‘Black Tie White Noise’: The racial tension at the heart of David Bowie’s game-changing song
White rock musicians of the 1970s have a complicated relationship with race, to say the least. Although many of them had used the style of Black blues musicians and early rock ‘n’ roll stars to influence their act (or, in some cases, rip them off entirely), some of the worst offenders actually came out and revealed themselves to be horrendously racist, with Eric Clapton being a prominent example. Of all the rock stars of the 1970s, few were as legendary as David Bowie, and he was never one to conform to normality.
Bowie consistently set himself apart from the old-school white rock and roll of people like Clapton throughout his career. Purporting innovative sounds and a fearlessly nonconformist attitude, it should come as no real surprise that Bowie was always eager to champion underappreciated and forgotten Black artists. Even in the early 1980s, Bowie was noted for his criticism of MTV and its lack of racial diversity in its output, a stance that few other rock stars of the same ilk would dare to question.
Years later, in 1991, the world would be gripped by the fallout of the Rodney King incident, which saw an unarmed Black man savagely beaten by the Los Angeles Police Department. It was a pivotal moment in the history of civil rights in America. Aside from the attention it brought to institutionalised racism within US police forces, the beating of Rodney King also inspired a variety of defiant music, with prominent examples coming from Rage Against the Machine and N.W.A., but the musical fallout of the incident was not limited to punk and hip-hop.
Bowie, too, was rightly outraged by the camera footage of King’s unjust assault, using the incident – as well as the riots which resulted from it – as inspiration for his groundbreaking song ‘Black Tie White Noise’. Taken from the album of the same name, the song takes on soul and jazz influences, with lyrics that saw Bowie “Lookin’ through African eyes”.
The Brixton-born singer witnessed the LA riots first-hand, as he explained to NME in 1993, “We were standing on the roof of our apartment block, hand-in-hand, looking out at these fires starting up everywhere. And they were close! It was unbelievable. […] We thought, ‘Oh shit, we’re in this’ and we did the same thing that everybody else did – we got in the car and went down the supermarket and started buying food, because we didn’t know if we’d be able to get out of there for a few days.”
Produced by Nile Rodgers, the song provided Bowie with a number 36 hit single in 1993. In many ways, though, it did not matter whether ‘Black Tie White Noise’ was a hit or not. Bowie was never that bothered with chasing chart success, even less so as his career progressed. As Rogers attested to Uncut, “I wanted it to be more commercial; he wanted it to be, what I would say… more artistic.” The song was not a pop song; it was Bowie’s defiant political anthem rallying against the continued oppression of Black people both in America and around the globe.
Black Tie White Noise was a pivotal moment in the career of David Bowie, signifying a move away from pop rock to deep and introspective work. Although the album is often overlooked within his discography, it was vitally important in inspiring the seminal works which followed it and remains an underappreciated highlight of the songwriter’s career.
