks himself up as a rock god, he would never release something like ‘Changes’ if he tried.
If anything, Bowie made his craft by deliberately creating something that could still be seen as classic even decades after its release. Some of the lingo behind albums like Aladdin Sane might not have held up in the way that some people expected them to, but there was never really a need for Bowie to be lavish for the hell of it. He was interested in making art in the vein of people like Lou Reed, and by giving himself that lavish makeover, he inspired millions of musicians to add a bit of flair back into rock and roll.
