Music Biographies 1 – David Bowie

As a music fan, there are biographies of a few bands / singers who have burned their way into my consciousness. Somehow a lot of them have involved the perils of getting into drugs. David Bowie was a remarkable guy, and he was a consummate artist in many sense of the word, but one remarkable thing I felt is that he was always some kind of a failure and a drug addict.

Of course I feel a little differently now. His profile was raised in a remarkable way during the last 3 years of his life, during which he made a remarkable comeback after 10 years of releasing nothing, then coming down with cancer, and then producing his final album, black star. And there have been reams written about him.

The first I heard about him was through buying one of his greatest hits collections. It was on a shitty cassette tape that spent too long in the sun and stretched easily. But it was a good overview of the best part of his career. The one that spanned from “Space Oddity” to “Tonight”. His music was a little strange and alien to my ears, but I’ll remember it, because it was a very welcome respite from the horrors of Singaporean FM radio.

But I think it was the album covers that were really compelling. David Bowie was really weird. He relished being really weird. There was something distinctly reptillian about him. If he wasn’t some kind of an alien, he was some kind of a transgendered freak, or else a drug freak. I think, to me, he represented some kind of freedom to be whatever you wanted to be. I was a 100% straight guy, but I could totally relate to who he was. I had that classical music upbringing and I got really tired of the regimentation, and for the first time, I heard music that related to some kind of expressive freedom. It was truly joyous.

One of the big themes that ran through a lot of his greatest period was cocaine paranoia. I have never encountered hard drugs. I live in a country where the penalty for trafficking hard drugs is death. So maybe his being a cocaine freak was some source of morbid fascination for me. Even as far back as “Space Oddity”, a bad trip or an overdose was cloaked in some metaphor for space travel. And in “Ashes to Ashes”, which felt like he was closing a chapter on his life, he still talked about how nasty it was to be coming off drugs. In “Young Americans”, he made some allusion to living beyond your means, living recklessly and foolishly, and paying the price when you were older. Now, you could look at “Station to Station” as the height of his cocaine addiction. I don’t know if there was anybody who could push himself to that limit, and then make a comeback. There was Natalie Cole, there was Primal Scream. Steve Earle. There were quite a few people out there who had problems as serious as his and basically ended up dead, either that, or they ended up finished as a creative force. Bowie was somebody who somehow cheated death.

For Bowie, he was already freaky, and the drugs made him even more freaky. “Station to Station” was somehow the height of his freakishness. Every year or so, he had invented some character and then inhabited it. He appeared on the cover of “Hunky Dory” in cross dress. He was Ziggy Stardust, and then Aladdin Sane, then the Diamond Dog, and some smooth crooning soul man in “Young Americans”, and finally the Thin White Duke. Then he crashed and had to bail out of Los Angeles. Moving to Berlin, he made 3 great albums, but they just seemed to feature David ol’ Bowie. He was simply keen to sit quiet, meditate, get his sanity back and get off drugs.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. We now know that he also took a lot of drugs in Berlin, but this seemed a lot like some kind of easing off, some kind of winning back his sobriety. His most famous song from this period was “Heroes”, and it it lurched from some kind of triumphalism to some kind of despair. It’s not surprising that it took place soon during his fascist period. Back and forth between hero and zero. Screaming out his delusions of grandeur and yet at the same time, you saw the fraility of his vision because of the despair mixed in. But there was always a struggle between his more level headed side and his more impulsive side.

There are so many more facets to David Bowie, but I’m not really going to highlight all of that. This was mainly about what kind of influence David Bowie had on me. This is just one facet of it. David Bowie had his demons, and the drugs amplified the effect of those demons. They drove him on to be ferociously creative, and at the same time, they managed to consume him. They consumed him once, when he became such a full blown addict that he had to either save himself or die. And a few years later, he made “Let’s Dance” and attained the commercial success in America that so often eludes British artists, and soon after that, he became creatively spent.

That’s the second facet of him that haunted me. From 1969 to 1980 that was the classic David Bowie, who put out classic after classic. And after that, a break of a few years, during which he dabbled in acting, and then one more great album in “Let’s Dance”, and then after that, a slow slide into irrelevance. That was the one other thing that haunted me. You could take the highlights of everything he did after 1980, and put them together in a greatest hits collection, and there would be enough highlights to make it into a a fairly impressive collection, but by 1980, most of his best work was already behind him.

He might have once been sui generis, but now, he had to compete in a crowded field where everybody had caught on to what he was doing, and a few of them were actively out-Bowie-ing him. He was no longer the all conquering warrior of old, but was content to settle down into a more staid midlife. And midlife was probably quite great if you don’t have to work for a living. But that was not the Bowie that I saw as a teenager, or the Bowie that captured my imagination. The Bowie who once boasted that he didn’t care if he was a faker because anyway he was moving too fast.

So I’m wondering about what happens to Bowie when he grows old. Did he get tired of making music? It did seem a little like that, although it’s to his credit that long after his peak, he carried on releasing music for the rest of his life, excepting that 10 year silence. He always aspired to be trendy, and always succeeded in being interesting. Did he run out of things to say? Or did he simply live to reach an age where rock music didn’t matter anymore?

Because those are the questions that I’m asking myself as an aging music fan. It’s not that I was a truly ardent David Bowie fan, but he was the gateway to so much more of what I managed to find. He opened the door to glam rock, to philly soul, to the experimental stuff that Brian Eno was putting out. He was some kind of Rosetta stone. There are a few narratives that you embrace as a young fan of music. You remember what the thrill was like, but somehow the thrill isn’t there anymore.

It gave you endless hours of joy and wonder, but it’s not something you can continue to hide behind. There was the thrill of discovery, but it’s all been discovered.

I wrote about drugs here. Rock and roll is not drugs, but it’s similar to drugs. It’s an effervescent feeling, but it’s fleeting. It might never be as great or as satisfying as it was some time in the past. It might be social, but for me it wasn’t. It was just me in a room, with either a tape deck or a CD player, which are things that are hard to find these days. It’s like the wind, and wild is the wind, but one day the wind will stop blowing! Rock and roll was about a spirit, but that just shows how elusive it is. What will you do when that spirit dies?

And that is why, when that spirit started to flame out, it seemed compelling to me because it felt like something that I thought was a permanent state of affairs was starting to ebb away.

That’s why I thought of him as a failure, maybe even a noble failure. He was one of the most impressive rock stars I had ever seen, why wasn’t he more well known in Singapore? At that time, he was just a little more of a fringe guy, the guy who acted in a muppet movie (Labyrinth). And another reason is that he seemed to be a guy haunted by his drug habit for years. It was all in his music, and he never tried to hide it. He could even be a spokesman for anti-drug campaigns. I wasn’t a drug addict as a teenager, but I could completely relate to his struggles to tame his wilder side, his excesses. And maybe I was judgemental of the time of his glass spider tour, when he tried but failed to capture his past glories. So in a way, the David Bowie did seem to be quite lost.

Today David Bowie is celebrated. When I first came across him in the 90s, he was of course popular, but his work still had yet to sink in. It may even have been one of the low points in his musical legacy, but it was around the time when the first set of reissues started to appear, and maybe that was a case being made for his legacy. At that time, though, it seemed that the Beatles and the Stones and the bands of the 60s were the ones with iron-clad claims for greatness.

As the 90s wore on, bands appeared that appeared to be shaped by his legacy. Suede and Morrissey openly emulated him. Maria McKee basically became the female Bowie for one album. Anybody who put on eyeliner to go on stage was compared to him. Lady Gaga especially. As time went on, and as music became more and more visual, you could no longer escape his influence, and that’s how deep and wide it had become. When he disappeared for 10 years, it didn’t even seem that he was ever away, such was the extent of the 80s revival, that it just seemed that his imprints were everywhere.

And even when you accepted that David Bowie’s later work was a step down, there were enough highlights in that part of his career that demanded to be taken seriously. Late Bowie was still vital in a way that – say late Stevie Wonder would have loved to be.

When he died, there was a great outpouring of grief, and that is because he had such an impact on popular music. I’m not even sure that we’ll see that for Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson when they go away. David Bowie died when he was still massively relevant. His early work practically made the world that we live in today. He expanded the vocabulary of rock music, he put in all the camp elements. He pushed the boundaries in 2 or 3 different fields of music. He may have been a bit of a fascist at one point but he was forgiven because his music always broke down boundaries. He always built bridges: glam rock was a bridge to the LGBT community. Plastic soul was a bridge to the blacks. His ambient stuff was a bridge to the avant garde. Later on in life, he tried to build a bridge to the drum and bass community. His late work became a bridge to his own past and his own legacy.

Lana Del Rey and the Karen rant

Lana Del Rey just published some stuff on her Twitter that’s going to raise a lot of eyebrows. I’m going to talk about it, because I think it’s similar to something I’ve seen before.

She called out some of the other people who just turned themselves into eye candy for more clicks on spotify or whatever streaming platform. Some of the biggest stars today are that way because they just go on and on about stripping and fucking. It wasn’t a totally unreasonably complaint, and yet, she got herself into a lot of trouble because the vast majority of the names she named were colored people.

So here’s the conceit of “indie” music. What I’ve come to think is that a lot of the time, in American popular music, it’s the black people who were on the cutting edge. You could think about Elvis as being some kind of a bridge, who blended country music with some of the innovations from black people’s R&B music, and brought “rock and roll” to the masses. And then in 1960s, people started getting into “rock” music, as opposed to “rock and roll”. Essentially, it was rock and roll, but stripped of certain black elements.

It usually followed a pattern: you had white people doing their version of the hip thing. There’s nothing inherently racist about wanting to carve out a niche for yourself, and filling in the space that better reflects your background. But then it started alienating the black peoples’ audience, so that wasn’t really cool. That was the strange story that Jimi Hendrix was instrumental in helping to push rock in a direction that was harder, more like heavy metal (although I don’t know if it would go that far). And inadvertently, the rise of “rock” would create a genre that all but excluded black people or black bands.

And take for example, indie music. In the beginning, it felt like some kind of a freedom and liberation from music making machines, collectives that mass produced hair metal, motown and Philly. But when you looked closer, it was some kind of a white privilege, that you’d have an audience, even though you were rough and unpolished. You could be more “literary”, ie you made the music more about culture than about the music qualities. Of course, as an impressionable teenager, I was taken in by many of the mystical qualities of indie bands. But eventually I did suss out that the ones that I really liked were those who had great musical qualities, and that 99% of indie bands simply either suck or are mediocre.

In contrast, people like Prince and Michael Jackson had to pull out all the stops for their show. They had to be flashy, they had to write and perform everything, they had to put up incredible shows with great props. And in the face of all that vast amounts of effort, they got labelled as “sell outs” and “too commercial”. I used to disdain the flashiness of Michael Jackson around the time of “Dangerous”. But when you compare it to that other famous album that came out around the same time, “Nevermind” by Nirvana, of course he put a lot more effort and craft into it. “Nevermind”, notwithstanding that it had a few genius songs, was made by a guy who had a needle in his arm half the time he was making it.

So I remember Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins saying in an interview, “Michael Jackson has sold 10 times more records than us. Does it make him better than us?” Notwithstanding that I’d agree that “Siamese Dream” (the current Pumpkins album during the time of that interview) is just a wee bit more of a classic than “Dangerous”, which was Michael Jackson’s last hurrah, but now when you think about it, there’s just a lot of resentment by a white guy that some black dude got ahead of him.

I would say that the vast majority of indie artists aren’t going to be prejudiced against “other types” of people. But it does embody some kind of privilege that one would associate with being white. You just had to celebrate your own culture, celebrate who you were, and in many ways, it would be enough. You just needed a few thousand people to buy your latest record, and it would be good enough. Good storytelling would be enough. Being rough around the edges would be enough. Being “literary” and maybe a little oblique when it comes to your intentions. Being unique and being yourself. There aren’t a lot of coloured people who have that kind of privilege!

You knew that you were already accepted, and you could just have a lot of leeway to experiment how you like. Whereas if you were a black person, you just had to be that much more conservative about what you put out. If you’re Asian, well you’re almost invisible. Well all this was maybe up to around 10, 15 years ago. These days, everythings a little more mixed up… and yet it makes things even worse because, let’s face it, an endless exploration of the various nuances of your identity, and doing all that semiotics doesn’t really substitute for making great music.

So Lana Del Rey did sound like she was getting a little upset that a lot of people out there were twerking their fit and perfect bodies and their tight little asses to the top of the charts. It wasn’t completely wrong to think that it was crass, and wonder what on earth the music scene had come to. But the implication that some kind of commercial success is owed to you because there “should” be a more discerning audience out there just comes off as being quite sour to me. I’m not surprised that she got attacked for being another “Karen”. But she was just clueless that some kind of privilege that she used to have was gone. Yes, it’s nice to harken back to some era a few decades ago when you didn’t have to be eye candy and totally common denominator to reach a large enough audience to fill your rice bowl. It’s nice to be able to do something more literary and sophisticated and leave the sex out of it. If only she were operating right in the middle of the Lilith Fair era, when you could have a reasonably OK existence making plain, barely passable music that spoke to the Karen identity.

I sympathise with her when I think about how one-dimensional music has become, although, truth be told, she’s not talented enough to stand on the pantheon with other geniuses like Bjork, Kate Bush or Joni Mitchell. But yes, point very well taken about the depressing state of music in 2020.

Look, Lana Del Rey, if you want artistic freedom, true artistic freedom, you’re just going to have to contend with being an “indie” artist. Even when times were good, people very rarely got to have both artistic freedom and financial freedom. Too bad you’re not operating in the 90s.

Video Killed the Radio Star

I used to believe that the 1990s were revolutionary for music. First was the rise of indie music, and that was represented by Kurt Cobain taking Michael Jackson’s place at the top of the billboard album chart. During the 60s to the 80s, the studio system ruled. Sometimes they were marvellous: you had Phil Spector, Motown, Philly. You had the Southern California yacht rock system, the hair metal system. Now, you had the punks taking over the world. It was the beginning of a great democracy movement for music. For a few brief glorious years, it would unleash one last great burst of creativity for the rock music movement. Anybody and everybody who was talented enough could start a rock band, and become popular enough, and that would fuel their creative efforts. They could sell millions of albums. This was true for a lot of the great bands of the 90s, who started off as indie bands who could get access to enough resources to fully explore and develop their creative visions, and yet never had to worry about compromising their artistic integrity or fit into a pre-defined system.

The other revolution of the 90s was not a good one. It was the rise of the internet, and it also contributed to music becoming free. A huge revenue stream was severed like a jugular vein. Suddenly it seemed as though piracy were becoming the norm for the transmission of music. From having to cough up $15 for just one CD, music suddenly became free overnight. Previously everybody had to own their own LP or CD in order to just hear the music. Now, they could just stream it, or they could just rip it and swap it when they were done.

It used to be that some of the greatest work produced in the rock era were by musicians who managed to buy themselves plenty of time to just work and tinker in the studio. “Pet Sounds” is mostly created to Brian Wilson, but the myth that a young man with a mental history created this work all by himself does not stand up to scrutiny. He was able to get his band mates to go out touring and leave him alone to work on it, he could call on the wrecking crew, a crack band of musicians, to play the symphonies he wrote. We’ll never have a system like this again in the forseeable future.

This was a system that was dismantled, first, by the punk ethos of the indie band system, and afterwards by the loss of sales of physical media.

I had been aware of these two developments. But for me, the big nail in the coffin was something that happened more recently, and over the last 10 years. I’ve been wondering why the quality of the music went down. Yes, the studio and engineer system was being dismantled, but for a while, there was a respectable body of work being made.

The big nail in the coffin for me was the rise of video streaming, and you could put this back to the introduction of the iphone. Ever since the rise of the internet, it was prophesised that anything that was physical was basically dead as a business proposition, although it took more than 10 years for that to happen. In fact, the early years of the internet seemed to fuel the rise of mega bookstores and mega music marts like Borders / Virgin / Barnes and Noble / Tower / HMV. It seemed that the internet facilitated the word of mouth hype about good music, and it made people (including myself) want to hunt down those treasures.

But the rise of iphones coincided with other developments that killed the music system.

First, it put the focus on the platform instead of the artist. When you bought a CD, the music that you listened to was tethered to several tags. There was the artist, the producer, and the record label. If it was a hit single, you caught on to the song itself. If it was an album, you caught on to the artist. Putting the artist front and center was one of the features of the rock era. You usually didn’t care so much about the radio that you listened it on, or the radio station, or your CD player.

Suddenly, that changed. The focus turned to the platform which gave you the music, apple tunes or spotify or pandora or tidal or amazon music or whatever. These were the main players, the stars, who replaced the rock stars. There’s no such thing as the rock star anymore, unless they were a holdover from the past, on nostalgia tours. The Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club bands of the world.

Maybe that’s why there’s such a nostalgia for vinyl, because vinyls had the best packaging. They were basically small posters that you held in your hand, and a piece of plastic that promised you 30-50 minutes of aural heaven. It represented a reverence for music that no longer existed in this day and age, when the artist could be put on top of a pedestal, and there would be a community of people, a fan club, holding up that pedestal.

The second development was the rise of the video on demand. It’s always been the case that we had music on demand. That came about with car tape decks, boom boxes, and walkmans. The compact disc was a wonderful invention, but you could not play them on portable devices, other than your car stereo. Discmans simply did not have battery life at all. The ipod was in a way the killer of the CD, because it was the walkman that the CD audiences wanted but never got.

Suddenly, video on demand happened, almost for the first time. Yes, you already had DVDs, but DVDs were expensive, and almost never worth it: you never owned physical media for DVDs because they never rewarded repeat viewing the way that CDs reward repeat listening. With the rise of youtube, you had music and video co-existing in the same platform.

And the rise of video on demand gave rise to the third thing: music became a whole lot more visual. In fact it used to be that the aural portion of it used to dominate. Now the whole dynamic is inverted, and the visual portion of it is everywhere.

When MTV first came up, it was a gimmick. It was regarded with suspicion, and in Elvis Costello’s words, a mere advertising device which drew attention away from the music. It spawned plenty of anxiety, back then, that music was becoming secondary to the video, but the video always had a subservient relationship with the music, it was always an accessory to the video.

MTV helped to change that equation. Probably the first branch of rock music where the imagery started to dominate was David Bowie and glam music. True, Elvis was the first rock icon, but he was first and foremost a musician who just happened to be young and handsome. Various rock groups postured around the standard iconography of the rock group, but David Bowie was one of the first to introduce theatre and fashion into music. Later on, MTV put it front and center. The biggest stars of the 80s – Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson – were the ones who put a lot of work into the visual aspects of their art. There was a pushback against this in the 90s due to the grunge movement, but the rise of the teenyboppers and Britney Spears made music a much more visual experience.

Suddenly, musicians were no longer just musicians. They were performers, and music was merely a portion of their craft. Lifestyle and image has always been a part of popular music, but in this day and age, it’s more like popular music is a part of the lifestyle and image of the performer. They used to be called pop stars, and now it’s more like they’re influencers who simply happen to make music. It used to be that the Beatles had to make one great album every year (which is why they burnt out). Then during the fat years, you could spend all the time you wanted / needed to make that perfect album every 3-4 years. You could experiment to death, produce it to death, and because music was the main product, people would still hanker after it.

Today, things have changed, and they’ve changed in such a profound way that I can hardly grasp it. We have a “water water everywhere and not a drop to drink” situation. It’s never been easier to release music, and everybody’s basically doing it. But there’s no money behind it, and even in this coronavirus crisis, the one thing that musicians can do that will earn them money – live performances – has gone away. It’s true that indie music can be really vital, but everything is restricted to music that can be made on indie musician’s budget and means of production.

What’s changed is that a lot of musicians are hardly even trying. There has to be an expedited release schedule for music, because these days it’s big personalities that matter, rather than the music. Albums have to be released once or twice a year, or you’ll be forgotten and left off the news cycle. Music has to be ephemeral. Storytelling has replaced music as the center of importance. It used to be that a lot of rock fans were fans because of the idol worship instead of the music. These people will no longer be interested in your music, if you can be a fan club of an influencer instead. That’ll leave only the true music fans, and your fan base will narrow as a result.

This has happened to a lot of art forms. There was a time when paintings were one of the dominant forms of art. Painting is still important today, but as an art form, it no longer has the cache it once had before cinema or photography proliferated around the world. Novel writing used to be a dominant art form, and the most famous novellists – Dickens, Flaubert, Melville, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Joyce – used to be the superstar artists of the time. Now the entire genre is sidelined because movies has come up to occupy their space, because TV and cinema or even folk music has replaced their storytelling capabilities, because nobody has time to complete reading a book anymore.

It’s not that any of these art forms have gone away. There are more novellists and painters today than ever before. But there’s not a chance that their work will get the attention that their predecessors once did. And my biggest fear is that this will also happen to music. Today, a songwriter could be working on the same creative level as a Lennon / McCartney or a Miles Davis, and people would hardly even notice.

I think that it was Beethoven who was one of the first major rock stars. He made music that demanded to be heard, that could only be front and center, rather than just ambient background entertainment. Wagner was another rock star, and his operas tried to incorporate theatre into the art form, to create something more complete. But he was probably lucky that back in the day, he never had to compete with streaming or music.

I always thought that music was always going to be my friend forever, to paraphrase something that Jim Morrison once wrote. But while I used to listen to music for hours on end as a teenager, I get a little impatient these days. Perhaps my attention span has been so shot to pieces that every computer with an internet connection and an open browser will just suck my attention away.

But a lot of things have conspired against music of late. I thought that the rise of the MP3 and the destruction of the studio system were big threats to the music industry and even music as an art form, but I had no idea that something even bigger and worse was afoot. One of the opening salvos of MTV was “Video killed the Radio Star” was supposed to be about something far in the future, but unexpectedly it’s become rather prophetic.