Why did David Bowie believe the 21st century started in 1971?
Even after well over 50 years, David Bowie’s Martian alter-ego still looks dynamically toward tomorrow’s world.
All of a sudden, the future had very much arrived smack bang in 1972. This was the era of Future Shock, when the previous decade’s utopian idyll began to give way to anxieties about society’s accelerated pace of change as the ‘information overload’ disoriented the Western world into a new and uncertain dawn. It wasn’t all dystopian gloom, however. Triggered by the double whammy of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Apollo 11 moon landing, came a surge in tech fascination, a sci-fi boom, plastic architecture, the birth of computer games, and a general zeitgeist that felt closer to the millennium than ever before.
This nascent air made its way to the pop charts. A good several years before punk took its revolutionary hatchet to the ossified rock scene, glam offered a gleaming, glittering soundtrack for a generation of 1970s kids deathly bored of the earnest singer-songwriters or prog wizards their older siblings were spinning. The counterculture had died long ago, already stumbling into a parody the likes of T Rex, Roxy Music, and Slade were eager to avoid in full, shimmering style.
“Myself and my mates, and, I guess, a certain contingent of the musicians in London at the beginning of the ’70s were fed up with denim and the hippies,” Bowie quipped on NPR’s Fresh Air series back in 2002, reflecting on the 30th anniversary of his defining LP opus.
Now, just like Marc Bolan, Bowie had been flirting with the psychedelic world before the future had quite hit home yet. In fact, Bowie had tried his hand at a lot of guises til something worked. A haphazard practice that would follow the ‘Cracked Actor’ all his life, but a jump between R&B beat, dreamy folk, The Feathers harmony trio, a little proto-metal, and novelty numbers about laughing gnomes all dotted Bowie’s musical CV before raiding the dressing-up box and riding the glitter wave toward Ziggy Stardust’s pop domination.
But Bowie knew what was up before most, “And these children that you spit on / As they try to change their worlds / Are immune to your consultations / They’re quite aware of what they’re goin’ through.” Even when Bowie was sporting long flowing locks and patterned dresses singing Hunk Dory’s ‘Changes’, the shock of the new was pulling the chameleon to new exotic realms, brewing an artful stew of iconoclastic satire, comic escapism, and a stake in the heart of rockist authenticity in electric tandem with the futurism hanging in the 1970s’ air.
“It was a pudding of new ideas,” Bowie recalled. “And we were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the 21st century in 1971.”
The rock and roll of Bowie’s youth was a white-hot flashbang firmly concerned with the present in all its plugged-in urgency. The subsequent psychedelia saw the rock from both sides of the Atlantic begin to look for answers beyond both rock and roll and society’s confines, striking thrilling countercultural gems before a chunk lapsed into stale deadends of musical and spiritual navel-gazing.
It took one Ziggy Stardust and the glam movement to decisively face the future’s beckoning dawn; however, taking retrofuturist stock of all that came before, feeding such heritage in a postmodern bricolage that shines brightly without the dust and mothballs of tradition standing in the way. It’s a visionary spirit that still dances at The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars dramatic core, an LP that bottles the era’s insurgent energy and still sounds radiantly, fantastically modern to this day.
