“Everything we despised”: The one era of pop that David Bowie hated
The pop charts always felt irrelevant to David Bowie. Although the changing trends in music may have been interesting for people keeping up with whatever was popular, Bowie was always looking for something a bit more challenging, and whenever he became fascinated with something slightly left-of-centre, it didn’t take long for him to shoehorn it into his sound in some way, whether that was drum and bass in the 1990s or working on the beginnings of post-rock on albums like Low. Even when he managed to score massive hits on his records, it’s not like he was in love with his contemporaries at the top of the hit parade.
Then again, pop was never a bad word for Bowie, either. He had become enamoured with rock and roll when listening to people like Little Richard, and by the time that he started strumming away singing folksy songs, The Beatles had already begun opening up doors for what rock and roll could be. If they could make groundbreaking stuff amongst themselves, ‘The Starman’ was about to lead everyone into new sonic territory.
By the time that he hit his stride in 1972, records like Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust introduced us to a new kind of rock and roller. This was someone who saw his music like most people saw theatrical productions, and he was more than happy to either go along with whatever was happening in the glam rock scene or deliberately buck the trend whenever the time called for it.
After spending years underground working his magic on albums for Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, Bowie slowly started warming up to the idea of being a pop star again. The MTV generation was made for his kind of theatricality, and when he donned his stunning suit and strutted his way across the stage for Let’s Dance, everyone remembered the magnetic frontman that he always was.
As with any genre, though, it didn’t take Bowie long to get bored. Playing in stadiums around the world may have certainly been fun, but when he started settling into a different groove on albums like Black Tie White Noise, he and Nile Rodgers had begun looking at the new flavour of rock music and were disgusted by what they saw.
Compared to the joyous optimism of the early days of MTV, Bowie felt that everything had been neutered by the early 1990s, saying at the time, “I have an incredibly hard time with it at the moment. It’s all so dispirited and sexless. Sex is suddenly once again the unmentionable word, and one wonders if that’s going to lead to more right-wing thinking and to a kind of fucking depressing grayness to the quality of life. It’s a return to everything we despised in the early ’60s.”
So when bands like Nirvana started to regain a footing again, it did feel like a changing of the guard in many respects. It may not have been as sexually liberating as Bowie would have wanted it to be, but since he had sung the praises of Pixies for years and had never been taken seriously, hearing Cobain take their entire sound to the top of the charts was enough to give people hope for rock and roll.
The kind of sexual revolution that Bowie had loved in the 1960s was still a thing of the past, but it wasn’t strictly about music that made people want to live out their fantasies of sex, drugs and rock and roll. It was about making music that actually made the listener feel something, and while many hair bands are forever cursing Nirvana’s name for what they did to the scene, them stomping out the superficial side of rock was almost a necessary evil.
