“I could never be”: The one genre David Bowie thought he couldn’t play
To say that David Bowie only fit into one genre of music would be foolish on another’s part. Most of his music does fall under the “rock” banner, but it’s hardly fair to claim that records like Diamond Dogs, Low, and Earthling were all drawing from the same stylistic playbook when they were being made. For all of the great detours that Bowie made during his lifetime, he knew that there were certain genres that he was never meant to touch.
But when it comes to any of Bowie’s records, he was never afraid to take that kind of chance. He had the power of making something unique when he wanted to, and whether that was something as goofy as his debut or the strange experiments with jazz on his final album Blackstar, nothing seemed to be completely off the table as long as he could sink his teeth into it.
And that also includes the moments where he seemed completely out of his element. An art-rock icon like Bowie shouldn’t have had any right to pull off Let’s Dance as well as he did, but when started getting a little too comfortable in his role as a pop star, albums like Never Let Me Down managed to do the exact opposite of what it’s title implied upon release in the late 1980s.
Even when Bowie needed a change, though, he never half-assed any of the stranger elements of his sound. People were aghast the minute that he stepped out onstage looking some rock and roll saviour during the Ziggy Stardust era, and while ‘The Thin White Duke’ was even more despicable than anything that had come before, Bowie made sure to leave something to the imagination when he performed, especially when he started taking inspiration from the occult in a handful of his lyrics.
Out of all of Bowie’s detours, there is a central theme. While ‘The Starman’ is no longer here to say it, all of his best moments are based on people who are lost in the world and don’t fit into the norms of society, whether that’s people who fall between genders or are struggling with their sense of identity. So with that kind of throughline, there was no way that Bowie would ever be able to embrace the blue-collar work environment.
“I didn’t feel like one of the working men. I mean, I could never be a blue collar-y kind of Springsteen-y type artist because I don’t believe I am that.”
David Bowie
Despite his love for all strands of rock and roll music, the kind of heartland rock that people like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty birthed would be forever outside his reach, saying, “I didn’t feel like one of the working men. I mean, I could never be a blue collar-y kind of Springsteen-y type artist because I don’t believe I am that, and I don’t believe I could ever represent that, and it is merely representation.”
Nor were any of his most hardcore fans asking him to make that change, either. There are many facets to what Bowie could do, but while he kept a lot of his greatest characters close to the chest, everyone would take one look at him in jeans and a T-shirt and think that his version of John ‘Ziggy’ Mellancamp was a fraud.
Because as much as Bowie liked the idea of having a flexible music career, he was never interested in switching genres solely to make a lot of money. What he was doing had to be a bit more musical than that, and even though not everything hit as well as his glam-rock period, he was happy to try it for curiosity’s sake rather than hold himself back.
