The one genre that became too boring for David Bowie: “I want and need creative, artistic success”
The last thing that David Bowie ever wanted to be was predictable.
Every single one of his albums was about making the most off-the-wall music that he possibly could, and even if he tried his best to work on records that went against the grain, even some of his more celebrated affairs were a lot more avant-garde than what was going on at the time. But after one too many times sitting on songs that made him one of the biggest stars in the world, there comes a moment when any artist would start to get a little bit bored.
And when looking through Bowie’s discography, you can tell the moments when he seemed to hit a brick wall in some respects. The glam period was one of the greatest runs of albums that anyone had ever done, but Bowie seemed to be disinterested after Diamond Dogs, and even when he got away from his name entirely on Tin Machine, it only took two albums before he realised that he wasn’t as invested in that kind of music as he thought he was when he first started getting heavier.
But coming out of his dark period, The Berlin Trilogy is by far the most interesting set of albums he ever made. Working with Brian Eno gave him a songwriting partner that he could have never imagined working with, and while his relationship with Tony Visconti would become a little bit strained over the years after ditching him for Nile Rodgers, ‘The Starman’ felt that he needed to switch things up every now and again to test what he could do.
Then again, it’s not like Visconti didn’t have his best interest at heart when making a record like Low. Anyone else would have been considered crazy to make the kinds of moves that Bowie was making around this time, but it wasn’t out of the question for him to disappear completely on half of his album in favour of instrumentals or making songs that were nothing but him peeling back the layers of what he felt rock and roll was supposed to be.
In fact, the only reason why Bowie even moved to Berlin and started working on these albums was to get away from the manufactured soul image that he had been creating, saying, “I felt I was very predictable, and that was starting to bore me. I was entering an area of middle-of-the-road popularity, which I didn’t like, with that disco soul phase, and it was all getting too successful in the wrong way. I want and need creative, artistic success.”
Admittedly, Station to Station does feel like the unofficial start to him experimenting like this, but his role as ‘The Thin White Duke’ was always something he wanted to block out of his mind. That character was one of his most sinister creations, and even if he has a lot of moments on that album where he sounds better than anyone else in his field, becoming someone who spoke his mind about the occult was only going to get him into more trouble had he gone further down that road.
Granted, it’s not like people were looking at Young Americans thinking that Bowie was going to become the next blue-eyed soul star or anything. He was more than happy to wear that genre like a second skin for a little while, but the thought of him being the pencil-thin soul star that could give Luther Vandross a run for his money wasn’t the kind of life that he wanted for himself after too long.
He wanted something a bit more exciting out of his music, and with Eno, he had found a kindred spirit who was looking to make equally strange music. They were both looking for the chords that no one else had touched upon yet, and they were going to test the limits of every single instrument they had if that meant getting a version of a song that they liked.
