Why David Bowie believed great art only comes with age
It’s no secret that David Bowie knew how to write a hit record. He even joked about it from time to time. But where this attitude differed is that Bowie always knew he was still learning, even when he seemed to have the recipe mastered. He never stopped moving, pushing himself to never settle for the commercial guarantee of one set formula.
Pandering to commercial expectations, for Bowie, was never conducive to earning a respectable artistic identity. In fact, he even joked about it, which is also incidentally how he conceived ‘Let Me Sleep Beside You’. According to the singer’s manager, Kenneth Pitt, he was watching television one day when he turned to him and said, “I’m going to write some top ten rubbish”. Obviously, Pitt laughed it off and said he didn’t believe Bowie could write “rubbish of any kind”, but the singer saw it as a challenge to pull out all of the best tricks in the book for a guaranteed chart topper.
But this didn’t come from a place of desperation, nor did he shy away from overly mainstream tropes if it’s what he knew his heart wanted. Like ‘Heroes’, which is a massive song, obviously, with all the components you might expect of someone trying to get a smash hit. But it’s only that way because it coasts the line between euphoria and melancholy authentically, as if it flowed out of Bowie like second-nature, not coming from any place of desperation.
This commitment to endless progression and experimentalism made for some wild cards in his discography, but it also made his art far more meaningful and reflective of who he actually was inside. He wasn’t an artificial product churned out by the unrelenting business machine but a real person who made art from the heart, earning respect even when he wasn’t sure anyone would even understand or appreciate the stories he manufactured.
But that was also the beauty of existing somewhere in between familiarity and abstraction. For Bowie, the moment any artist starts to find themselves leaning into the familiar hues of playing it safe is when clarity becomes clouded by the fatal hands of pretence. Because that’s also the moment musicians stop making music for themselves and start making decisions based on what they think others will like, which is one sure road to disaster.
However, according to Bowie, most only learn this, and truly learn it, when they mature and live through enough mistakes to figure out how to avoid them with intent.
“Never play to the gallery,” he once said. “Never work for other people in what you do. You never learn that until much later on. Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with the rest of society… I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfil other people’s expectations. They generally produce their worst work.”
He added: “The other thing I would say, is that if you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you are capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
It’s an easy piece of advice to get behind, because most of us know the perils of doing something purely because you think it’s going to appease someone else. But for Bowie, the difference between good art and art made to satisfy perfect strangers is being as authentic as possible, and leaning into your own bubble, even if there’s an element of uncertainty about the kind of audience it’s going to draw in, if any. But also, this is something most only realise after the fact, making it a lifelong battle that even the man felt challenged himself to live by.
