Transitioned: on the Illusiveness of David Bowie

Transitioned: on the Illusiveness of David Bowieby Charles Hughes + Deborah Elizabeth Whaley | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Editor’s note: David Bowie transitioned on January 10, 2016. Transitioned. That seems an appropriate word. Bowie was always different; for him to transition from this world to another seems apropos for a man so illusive. I asked two scholars of art (one a musical historian and the other an expert in visual art) to offer reflections on a man so seminal to pop music. I thank them for their contributions. --Lawrence Ware

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Charles Hughes is the Director of the Memphis Center at Rhodes College, where he designs courses, programs and partnerships. A scholar of black history and culture, he is author of Country Soul, one of Rolling Stones’ 10 best books on music published in 2015. Follow Him on Twitter: @CharlesLHughes2Before the release of Blackstar, David Bowie’s final album, its producer Tony Visconti told Rolling Stone that Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly was a key influence on Bowie and his collaborators. But Visconti also claimed that the influence was less musical than conceptual. "We wound up with nothing like [To Pimp a Butterfly], but we loved the fact that Kendrick was so open-minded and he didn't do a straight-up hip-hop record. He threw everything on there, and that's exactly what we wanted to do.” I agree with Visconti that Blackstar’s debt to Kendrick Lamar is more about scope and feel than about particular musical markers. Still, I hear K-Dot’s musical imprint throughout Bowie’s final record. (And I’m not the only one.) I recognize Lamar’s fluid vocality and layered rhythms in “Girl Loves Me.” I hear his pinched harmonies and jagged song structures in “Blackstar.” I sense the similarity in how Lamar and Bowie use saxophone – played brilliantly by Kamasi Washington and Donny McCaslin, respectively – as both center and subtext. I get the fractured jazz, the troubled beats, the quivering textures, and the interplay between epic and intimate. I find a shared beauty and strangeness, a mutual interest in frailty and salvation. “I remember you was conflicted,” Kendrick says. “Look up here, man, I’m in danger,” Bowie answers. I could be overreaching, I suppose. Still, some of Bowie’s best and most successful albums were direct and sophisticated responses to the latest vanguards in black popular music. Maybe I’m just sad and it’s timely, but right now I hear Blackstar as one of the most interesting of those responses. Regardless, one of the key lessons that I learned from David Bowie is to keep listening. So that’s what I’ll do.+++


Deborah Elizabeth Whaley is an artist, curator, writer, and Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. Her recent book is Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (2015). Her first book is: Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (2010). Follow her on Twitter: @dewhaley
Like many, I have a David Bowie story, that is, I remember the first time I heard his music. My musical tastes are eclectic, something that strengthened during the five years I worked at Wherehouse record store during my undergraduate years, but the majority of music I listened to as a pre-teen, teenager, and young adult was alternative rock. Yet, I came to David Bowie’s music not through rock, but through soul music; it was on the Black radio station KSOL 107.7 that I first heard David Bowie’s song “Fame,” which was later followed by my older sisters and I seeing his performance of “Fame” on Soul Train that same year in 1975.
I actually did not know Bowie was not Black until after seeing him on Soul Train, since most artists on R&B radio at the time were Black. When white artists were on Black radio in the late 60s and 70s, it seemed like a sign of solidarity with Blackness even if not as a sign for Black struggles. For Bowie, his relation to Black struggle as it intersects with music is archived in an interview he did with MTV where he chastised their decision to either not play Black artists or to play Black artists at times that were not peak viewing hours.
I did not see this Bowie interview when it first aired (thanks to cultural critic Lawrence Ware for making me aware of it), but I did grow up watching MTV for more hours than I care to admit in the early 1980s and after. MTV led me to Bowie’s larger repertoire including what became one of my favorites -- 1980’s album Scary Monsters. “Ashes to Ashes” and “Fashion” were on heavy rotation on MTV, and it was about that time I fell in love with his music and with rock music more broadly, including rock acts like Journey, The Babys, and Pat Benatar. By the mid-80s, my David Bowie fandom waned. As I teenager, I still held on to my love of soul and rock music, but was deeply entrenched in alternative music subcultures and kept my Bowie listening to older albums released before Bowie’s Let’s Dance.
Sure, we all (my peer group) secretly listened to a Top 40 music gem every now and then, but if it was not on college radio (KSJS 90.5’s alternative music programming in San Jose), it became open for ridicule during our lunch hour. In my undergraduate years, my peers and I would invest in the game of cultural capital; we marked prestige in our subculture by professing indie label musical tastes and collecting vinyl and imports at a time when CD’s were all the rage. Peter Murphy, former front man of Bauhaus, became my new David Bowie (Bauhaus covered Ziggy Stardust in 1982). Murphy’s collaboration with TV on the Radio and Trent Reznor is a good example of why, after all these years, he still holds this place in my alternative-soul heart.
Social media, popular news, and traditional news outlets are now flooded with Bowie stories since his passing on 10 January 2016. Questions about Black affinity for Bowie, Bowie and underage girls, and the role that race may play in vindicating predatory practices, are circulating alongside and within memorial pieces about his musical legacy – from “Ziggy Stardust” to his trenchant and timely political critique “I’m Afraid of Americans” – to his recently released Blackstar. Writer Pearl Cleage’s powerful rhetorical essay about Miles Davis, “Mad at Miles,” is instructive to these conversations about the ways consumers navigate their decision to demarcate the life practices of a musician from the music that they make and the role that gender consciousness may play in these decisions.
Yet, Bowie is very different from Davis and other musical and popular celebrity icons many are comparing him to (Chris Brown and R. Kelly, for example); he is also an icon of queer, nerd, punk, and disco subcultures. Those who identified with, praised, or ignored Bowie’s fluid performance of gender and sexuality over the years may grapple with their comfort with a non-celebrity whose gender and sexuality is not codified or easily marked as “gay,” “straight,” “male,” “female,” queer, or trans. Bowie defies the language and grammars of these (material) identity constructs and his malleability transformed multiple communities.   
I use Bowie’s music and music videos in my classes on a regular basis, and I generally preface listening sessions with the caveat that we are not listening for pleasure, though we may find the music pleasurable, and that we will learn to analyze popular artifacts that we consume in everyday life outside of binaries. Bowie’s “China Girl” is instructive in my Social Construction of Whiteness and Introductory American Studies courses to deconstruct aspects of his Orientalism. In addition, what are we to make of a somewhat throwaway line in one of my favorite songs, “Ashes to Ashes,” where he uses the term “Jap girl?” How does “I’m Afraid of Americans” illuminate and critique American exceptionalism?
While I often use digital musical examples, this past September, I played “Ashes to Ashes” and additional songs from a Bowie album in my first-year writing and rhetoric course as an example of compelling and contradictory arguments in lyrics and in musical compositions. I wanted them to hear Bowie and other select musical artists on vinyl; we waxed on portions of Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” as well as contemporary musical selections and journal entries they uploaded to our course blog.  
Many questions were entertained that evening: What arguments do you think Bowie and other artists are making and are their arguments convincing? What type of rhetorical strategies (logos, pathos, and ethos) do they use to persuade listeners about the struggles of everyday life? What contradictions are present in the arguments musicians make about real life in their music? These are ongoing questions also entertained in my Black Popular Music course as we study the music of blues, bebop, dub, Afropunk, soul, and hip-hop artists.
When I asked my Rhetoric class at the end of the term which class sessions they found the most useful and why, I was actually surprised many mentioned the day we discussed music journalism and I brought in my old albums and portable turntable. Even though our discussion that September evening stood out to me as one of the best and in some ways the most challenging, especially when aiming to deconstruct an argument in music with no lyrics, I later wondered if I seemed silly and old-fashioned with my dusty albums and record player.  
However, their take-away from that evening was refreshing to hear: Music lyrics and instrumental compositions contain contradictory elements and arguments. Musicians are no less complicated than the music they make, and there is much to learn from the reality of those contradictions. In the wake of Bowie’s passing and given the ensuing conversations about the music and the musician, I wonder if my Rhetoric students are like me -- thinking about the multifaceted dimensions of our conversation while listening to and learning from the ruptures and sutures that the music and the man represents.