by Joyless Staff
One of the most important legacies that David Bowie leaves behind in the wake of his death last week is his key role in catalyzing the potential of music to be not only an aural medium but a visual one. His iconic personae, including Ziggy Stardust, were forged out of both sound and image, through fashion, performance, and a spate of promotional films that presaged the contemporary music video.
It’s fitting, then, that he also penned pop’s greatest ode to watching movies. “Life on Mars?,” the surreal centerpiece of Bowie’s 1972 masterpiece Hunky Dory, expertly captures the sweeping duality of spectatorship, of feeling not only one’s own emotions but also those of the figures on screen. In one brilliant lyric, Bowie’ finds his protagonist—a young girl “hooked to the silver screen”—honing in on this central paradox, as she contemplates whether a film’s characters are as aware that they’re being watched as she is of watching them: “Take a look at the lawman / Beating up the wrong guy / Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know / He’s in the best-selling show.”
The questions raised by the song’s uncanny and cerebral wordplay echo throughout Bowie’s career, which spans not only some of the most vital and revolutionary music of the past 50 years, but the dozens of movies in which he appeared either as an actor or as himself (or somewhere inseparably between the two). Here, the staff of Joyless Creatures pays tribute to this inimitable icon by reflecting on his music, his films, and his influence. (Peter Valelly)
It’s fitting, then, that he also penned pop’s greatest ode to watching movies. “Life on Mars?,” the surreal centerpiece of Bowie’s 1972 masterpiece Hunky Dory, expertly captures the sweeping duality of spectatorship, of feeling not only one’s own emotions but also those of the figures on screen. In one brilliant lyric, Bowie’ finds his protagonist—a young girl “hooked to the silver screen”—honing in on this central paradox, as she contemplates whether a film’s characters are as aware that they’re being watched as she is of watching them: “Take a look at the lawman / Beating up the wrong guy / Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know / He’s in the best-selling show.”
The questions raised by the song’s uncanny and cerebral wordplay echo throughout Bowie’s career, which spans not only some of the most vital and revolutionary music of the past 50 years, but the dozens of movies in which he appeared either as an actor or as himself (or somewhere inseparably between the two). Here, the staff of Joyless Creatures pays tribute to this inimitable icon by reflecting on his music, his films, and his influence. (Peter Valelly)
Basquiat
As an actor, David Bowie's most impressive roles have been those in which he has inhabited the visage of an existing person. Something about his glam rock days and the many different Bowie eras he lived must have given him a preternatural sense of how to believably and thoroughly become someone else. Nowhere is that more masterful than his turn as Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel's Basquiat. Bowie's Warhol has all the angsty self importance and self-conscious self-parody that you'd imagine was wrapped up in the real Warhol. "Wow, ignorant art, that sounds good," he purrs like a smarmy kitten as Jean Michel Basquiat presses his homemade, card-sized paintings on him.
Bowie's presence in the film is limited, but every scene he's in he fills completely. Whether it's Warhol as the signifier of the money of the new art world, loaning $3,000 to his pal Jean Michel Basquiat to buy caviar, or the surprisingly sensitive Warhol making new paintings and muttering forlornly "God, I can't even see what's good anymore," Bowie's performance captures a level of humanity and tragedy that has eluded other actors portraying the pop art progenitor. Not only is Bowie the best Warhol of all time, but he brings out a deep honesty to Warhol's persona. And that's because the two are peas in a pod, two artists whose images outgrew their own stature. Bowie's deep personal connection to Warhol's work is well documented, but perhaps he put it best in his 1971 song "Andy Warhol" when he sang, "Andy Warhol, silver screen / Can't tell them apart at all." (Jeremy Meckler)
Bowie's presence in the film is limited, but every scene he's in he fills completely. Whether it's Warhol as the signifier of the money of the new art world, loaning $3,000 to his pal Jean Michel Basquiat to buy caviar, or the surprisingly sensitive Warhol making new paintings and muttering forlornly "God, I can't even see what's good anymore," Bowie's performance captures a level of humanity and tragedy that has eluded other actors portraying the pop art progenitor. Not only is Bowie the best Warhol of all time, but he brings out a deep honesty to Warhol's persona. And that's because the two are peas in a pod, two artists whose images outgrew their own stature. Bowie's deep personal connection to Warhol's work is well documented, but perhaps he put it best in his 1971 song "Andy Warhol" when he sang, "Andy Warhol, silver screen / Can't tell them apart at all." (Jeremy Meckler)
Control
| “Don’t you remember?” I shouted to my mother, to my brother. “I have been telling you that everything is held back, tamed, walled in by boredom, unliberated! And now look at that flood, at that flowering, at that bliss…” —Bruno Schulz, The Age of Genius | My father looked at the floor, took a moment, and then said, very quietly: “You know we had a black and white television, don’t you?” —Dylan Jones, “David Bowie: How a master of invention changed British culture for decades” |
In the week since David Bowie’s death, I’ve encountered much less writing about his biography than I have about the ways he altered the lives of ordinary mortals. The takeaway image of Bowie, master of image, is not of Bowie himself but of someone else, a kid in a bedroom. It could be any kid, anywhere, so long as an alien rock star has just now infiltrated their colorless world. Maybe the kid’s standing in front of a mirror, inspecting and dancing with the person in the glass. Maybe the mirror’s flanked by pictures, of Bowie, of Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. Maybe the kid’s shirtless, but until they’ve chosen a skin and opened the bedroom door, that’s for their eyes only. It’s important to wrest these impressions away from the archetype of pale, skinny torsos. Every body has to learn, in a closed-off room filled with music, how to perform.
The opening scenes of Control visualize, in black and white, the archetype. The torso belongs to Ian Curtis, a number of years before his band Joy Division makes him famous. His shoulders are a match for the ones on the cover of Aladdin Sane, minus the blush and the crystal teardrop. As “The Jean Genie” plays, he looks himself over, fogs up the mirror with his breath and traces the words he’s hearing. He arranges his body into poses. Regardless of how much Bowie will influence his future life as a performer, right now he’s not so much Ian Curtis as he is a 1970s British kid miming a much broader transformation. There are any number of reasons to film his story in black and white, but in these scenes the decision has little to do with him. Bowie’s arrival didn’t necessarily turn Kansas into Oz, the palette argues, or make the world any more visibly colorful than it was before. Flowering can occur in the absence of reds, blues and greens. (Geoffrey Stueven)
The opening scenes of Control visualize, in black and white, the archetype. The torso belongs to Ian Curtis, a number of years before his band Joy Division makes him famous. His shoulders are a match for the ones on the cover of Aladdin Sane, minus the blush and the crystal teardrop. As “The Jean Genie” plays, he looks himself over, fogs up the mirror with his breath and traces the words he’s hearing. He arranges his body into poses. Regardless of how much Bowie will influence his future life as a performer, right now he’s not so much Ian Curtis as he is a 1970s British kid miming a much broader transformation. There are any number of reasons to film his story in black and white, but in these scenes the decision has little to do with him. Bowie’s arrival didn’t necessarily turn Kansas into Oz, the palette argues, or make the world any more visibly colorful than it was before. Flowering can occur in the absence of reds, blues and greens. (Geoffrey Stueven)
David Bowie (self-titled 1967 album)
David Bowie's self-titled debut album found the 20 year old artist at his most distinctively British. Up until this point, Bowie had released a handful of freakbeat singles under his actual name Davy Jones (which he soon changed to Bowie when The Monkees turned up on the music scene with a Davy Jones in their line-up). Of these early singles, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving" is the best and is a perfect exemplar of London’s mod sound. It’s a mid-tempo rocker that completely disintegrates into a freakbeat rave-up with loads of feedback à la The Creation or The Yardbirds.
Bowie rarely repeated himself and his debut remains a charming slice of British psychedelia. Bowie flirts with music hall and cabaret as much as he explores the more whimsical side of fairytale psych. The Kinks may have perfected the former styles, while the Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd couldn't be matched in the latter; but Bowie, as always, brings his own idiosyncratic flair to the material. With his pageboy haircut, he plays the part of a dashing dandy, crooning with a cockney intonation throughout David Bowie (his iconic strangulated vocals are nowhere to be found on this one). The album is uniformly good, but the highlight of the record is the marching song “Rubber Band,” with Bowie laying down a forlorn tuba as the lead instrument and a vocal that would’ve tickled Professor Stanley Unwin, the inventor of gobbledygook. Other standouts are the quirky character sketch “Uncle Arthur” and the breezy “Love you Till Tuesday” which finds the young ‘Starman’ intimating at the space imagery that would dominate his early 70s albums with the line “don’t be afraid of the man in the moon because it’s only me.” (Michael Montag)
Bowie rarely repeated himself and his debut remains a charming slice of British psychedelia. Bowie flirts with music hall and cabaret as much as he explores the more whimsical side of fairytale psych. The Kinks may have perfected the former styles, while the Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd couldn't be matched in the latter; but Bowie, as always, brings his own idiosyncratic flair to the material. With his pageboy haircut, he plays the part of a dashing dandy, crooning with a cockney intonation throughout David Bowie (his iconic strangulated vocals are nowhere to be found on this one). The album is uniformly good, but the highlight of the record is the marching song “Rubber Band,” with Bowie laying down a forlorn tuba as the lead instrument and a vocal that would’ve tickled Professor Stanley Unwin, the inventor of gobbledygook. Other standouts are the quirky character sketch “Uncle Arthur” and the breezy “Love you Till Tuesday” which finds the young ‘Starman’ intimating at the space imagery that would dominate his early 70s albums with the line “don’t be afraid of the man in the moon because it’s only me.” (Michael Montag)
The Man Who Sold the World
Released in 1970, The Man Who Sold the World is often seen as the beginning of the David Bowie saga as we know it; while his eponymous albums in 1967 and 1969 introduced him to the world (the latter to be rereleased as Space Oddity), The Man Who Sold the World was the first to feature the backing band that would become known as the Spiders from Mars. More importantly, this was the first release to point to the genre-bending eclecticism for which he would later become known while showcasing subject matter and lyrical delivery that are both unnerving and thrillingly exciting.
Through its nine tracks, The Man Who Sold the World exhibits nonstop musical innovation. The eight-minute opener, "Width of a Circle," demonstrates the influence of the then-ubiquitous Led Zeppelin with its propulsive blues-rock riffs, though the song also segues into dreamy psych-rock interludes that perfectly match Bowie's surreal lyrics ("His nebulous body swayed above / His tongue swollen with devil's love"). My favorite Bowie song of all time, "All the Madmen," has slightly disturbing lyrics regarding insanity and conformism (just listen to that chorus!), but its fuzzy guitar work and odd instrumentation (such as a wayward recorder) are nothing less than invigorating. "Black Country Rock" and "She Shook Me Cold" come close to hard rock while "After All" and "Saviour Machine" point towards the psychedelia of another of Bowie's peers, Pink Floyd, with the lyrics of the latter song prophesying a future overrun by omniscient computers. The titular track, meanwhile, features a guitar riff both exciting and dreary, vocal and mixing effects that give the impression of mounting madness, and cryptic lyrics that offer a darker version of the "Starman" that would later occupy a large part of Bowie's mythology. (It was also one of Kurt Cobain's favorite songs.)
There is some controversy over The Man Who Sold the World, as some of the musicians (Tony Visconti and guitarist Mick Ronson especially) allege that they wrote all of the songs in collaboration (though Bowie was credited as composer), while Bowie devoted his attention to his new wife, Angie. Whatever the collaborative backstory, The Man Who Sold the World presages the chameleonic quality of Bowie's masterpieces throughout the seventies, particularly his "Berlin Trilogy." (The cover art, also, is one of the first iterations of Bowie's famously androgynous persona.) Even if some of the music is indebted to popular bands of the time, it has a jagged, maverick quality that sets it apart from anything of its time or since – as though an extraterrestrial listened to music from the Top 40 charts and attempted its own alien interpretation.
Many recent tributes to Bowie have emphasized a personal, coming-of-age connection to his work, and I suppose that's true of this, too: I first listened to The Man Who Sold the World as a senior in high school, when I began to realize that the arbitrary categories of movies and music – mainstream or independent, rock or pop, entertainment or art, drama or comedy – were often constricting and damaging to artists. Just like the 1976 film for which David Bowie would be acclaimed as actor, The Man Who Fell to Earth, his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World straddles all of these categories and ultimately obliterates them, finding more humanity and originality in the gray areas between these simplistic genres. The more often you listen to this album, the more complexities and oddities it offers. Just like David Bowie himself. (Matt Levine)
Through its nine tracks, The Man Who Sold the World exhibits nonstop musical innovation. The eight-minute opener, "Width of a Circle," demonstrates the influence of the then-ubiquitous Led Zeppelin with its propulsive blues-rock riffs, though the song also segues into dreamy psych-rock interludes that perfectly match Bowie's surreal lyrics ("His nebulous body swayed above / His tongue swollen with devil's love"). My favorite Bowie song of all time, "All the Madmen," has slightly disturbing lyrics regarding insanity and conformism (just listen to that chorus!), but its fuzzy guitar work and odd instrumentation (such as a wayward recorder) are nothing less than invigorating. "Black Country Rock" and "She Shook Me Cold" come close to hard rock while "After All" and "Saviour Machine" point towards the psychedelia of another of Bowie's peers, Pink Floyd, with the lyrics of the latter song prophesying a future overrun by omniscient computers. The titular track, meanwhile, features a guitar riff both exciting and dreary, vocal and mixing effects that give the impression of mounting madness, and cryptic lyrics that offer a darker version of the "Starman" that would later occupy a large part of Bowie's mythology. (It was also one of Kurt Cobain's favorite songs.)
There is some controversy over The Man Who Sold the World, as some of the musicians (Tony Visconti and guitarist Mick Ronson especially) allege that they wrote all of the songs in collaboration (though Bowie was credited as composer), while Bowie devoted his attention to his new wife, Angie. Whatever the collaborative backstory, The Man Who Sold the World presages the chameleonic quality of Bowie's masterpieces throughout the seventies, particularly his "Berlin Trilogy." (The cover art, also, is one of the first iterations of Bowie's famously androgynous persona.) Even if some of the music is indebted to popular bands of the time, it has a jagged, maverick quality that sets it apart from anything of its time or since – as though an extraterrestrial listened to music from the Top 40 charts and attempted its own alien interpretation.
Many recent tributes to Bowie have emphasized a personal, coming-of-age connection to his work, and I suppose that's true of this, too: I first listened to The Man Who Sold the World as a senior in high school, when I began to realize that the arbitrary categories of movies and music – mainstream or independent, rock or pop, entertainment or art, drama or comedy – were often constricting and damaging to artists. Just like the 1976 film for which David Bowie would be acclaimed as actor, The Man Who Fell to Earth, his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World straddles all of these categories and ultimately obliterates them, finding more humanity and originality in the gray areas between these simplistic genres. The more often you listen to this album, the more complexities and oddities it offers. Just like David Bowie himself. (Matt Levine)
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is directed by the great Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, boasts a phenomenal electronic score by legendary composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (who also appears in one of the lead roles), and premiered at Cannes. Despite this pedigree, the 1983 film seems like an obscurity or curiosity within David Bowie’s filmography as an actor, outflanked by the more stylish and traditionally Bowie-esque The Man Who Fell To Earth and The Hunger. However, Bowie’s performance in the film is a dark-horse candidate for his finest ever, as he convincingly embodies the rugged, tormented, and regretful Captain Jack Celliers, a British soldier held in captivity at a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. Celliers is one of four men who provide the coordinates for the film’s unwieldy but captivating psychodrama, alongside the titular Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence (Tom Conti), who is a fellow prisoner, as well as camp leaders Captain Yonoi (Sakamoto) and Sergeant Hara (played by Takeshi Kitano, later a terrific filmmaker himself). Tracing the contours of the four men’s relationships to one another, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence deftly and subtly examines power, violence, honor, and homoeroticism, but never becomes didactic. Beautifully directed by Oshima, the film nonetheless feels a bit rough around the edges, a bundle of digressions and vignettes that, while potent and striking, never finds a cohesive narrative rhythm. But Bowie helps hold things together, evincing a surprising degree of pathos and gravity in a magnetic turn that proves he’s a natural-born actor. (Peter Valelly)
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
David Bowie, possibly the greatest solo musician of the post-rock-and-roll era, is also pop history’s quintessential master of “the shock of the new.” The furthest-out albums released during his classic period—namely, 1976’s majestically wracked Station to Station and the 1977-79 “Berlin trilogy” (Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger)--still sound uniquely alien and inspired today. Yet while I cherish all of those albums, my favorite Bowie record has long been Scary Monsters, the 1980 album widely regarded as his “return to Earth” following the experimental forward march of his mid-to-late ‘70s work.
In my review of The Man Who Fell To Earth, I described Scary Monsters as Bowie’s “wisest” album, and I still can’t think of a better word to encapsulate it. Both its lyrics and its sonics bear the scars of Bowie’s tumultuous career to date. His songwriting hits jagged peaks of anguish and remorse throughout, but the album’s overall headspace is buoyed by a world-weary resolve, a sensation of having made it this far, and perhaps of having overcome. Musically, the album may mark a return to more conventional rock forms after a few years spent toying around at the genre’s fringes with Brian Eno in Berlin, but it also features many of the same personnel who joined Bowie on that journey, including both his longtime rhythm section (led by the brilliant guitarist Carlos Alomar) and producer Tony Visconti, with lead guitarist and Eno affiliate Robert Fripp also dropping by to lend his warped riffage to most of the tracks. Together, this outfit crafts a fractured yet anthemic art-rock sound, pushing defiantly into new wave and post-punk but never quite assimilating.
The result is a suite of raw-nerve dioramas that finds Bowie, for once in his career, untethered from identity, not quite able to piece together a whole self. In “Ashes to Ashes,” his greatest song ever, he gestures mournfully towards his star-making early persona of Major Tom, who becomes a lens for Bowie to eulogize the past decade. “Teenage Wildlife,” meanwhile, seems to lash out at reckless youth, targeting not just Bowie’s contemporary imitators but his own memory of his young self. Other songs, though, look towards the future: “Fashion,” a jarring fusion of art-rock dissonance and New Romantic synth-pop allure, remains one of Bowie’s most forward-thinking and unlikeliest singles, while “Up the Hill Backwards” is an anxious, ambivalent hymn to perseverance. And then there are the album’s bookends: “It’s No Game, Pt. 1,” a skittering, discomfiting opener that boasts Bowie’ s most unhinged vocal performance, and the concluding “It’s No Game, Pt. 2,” which finds the same song delivered with a mixture of wistfulness and grim, knowing acceptance.
Given the hard commercial turn that Bowie took with the (admittedly very good) Let’s Dance three years later, it’s hard not to see Scary Monsters as a swan song for Bowie the innovator. While he would regain his creative footing eventually, he would never again find himself both standing astride the zeitgeist and firing on all cylinders. (Peter Valelly)
In my review of The Man Who Fell To Earth, I described Scary Monsters as Bowie’s “wisest” album, and I still can’t think of a better word to encapsulate it. Both its lyrics and its sonics bear the scars of Bowie’s tumultuous career to date. His songwriting hits jagged peaks of anguish and remorse throughout, but the album’s overall headspace is buoyed by a world-weary resolve, a sensation of having made it this far, and perhaps of having overcome. Musically, the album may mark a return to more conventional rock forms after a few years spent toying around at the genre’s fringes with Brian Eno in Berlin, but it also features many of the same personnel who joined Bowie on that journey, including both his longtime rhythm section (led by the brilliant guitarist Carlos Alomar) and producer Tony Visconti, with lead guitarist and Eno affiliate Robert Fripp also dropping by to lend his warped riffage to most of the tracks. Together, this outfit crafts a fractured yet anthemic art-rock sound, pushing defiantly into new wave and post-punk but never quite assimilating.
The result is a suite of raw-nerve dioramas that finds Bowie, for once in his career, untethered from identity, not quite able to piece together a whole self. In “Ashes to Ashes,” his greatest song ever, he gestures mournfully towards his star-making early persona of Major Tom, who becomes a lens for Bowie to eulogize the past decade. “Teenage Wildlife,” meanwhile, seems to lash out at reckless youth, targeting not just Bowie’s contemporary imitators but his own memory of his young self. Other songs, though, look towards the future: “Fashion,” a jarring fusion of art-rock dissonance and New Romantic synth-pop allure, remains one of Bowie’s most forward-thinking and unlikeliest singles, while “Up the Hill Backwards” is an anxious, ambivalent hymn to perseverance. And then there are the album’s bookends: “It’s No Game, Pt. 1,” a skittering, discomfiting opener that boasts Bowie’ s most unhinged vocal performance, and the concluding “It’s No Game, Pt. 2,” which finds the same song delivered with a mixture of wistfulness and grim, knowing acceptance.
Given the hard commercial turn that Bowie took with the (admittedly very good) Let’s Dance three years later, it’s hard not to see Scary Monsters as a swan song for Bowie the innovator. While he would regain his creative footing eventually, he would never again find himself both standing astride the zeitgeist and firing on all cylinders. (Peter Valelly)
Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture
"Not only is it the last show of the tour, it's the last show we'll ever do." Bowie made this pronouncement at the end of a blistering 20-song set at the Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, 1973, and D.A. Pennebaker (Don't Look Back) happened to be filming. The crowd is so shocked by the news, even the cameraman shakes in surprise. Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture is, along with Pink Floyd Live in Pompeii and The Song Remains the Same, one of the most underrated 70s concert movies. Original reviews were bad, citing the murky and dark verité filmmaking, Bowie's theatrical excesses, and meaningless backstage scenes. And yet this set was Bowie in his prime, backed by his greatest band, The Spiders From Mars, and fearless lead guitarist Mick Ronson. Amongst the catalog of early Bowie classics, there are three covers: the Velvet Underground, the Stones, and a haunting 12-string acoustic version of Jacques Brel's "My Death." Also worth checking out is the BBC documentary Cracked Actor, which is to Ziggy what Cocksucker Blues is to Gimme Shelter. (Nathan Sacks)
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