The genre David Bowie was ashamed for inspiring: “Bloody awful”
Most artists don’t have a choice in what their music does to their fans. Even though inspiration is anything that an artist can hope to do, what the next generation creates after listening to their music is never going to be quite like what they heard in their head when they started out. Although David Bowie managed to be one of the few artists who could inspire multiple genres of music, he will forever be associated with that glittering alien persona that came down to Earth in the 1970s.
Then again, there was a good chance that Bowie wouldn’t become one of the leaders of glam-rock at all. He always had a flair for theatrics, but that got channelled through vaudeville songs on his debut album before he started teasing up his hair and talking about what life was like beyond Earth in ‘Space Oddity.’
Although The Man Who Sold the World took more inspiration from genres like heavy metal, Bowie will forever be known as one of the kings of glam rock thanks to what he did during his prime as Ziggy Stardust. Most people had heard of the more androgynous side of rock and roll, but Bowie was the first to take it to the charts, whether that was him channelling his muse through acoustic songs like ‘Changes,’ breaking out the roaring guitars on ‘The Jean Genie’, or getting those massive singalongs going on ‘All The Young Dudes‘.
But even when the genre was shaping around him, Bowie did have time to stay in one style for the span of one record. There were still allusions to people like T Rex in the way that Mick Ronson played the guitar, but looking at a song like ‘Hang On To Yourself’, Bowie was already on the verge of punk rock without even realising it, especially since one of his heroes was Iggy Pop.
Once he shed his skin in the late 1970s and began making music with Brian Eno, though, the genre had been played out. There had been people like T Rex and Mott the Hoople making waves, but Bowie couldn’t help but look back in horror when he had started making his post-rock experiments on Low.
The whole point of glam was to subvert the status quo, and when it suddenly became the norm on the charts, Bowie looked back on the golden age of the genre with a bit of regret, saying in 2002, “Oh, [it was] bloody awful. Some of the stuff that we encouraged – and I have to pull Roxy [Music] into this as well – good Lord, we should be ashamed of ourselves. It was so dire. It lent itself to really despicable performances because you had to move into really outré areas to make it work; and if it didn’t work well, my God, it came crashing down.”
Granted, a lot of that might have to do with what came out a decade after them. The glam rock fad may have hung around for a little while with bands like Sweet, but the minute that hair metal acts started dressing like a warped version of Bowie and started singing about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, it started to look like a parody of what the genre was supposed to be, almost as if they gave a couple of models some guitars and hoped for the best.
Then again, it’s always better to appreciate the good when talking about the bad as well. Bowie’s music may have had the unfortunate side effect of leading to the sleaziness of the Sunset Strip, but if it meant getting forward-thinking albums like Diamond Dogs and For Your Pleasure, it’s safe to say that glam’s influence on rock and roll was a net positive.
