The genre David Bowie said created a “new force” in music
David Bowie never wanted to stay in one place for too long when he made music.
He knew that anything he put out needed to reflect where he was at a particular moment, and while rock and roll had its place in history, he understood when things started to change for the genre as time went on.
Because even when he first started strumming his acoustic guitar, the world of 1968 was completely different from the world of 1973 when Bowie first hit it big. Ziggy Stardust was presenting a new kind of music to the world, and even if it wasn’t embraced by the mainstream media all the time, ‘The Starman’ knew there was a market for him to break out of. All he needed to do was keep his finger on the pulse of what was going on, or, in some cases, go against it.
Even in an era that suited Bowie’s visual aesthetic perfectly, like the 1980s, there were always going to be moments where he started going against the grain. His time in Berlin was coming to an end when MTV first started showing some of his videos, and while he was happy to work outside of his usual medium with Nile Rodgers, there was a reason why he never bothered to go back to genres like pop music after Let’s Dance became a classic.
That didn’t mean he hit it out of the park every time, either. He was still on a high after his 1980s smash, and while Tonight and Never Let Me Down are far from terrible albums, there was bound to be a drop-off in quality after a while. And given where the underground was heading, Bowie felt that it was much more interesting to follow what the first strains of hip-hop were doing than any of his pop contemporaries.
If we were to view the genre through a rock lens, rap was going through its garage-rock golden age at this time, and Bowie felt that anyone bothering to keep tabs on the new school would need to listen to where rap was heading, saying, “I think the white administration have come of age, the people that brought rock and roll to us. The quality of the social message has moved very much to the black and Hispanic market, and that’s where the new force of music is coming from.”
And for those still clinging to their favourite rock albums, Bowie does have a point. As much as people like U2 were fighting the good fight, trying to bring social messages into their music, the artists that seemed to have the most to say were hip-hop artists, be they Public Enemy talking about political upheaval, which then paved the way for everyone from Tupac Shakur to Rage Against the Machine.
Bowie certainly wasn’t going to try his hand at donning Run-DMC Adidas shoes or spitting the kind of bars Chuck D was known for, but he knew things were going to get interesting if he kept pushing the envelope. Even up until his final hour, ‘The Starman’ admitted to listening to people like Kendrick Lamar when it came time to put together Blackstar, pulling from the same jazzy beats that turned up on some of K-Dot’s best albums.
But please don’t let Bowie’s words come off like a condemnation of rock in any stretch. That was the music that helped form the musical alien that he was and always will be in the hearts of fans, but he knew that it was better to teach his fans about more interesting stuff that was out there beyond what was in most of their record collections.
