The one musician David Bowie could never be: “I didn’t feel comfortable”
There are many different eras when it comes to talking about the best moments of David Bowie.
He never felt comfortable staying in one place for too terribly long, and some of his greatest moments often came when he was taking the kind of chances that would have killed anyone else’s career back in the early 1970s. He was never afraid to take a few chances here and there when he wanted to, but there were also far too many times when he felt like he was out of his depth trying to emulate certain artists.
Then again, any other artist should have been like a new challenge for Bowie. He thrived on genres that he wasn’t going to understand at first, but even when working on some of the most out-there concepts with Brian Eno or transforming himself into an alien lifeform in front of our eyes every time he performed, probably the most unexpected thing that he could ever hope to be is normal. And while the pop star period was as far as he got to a “normal” pop star, it’s not like he was giving Phil Collins or Bruce Springsteen a run for their money.
But even if Bowie backhandedly called that era of his career his “Phil Collins years”, he knew that there was no point in ever trying to look at his music through the same lens as Springsteen. ‘The Boss’ had a rough-and-tumble way of looking at the world, and even though they both took influence from people like Bob Dylan, Bowie had a much more artistic approach than anything Springsteen ever did.
That’s not to say that Springsteen didn’t tell beautiful stories; they just weren’t the ones that Bowie was comfortable telling. He wanted the chance to make music that no one would have ever conceived of before, and while there are many times when he went into the well and found absolutely nothing at the end of his journey, he knew that it wouldn’t have made any sense trying to claim to be a man of the people.
He wasn’t normal by anyone’s standards, and for as many faces as he had, becoming ‘The Boss’s Everyman-style persona was never going to work, saying, “I didn’t feel comfortable in that because 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 artists because I don’t believe I am that. And I don’t believe I, (laughter) you know, could ever represent that. And it is merely representation.” And that laugh isn’t there by accident.
I mean, think about it for a second. Bowie created some of the greatest trends in fashion that the world had ever seen, but could you really imagine him putting on some faded blue jeans and starting to talk about the pleasures of living in America? He had already seen the horrors of the country when he went to LA, but even if he found his calling in New York, something about Springsteen’s is not how he was wired.
His songs certainly have a distinct flair to them in the same way that Springsteen’s do, but there are more often times when you’re listening to his music where he’s actively trying to move outside of everyone else’s comfort zone. The meaning behind any artist tends to involve being misunderstood, so being that cut and dry about working-class men and women wouldn’t have worked for Bowie unless it was some sort of critique on modern living.
Springsteen was definitely a great presence in rock and roll for about the same time that Bowie was, but ‘The Starman’ never found his heart in the heartland. He wanted the chance to make music that pointed towards new lands, and even up until his final days, he wanted to make sure that he kept his audience guessing at every single turn.
