The one genre David Bowie couldn’t stand listening to
If David Bowie didn’t exist, there’s a good chance that we would have had to invent him.
‘The Starman’ was never one to play by the rules of what the record labels wanted whenever he made a new record, and most of us could only hope to have a career where we could do literally anything that we wanted to do and still make out like a bandit whenever we hit the charts. But even though there were many avenues for Bowie to go down throughout his career, he knew that there were some musical stones that were best left unturned whenever he started working on his projects.
Then again, it’s not like Bowie was the kind of person to get bogged down in one genre for too long. If you really think about it, Bowie is one of the few people that you could claim did everything that he possibly could during his time on Earth, and even when he started working on his final album Blackstar, no one could have imagined that he would have been able to pull off a spaced-out jazz pastiche, of all things, while singing about his own sense of mortality as he slowly withered away.
But in his world, there was nothing that was off the table whenever he had the right idea for a song. Even if a timeline where he stuck to his vaudeville side wasn’t in the cards, every single album felt like a new adventure whenever you heard his glam rock albums or when he was pulling at his sound every single time he worked on one of his Berlin records like Low or Lodger. And all along the way, there were plenty of genres that Bowie could add to his bag of tricks as well.
Most people would have been happy to spend an entire career trying to be one of the best artists in one respective genre, but the fact that Young Americans were nothing more than sidequests for Bowie really speaks to the kind of artist we were dealing with. He could master industrial music in only a few minutes on ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’, but there are many more tunes that didn’t seem to fit into his aesthetic when you really think about it.
Because when looking at his attitude, Bowie wasn’t the kind of person who thrived on playing along with what the older generation expected of him. The evolution he talks about in ‘Changes’ may as well be his mantra, but even during the best of times, Bowie felt that there were genres like country music that he didn’t feel like he could add anything to whenever he got into the studio.
The allure of someone like Johnny Cash may have been interesting for a song or two, but Bowie knew that there was no point in him trying to become a major country artist or anything, saying, “I think the only music I didn’t listen to was country and western, and that holds to this day. It’s much easier for me to say that, the kind of music I didn’t listen to was pretty much that. I mean everything, from jazz to classical to popular.” And it’s not exactly hard to see why it didn’t suit him, either.
It is interesting to see him make something close to country music on certain pieces of Low, but there was never a chance that he was going to be talking about life in the South. The Beatles did a passable impression of country artists, but no one was going to look at Bowie with a straight face and say that he belongs in a cowboy hat, talking about the simple pleasures in life with Dolly Parton beside him.
He wasn’t averse to more sophisticated music outside of rock and roll, but there’s a reason why he ended up singing a duet with Bing Crosby instead of George Jones. His voice was able to move in a bunch of different directions, but one of them wasn’t going to be adding some twang to his voice.
