The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s

by Peter Doggett

Bowie’s skill was being able to live out the dictum of rock critic Simon Frith: “Rock is entertainment that suggests—by its energy, self-consciousness, cultural references—something more.” He achieved this almost instinctively, whereas Roxy Music, his most cogent rivals as intelligent seventies pop stars, deliberately used their art-school background as a resource. They were a conscious evocation of classic Pop Art principles, deftly using the clichés of fifties and sixties rock to satirize pop’s superficiality, while employing irony and camp as a way of distancing themselves from the purely ephemeral pap around them. Roxy’s frontman, Bryan Ferry, was Bowie’s only serious rival as the self-constructed symbol of seventies Pop Art, though it was his short-term colleague Brian Eno who proved to be more influential than Ferry on the decades to come (and indeed on Bowie himself).