The genre David Bowie called “music of the 21st century”
The music David Bowie made always existed in a different time and space.
No one was ready for a rock and roll alien to descend from the heavens in the middle of the 1970s, but even when he landed on Earth, he wasn’t about to give his audience what he thought they wanted. His dreams were a lot bigger than being the next rock and roll star, and he would spend the rest of his career trying to reinvent what a rock and roll star was supposed to be with every character he came up with.
‘Major Tom’ was already a bit strange with that mile-high red hairdo, but when looking at something like ‘The Thin White Duke’, ‘The Starman’ could switch things up on a dime, which made you wonder who you were listening to from one song to the next. But if he’s going to be remembered for anything, it’s most likely going to be for the glam aesthetic that he pioneered when he first stepped onstage in pancake makeup and showed the world Ziggy Stardust for the first time.
But when you think about it, androgyny wasn’t completely taboo in rock and roll by the time Bowie started. Little Richard was already showing everyone what can happen when someone is an absolute showman, and while Bowie may have piled on the lipstick and makeup pretty thick, he wasn’t all that different from what Marc Bolan was doing around the same time when he started making his bluesy take on glam.
The rest of the Spiders from Mars might have been a little bit shocked by Bowie’s direction at the beginning, but he made it clear that what they were doing would matter years down the road, saying, “We were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the 21st century in 1971. That was the idea. And we wanted to just blast everything in the past, rather like the vorticists did at the beginning of the century in the Britain or the dadaists did in Europe, you know. It was the same sensibility of everything is rubbish, and all rubbish is wonderful.”
And when you listen to the song construction, Bowie certainly wasn’t taking the usual rock and roll formula every time he played. Ground zero for the Ziggy character was on ‘Life on Mars?’, and when you look at the kind of chords that he crams into that song, it’s almost like he was trying to make everything slightly offbeat from what had come before. The same could be said of ‘Starman’ from Ziggy’s album, but Bowie wasn’t looking to just make strange chords work in his tunes.
The whole point was to show different avenues for rock and roll to go down, and while Bowie clearly studied under people like Mick Jagger, he had taken things to the next level. No one was that explicit about gender fluidity at the time, and while Bowie was clearly portraying a character whenever he performed live, his moves gave everyone else permission to do their own thing whenever they stepped out onstage.
Sure, there were glamorous bands that followed Bowie’s lead, like Mott the Hoople and New York Dolls, but it was also about giving the underground artists a chance in the spotlight. Bowie already was championing his favourite artists like Lou Reed, but when you look at the way a band like Nirvana interpreted ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, the fact that they could exist in the limelight at all was because of Bowie giving everyone the idea that rock stars didn’t always have to be completely normal.
It was only natural for people to think outside the box, and while Bowie did the best he could to break down barriers, he knew that some of his finest work wouldn’t be appreciated fully until years after the fact. He might have been too shocking for a lot of people when he first came up with the platform boots and the lightning bolt down his face, but given how much ground he covered in only a few years, it’s no wonder that he was considered a legend even as he entered his twilight years.
