- Bowie
”Man is least himself when he talks in his own person... Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth”
- Oscar Wilde
Ziggy and the Zeitgeist
After Bowie's death, when Call-Me-Dave Cameron tried to paid tribute to a man he barely even had a first name in common with, Newsthump cheekily suggested he'd cited 'Sergeant Pepper' as his favourite album. And like a lot of satire, it's not that far off.
'Ziggy' may to some extent be Bowie's 'Pepper', the name non-fans have in their heads as the correct answer to the question. Truth is, not only is it not his best album it's not even the best of his Glam era. Bowie himself thought so, preferring 'Aladdin Sane'. I’d most likely go for 'Diamond Dogs'. So how can we explain this fixation on 'Ziggy'?
It was that album which broke Bowie, and so the way most fans first heard of him. But there's more to it than that. Bowie may at other times have made better music. But arguably 'Ziggy' achieves a more important task of popular music - 'Ziggy' is zeitgeisty.
In look and sound Bowie intended Ziggy to come across like a landing Martian, like something so strange he'd beamed down from a different reality. And yet the genius of the thing was the way he plugged so neatly into early Seventies culture. His was just the strange our normal needed.
Perhaps significantly, Ziggy is the archetypal figure for Glam as much as for Bowie. Even though Glam was already well underway at the time. (It’s launch is often considered to be Marc Bolan’s ’Top of the Pops' appearance in March 1971. Bowie’s ‘Starman’ wasn’t until July 1972.) So what was there in Ziggy that allowed Bowie to eclipse Glam’s originator?
It was Bolan who said “pop songs must be like a spell”. And, as said over the later 'Station To Station', Bowie often wrote songs as a form of sympathetic magic. Adam Sweeting wrote in his Guardian obituary “the [Ziggy] album effectively wrote the script for his own stardom”. Like wheels within wheels, he would perform as Ziggy but Bowie was already an alter ego. (He'd been born David Jones.) Bowie became a rock star by playing one, on and off stage.
But this was also the Bowie album which most addressed the audience, and in the most literal sense. Bliss it must have been to be young in that very dawn, and watching that legendary 'Top of the Pops' version of 'Starman', where he pointed out of the screen straight at “yo-hoo-hoo”.
And who was in that audience? Remember the opening monologue of 'Trainspotting'? Culminating in the spat line about “the brats you spawned to replace yourself”? Though set in the following decade it’s a statement even truer of the Seventies, when it wasn't at all uncommon for children to entirely replicate their parents' lives. As workplaces were often localised, sons would take up not just similar work to their fathers but the same work in the same workplace. While daughters were even more likely to stay home and change nappies, just as their mothers had changed theirs. The lines in your parents’ faces mapped your own future.
But this was also the time where fixed careers first started to erode, effectively the first generation for who replacing your parents wasn't an inevitability. In the Sixties, Mod had been about dressing up, looking smart and becoming a “Face” on the scene, in a way which related to social aspiration. But it was still tied to the fixation on your Saturday night respite from the daily grind. Glam took this further, into a form of self-transformation.
Young children, noting they have the power to name things, sometimes re-name themselves in an early act of re-self-branding. But we’re expected to grow out of that. Glam took it up at a higher level. Why did you need to keep the name your parents had given you? You could create an alter ego, and then become that person just by dressing up as them. Sartre had said “Man makes himself by acting.” Why should play-acting prove any different? The Glam credo was actually spelt out the clearest by neither Bowie nor Bolan but ’The Rocky Horror Picture Show’: “Don’t dream it, be it.”
And the spells Bolan spoke of are at their most potent in our teenage years. We wrap ourselves up in them, play their magic words over. Melita Dennett, frequent Brighton gig-goer to this day, has recalled why she found seeing Bowie so significant: “This was it: I knew there was another life, another world because I'd seen it, here in Brighton Dome. It wasn't just about Bowie, it was the realisation that you could step outside of stifling conformity, normality and find that other world for yourself.”
And Bowie himself said at the time: “If I've been responsible for people finding more characters within themselves than they originally thought they'd had, them I'm pleased. Because that's something I feel very strongly about. That one isn't totally what one has been conditioned to think one is.”
(And this self-transformation was central to Glam. Genesis’ Peter Gabriel dressed up as his characters onstage. But not only was their music quite different to Glam, his were actor’s costumes to be worn and then discarded. Whereas Glam set up shop in the slippage between costume and identity.)
And its probably no coincidence that another great album of the early Seventies, Patti Smith's 'Horses', also plays with gender identity and general themes of transformation. If in her case with a more surrealist emphasis on metamorphosis.
From our vantage point, where varied careers have come hand-in-hand with precarity, we naturally dwell on the downside of this and tend to look back rather fondly on the time job security was actually a thing. Besides, how many times have Madonna or Geri Halliwell ‘reinvented’ themselves now, with ever-diminishing returns? The payoff line from the 2004 film ’The Edukators’ - “some people never change” – may prove a more salutary credo for us today. Nevertheless, in the early Seventies transformation was a powerful idea.
”He Played It Left Hand”
In that legendary ’Top of the Pops’ performance, the moment where Bowie puts his arms round Mick Ronson's shoulder would now scarcely be noticed. At the time it caused astonishment. Just before the album was released, Bowie told the music paper ’Melody Maker’ he was gay.
Seeing as he was at that point married, even dedicating a song from his previous album to their child, a slightly cynical response might be in order. It’s true Bowie was bisexual to a degree, but this was at best a vast exaggeration. (He later conceded “I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well.”)
Is this any different to Tarantino notoriously claiming “there's part of me that is black”? It could easily be argued gay had simply become the new black - with black culture now so successfully strip-mined something had to be next. So a form of 'gay drag' was hit upon by a fledgeling music star. He later said he'd given the interview in character as Ziggy, something he did increasingly.
Yet notably only in 'Lady Stardust' is the title feminised, and even there every gendered pronoun is “he”. And arguably this was merely upping the ante of what was already present in popular music. From the Sixties, Jagger's stage persona had been a mix of high camp and hyper-masculinity.
...which is perhaps a bit too cynical. For one thing perhaps this is simply what Glam does. As Simon Reynolds argued in ’Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and it’s Legacy’ “isn’t it more radical – more glam – to say ‘I wasn’t born this way, I’m choosing to go against nature.’” For another it underestimates the degree of homophobia which was then prevalent. At the time he made that claim, legalisation was less than five years old. Many gay people were still to come out, playing it straight in public life. Now here was a predominantly straight guy saying loudly he was gay.
And why was that arm around a shoulder so significant? Culture was then not just homophobic, it was virtually expresso-phobic. These were the “felt nowt” years, when doing anything remotely out of the ordinary – particularly if it suggested some form of emotional expression - was met with the catch-all accusation of “that sounds gay”. “Queer” wasn't just wrong, it was a signifier term for all that was wrong. So the response to that accusation inevitably became “alright then, I'll be queer”.
It wasn't about arguing gay people could be considered normal. In many ways it was the opposite, the far more potent message we could all be “queer” if we chose to. Appropriating some gay tropes became a way of taking the stopper out of your own bottle. During the same era, Eno, neither gay nor trans, wanted to wear glamorous clothes, and the only ones he could find were made for women. In the previous decade, Timothy Leary had said we needed to go out of our minds to use our heads. By Bowie's time we needed to go a bit gay to use our hearts.
And, despite his first using the word “gay”, ultimately bisexuality became not just more accurate but more important. He may even have been using the more graspable term to acclimatise his audience. Bisexuality isn’t the same thing as gender bending, but they’re popularly associated and Bowie did little to separate the two. In both, sexual identity isn't fixed but fluid.
Partly this just turns flamboyance into a moving target. As a character in the film ’Velvet Goldmine’ says to the blatant Bowie stand-in: "You live in terror of not being misunderstood”. After all, what’s being a teenager all about except the desperate urge to be misunderstood? And what better element to set in motion than the one everyone had almost assumed was most fixed – gender identity? You could decide who you wanted to be, but you didn’t need to ever quite decide.
More to follow…
(And this self-transformation was central to Glam. Genesis’ Peter Gabriel dressed up as his characters onstage. But not only was their music quite different to Glam, his were actor’s costumes to be worn and then discarded. Whereas Glam set up shop in the slippage between costume and identity.)
And its probably no coincidence that another great album of the early Seventies, Patti Smith's 'Horses', also plays with gender identity and general themes of transformation. If in her case with a more surrealist emphasis on metamorphosis.
From our vantage point, where varied careers have come hand-in-hand with precarity, we naturally dwell on the downside of this and tend to look back rather fondly on the time job security was actually a thing. Besides, how many times have Madonna or Geri Halliwell ‘reinvented’ themselves now, with ever-diminishing returns? The payoff line from the 2004 film ’The Edukators’ - “some people never change” – may prove a more salutary credo for us today. Nevertheless, in the early Seventies transformation was a powerful idea.
”He Played It Left Hand”
In that legendary ’Top of the Pops’ performance, the moment where Bowie puts his arms round Mick Ronson's shoulder would now scarcely be noticed. At the time it caused astonishment. Just before the album was released, Bowie told the music paper ’Melody Maker’ he was gay.
Seeing as he was at that point married, even dedicating a song from his previous album to their child, a slightly cynical response might be in order. It’s true Bowie was bisexual to a degree, but this was at best a vast exaggeration. (He later conceded “I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well.”)
Is this any different to Tarantino notoriously claiming “there's part of me that is black”? It could easily be argued gay had simply become the new black - with black culture now so successfully strip-mined something had to be next. So a form of 'gay drag' was hit upon by a fledgeling music star. He later said he'd given the interview in character as Ziggy, something he did increasingly.
Yet notably only in 'Lady Stardust' is the title feminised, and even there every gendered pronoun is “he”. And arguably this was merely upping the ante of what was already present in popular music. From the Sixties, Jagger's stage persona had been a mix of high camp and hyper-masculinity.
...which is perhaps a bit too cynical. For one thing perhaps this is simply what Glam does. As Simon Reynolds argued in ’Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and it’s Legacy’ “isn’t it more radical – more glam – to say ‘I wasn’t born this way, I’m choosing to go against nature.’” For another it underestimates the degree of homophobia which was then prevalent. At the time he made that claim, legalisation was less than five years old. Many gay people were still to come out, playing it straight in public life. Now here was a predominantly straight guy saying loudly he was gay.
And why was that arm around a shoulder so significant? Culture was then not just homophobic, it was virtually expresso-phobic. These were the “felt nowt” years, when doing anything remotely out of the ordinary – particularly if it suggested some form of emotional expression - was met with the catch-all accusation of “that sounds gay”. “Queer” wasn't just wrong, it was a signifier term for all that was wrong. So the response to that accusation inevitably became “alright then, I'll be queer”.
It wasn't about arguing gay people could be considered normal. In many ways it was the opposite, the far more potent message we could all be “queer” if we chose to. Appropriating some gay tropes became a way of taking the stopper out of your own bottle. During the same era, Eno, neither gay nor trans, wanted to wear glamorous clothes, and the only ones he could find were made for women. In the previous decade, Timothy Leary had said we needed to go out of our minds to use our heads. By Bowie's time we needed to go a bit gay to use our hearts.
And, despite his first using the word “gay”, ultimately bisexuality became not just more accurate but more important. He may even have been using the more graspable term to acclimatise his audience. Bisexuality isn’t the same thing as gender bending, but they’re popularly associated and Bowie did little to separate the two. In both, sexual identity isn't fixed but fluid.
Partly this just turns flamboyance into a moving target. As a character in the film ’Velvet Goldmine’ says to the blatant Bowie stand-in: "You live in terror of not being misunderstood”. After all, what’s being a teenager all about except the desperate urge to be misunderstood? And what better element to set in motion than the one everyone had almost assumed was most fixed – gender identity? You could decide who you wanted to be, but you didn’t need to ever quite decide.
More to follow…
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