Bowie Music Quotes

And these children that you spit on As they try to change their worlds Are immune to your consultations. They're quite aware of what they're going through. - Changes

We can be heroes just for one day

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

It's only forever, not long at all

I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour drinking milk shakes cold and long Smiling and waving and looking so fine don't think you knew you were in this song. - Five Years

Written in pain, written in awe By a puzzled man who questioned What we were here for - Oh! You Pretty Things

The bravest thing David Bowie ever did was to go on stage after Queen at Live Aid.

And the stars look very different today.

In the background Bowie sings of lawmen and cavemen, sailors fighting in dance halls, and I wish he were here now, in this kitchen with me, and I would hold his hand and together we would talk of life—on Mars, or otherwise.

I was not jealous of his intelligence — he is entirely superficial, which is why he never knows what to look like. Or what music to make. Or whether to be a boy or a girl.

Ben had never seen his mother cry before, and it startled him, so he didn't ask again. Right afterward she'd put on her favorite record and played a mysterious song called "Space Oddity," about an astronaut named Major Tom who gets lost in space. She used to listen to the song over and over again. With her eyes closed, she'd place the palm of her hand against the fabric of the speaker, so she could feel it vibrate against her skin.

Til there was Rock You only had God. - Sweet Head

His name is David Bowie and he's nineteen. Would you like to meet him?

Music has both been my doorway to perception and the house I live in

Finally, words cannot speak of music; they cannot elucidate nor illuminate. Both sounds enter through the ears, but only music travels throughout and animates the whole body. David Bowie has always known this.

glam rock and progressive pop, preferably British and often of the androgynous variety: David Bowie, Sparks, Mott the Hoople, Steve Harley, Marc Bolan, Small Faces, Roxy Music, with Suede as a contemporary bookend.

Too embarrassed even to try as long as everyone was looking at me, I made what was probably a fairly unique request. ‘Um, I’ll have a go. But I can’t do it if you’re all looking at me. Can I go inside the wardrobe and sing from there?’ The others looked at me strangely, possibly beginning to worry about the apparent absence of any stage personality in this girl they had just recruited, but to their credit they agreed, without killing themselves laughing, and so in I went. From inside my hidey-hole I sang David Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’. I emerged to a very positive response, the others all declaring that I sounded like Siouxsie Sioux – I was trying very hard to – and while I was quite pleased with myself, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to do it in front of an audience. We could hardly take the wardrobe around with us.

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts. David Bowie

Bowie talks in great, voluble torrents, darting from one topic to the next, parenthesizing and then parenthesizing the parentheses, as if he has too many ideas for one conversation.

You measure a good song the same way you measure architecture, fashion, or any other artistic endeavor. Time. You know when you see a picture of yourself from the eighties with a horrible hairdo and some stone-washed jeans and you think, “How embarrassing—what the fuck was I thinking? Why didn’t somebody stop me?” It’s the same thing Mick Jagger and David Bowie should be thinking every time they hear their cover of “Dancing in the Streets.” The point is, at the time it seemed like a good idea, just like kitchens with burnt-orange Formica and avocado appliances, den walls covered with fake brick paneling, and segregation—all horrible decisions that we now universally recognize as wrong. But somehow when it comes to music, we can’t just admit we made a mistake with “Emotional Rescue.” There’s always some dick who defends the past. “Hey, man, I lost my virginity to ‘Careless Whisper.’ ” I’m sure there was somebody who got laid for the first time on 9/11 but they don’t get a boner when they see the footage of the planes going into the tower.

sexuality is a very personal thing... whatever you perceive as sexuality, that's what it is. And it's not for one person to say that they're heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual, because none of these things are real. People are just sexual. David Johansen New York Dolls

Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them. If I hadn't learned how to be a musician and writer, it wouldn't have mattered what I did. I never knew too many rock people. I would get to a place, some nightclub or other, and see all these famous rockers bonding.

A man’s voice filled up my head from my jawbone up to the plates of my skull. The most beautiful and saddest voice that ever was... A voice like the whole old world calling up from the bottom of the sea. The man on Madeline Brix’s tape was saying he was happy, and he hoped I was happy, too.

My country is in the depths of lethargy and very apathetic, there is very little happening. There’s no action in my country. This is quite a challenge to come over to a country like this where for me the most important thing to me is that the music is a communicative blanket media. Where at home it’s merely something to listen to.

One of the songs which certainly impacted greatly in the summer of 1977 was a song which sounded as if Kraftwerk had gone potty and recruited a bona fide American soul singer. In fact, it wasn’t Kraftwerk, but Italian musician and producer Giorgio Moroder. ‘One day in Berlin,’ says Bowie, ‘Eno came running in and said, “I have heard the sound of the future.” … He puts on “I Feel Love”, by Donna Summer … He said, “This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next 15 years.” Which was more or less right.

From strange alter-egos, to the occult concept of androgyny, and of course including references to Aleister Crowley and his Thelema, David Bowie did decades ago what pop stars are doing now. “Bowie’s alter-ego named Ziggy Stardust was a representation of the “illuminated man” who has reached the highest level of initiation: androgyny. There was also a lot of one eye things going on. Drawing the Kabbalistic Tree of Life The difference between Bowie and today’s pop stars is that he was rather open regarding the occult influence in his act and music. In a 1995 interview, Bowie stated: “My overriding interest was in cabbala and Crowleyism. That whole dark and rather fearsome never-world of the wrong side of the brain.” In his 1971 song Quicksand, Bowie sang: “I’m closer to the Golden Dawn Immersed in Crowley’s uniform of imagery” (Golden Dawn is the name of a Secret Society that had Crowley as member). These are only some examples of the occult influence on Bowie’s work and an entire book could be written on the subject. Since the main antagonist of Labyrinth is a sorcerer who also happens to enjoy singing impromptu pop songs, David Bowie was a perfect fit for the role.

Johnny Rotten slouches at the front of the stage, propped up on the mike stand. He's leaning so far forward he looks as if he might topple into the empty space in front of the audience. · His face is pale and his body is twisted into such an awkward ugly shape he looks deformed. He looks ordinary, about the same age as us, the kind of boy I was at comprehensive school with. He's not a flashy star like Marc Bolan or David Bowie, all dressed up in exotic costumes, he's not a virtuoso musician like Eric Clapton or Peter Green, he's not even a macho rock-and-roll pub-band singer – he's just a bloke from Finsbury Park, London, England, who’s pissed off. Johnny sneers at us in his ordinary North London accent, his voice isn't trained and tuneful, it's a whiny cynical drawl, every song delivered unemotionally. There's no fake American twang either. All the things I'm so embarrassed about, John's made into virtues. He's unapologetic about who he is and where he comes from. Proud of it even. He's not taking the world's lack of interest as confirmation that he’s wrong or worthless. I look up at him twisting and yowling and realise it's everyone else who's wrong, not him. How did he make that mental leap from musically untrained, state-school-educated, council estate boy, to standing on stage in front of a band? I think he's brave. A revolutionary. He's sending a very powerful message, the most powerful message anyone can ever transmit. Be yourself.

The founder of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones (born Lewis Brian Hopkin-Jones), had Welsh blood. David Bowie’s real name was David Jones. Ray Davies. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page both had Welsh ancestors, and even retreated to Wales to write music for Led Zeppelin. “Bron-Yr-Aur.

Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’. Surprisingly, all aboard were in favour. Archie loved that their interest in music was genuine.

Bass was probably the King Bees’ closest follower, hanging out with them at Wimpy bars, coffee shops, parties, and gigs. She knew David well; he was likable, cheerful, enthusiastic, but almost bland and boring in his single-mindedness: “All he wanted to do was practice, and listen to tapes or records that he’d got hold of. That was his life. Everybody regarded themselves as an expert in music—but he really was. What made him different was he would pass a party, or anything, up if there was something he needed to do for his music. For the other kids, that was inconceivable.

On the album that would become Let’s Dance, his delegation was even more extreme, with Rodgers recruiting musicians as well as overseeing the finest details of the arrangements. It was Nile Rodgers who programmed the music. But it was David Bowie who programmed Nile Rodgers.

That fateful year, David Jones sashayed confidently into the epicenter of swinging London, hanging out with the scene’s hippest stars, participating in the shag-tastic promiscuity, convincing many he had more right to be there than they had. Within a year, he had become a leading face in the scene, distinguished in every respect except one—his music. The nerve with which the seventeen-year-old engineered his next career

Bowie himself said, “Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity.”2 After reviewing his troubled early years, British psychologist Oliver James wrote, “What seems to have been the trigger for his shift from distressed and tortured to emotionally healthy, was his adoption of personas in his musical career.”3

Yours was a gritty voice that ran freely through a somnolent tunnel, bringing it up to the wakeful reality of indelible Rock ‘n’ roll. Yours was a peculiar culture adorned in hues of élan and the confidence of recurrent reinvention. Rest in peace, David Bowie. Thanks so much for the music you gave the world.

While Bowie was the great photogenic pop icon, his work about characters and masks, Eno’s art was in disappearance: ‘… Eno’s object was to eliminate himself from his work, to minimise his “degree of participation”, to cleanse his art of the idea of the individual artist,’ wrote Simon Frith and Howard Horne in their book Art Into Pop. Eno was interested in systems music, music that almost played itself and followed repetitive patterns. Bowie was interested in dramatic gestures and melodic sweeps.

music does have an implicit message of its own; it makes its case very pointedly. If that were not the case, then classical music would not have succeeded to the extent that it did ... It makes me very angry ... when people concentrate only on the lyrics because that’s to imply there is no message stated in the music itself, which wipes out hundreds of years of classical music. Ridiculous.

One of the methods that he and Bowie used on Low was the “Oblique Strategies” he’d created with artist Peter Schmidt the year before. It was a deck of cards, and each card was inscribed with a command or an observation. When you got into a creative impasse, you were to turn up one of the cards and act upon it. The commands went from the sweetly banal (“Do the washing up”) to the more technical (“Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation”; “The tape is now the music”). Some cards contradict each other (“Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities”; “Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics”). Some use Wildean substitution (“Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do”). And several veer towards the Freudian (“Your mistake was a hidden intention”; “Emphasise the flaws”). The stress is on capitalising on error as a way of drawing in randomness, tricking yourself into an interesting situation, and crucially leaving room for the thing that can’t be explained—an element that every work of art needs. Did the Oblique Strategy cards actually work? They were probably more important symbolically than practically. A cerebral theoretician like Eno had more need of a mental circuit-breaker than someone like Bowie, who was a natural improviser, collagiste, artistic gadfly. Anyone involved in the creative arts knows that chance events in the process play an important role, but to my mind there’s something slightly self-defeating about the idea of “planned accidents.” Oblique Strategies certainly created tensions, as Carlos Alomar explained to Bowie biographer David Buckley: “Brian Eno had come in with all these cards that he had made and they were supposed to eliminate a block. Now, you’ve got to understand something. I’m a musician. I’ve studied music theory, I’ve studied counterpoint and I’m used to working with musicians who can read music. Here comes Brian Eno and he goes to a blackboard. He says: ‘Here’s the beat, and when I point to a chord, you play the chord.’ So we get a random picking of chords. I finally had to say, ‘This is bullshit, this sucks, this sounds stupid.’ I totally, totally resisted it. David and Brian were two intellectual guys and they had a very different camaraderie, a heavier conversation, a Europeanness. It was too heavy for me. He and Brian would get off on talking about music in terms of history and I’d think, ‘Well that’s stupid—history isn’t going to give you a hook for the song!’ I’m interested in what’s commercial, what’s funky and what’s going to make people dance!” It may well have been the creative tension between that kind of traditionalist approach and Eno’s experimentalism that was more productive than the “planned accidents” themselves. As Eno himself has said: “The interesting place is not chaos, and it’s not total coherence. It’s somewhere on the cusp of those two.

Rock has always been the Devil’s music…I believe rock and roll is dangerous…I feel we’re heralding something even darker than ourselves.” – David Bowie, Rolling Stone, February 12, 1976

A demigod who reaches his apotheosis never mourns for himself. It is the business of his many adulators to mourn for him. He cannot feel sadness to be so great, leaving all the rest of us to champion in trembling misery. I, surprisingly, have very few words to offer, only because this year has taken so many sensational performers from us. There comes a time when the agony of loss is too great, when we feel it too much-- there is nothing left but painful astonishment. My grievances lie more with the Gods for taking him away from us than they do with his parting. I suppose I shall reach the stage of unconscionable sorrow at some point; now I am half confusion and half indignation. It should be impossible for people to be so deeply affected by someone whom we have never formally met, but this is existence: it is a bold measure we take, this stake in sufferance; we must all go through everything together, another proof of the mask of division. We all feel the same things, and Prince's passing is felt no less by anybody. Between him and Bowie, there is now a musical chasm in the world, a place where Gods once dwelt that is now abandoned, and in the Age of Pseudolotry, where what is nonsensical reigns over what is intelligent, we are likely never to see one of his kind again. Goodnight, sweet Prince. We shall go on trundling through this 'thing called life' with hearts defrauded of our greatest love. --On the death of Prince

The basic task performed by the credit rating agencies was to strip derivatives of their individuality. Whether it was David Bowie pioneering securities derived from the perpetual value his music had created or a 30-year conventional mortgage, once a credit rating had been assigned, investors were agnostic. Bowie’s AAA-rated royalties and the AAA mortgage on the house next door were interchangeable, or as Gorton said, “informationally insensitive.

1973 was the year when the United Kingdom entered the European Economic Union, the year when Watergate helped us with a name for all future scandals, Carly Simon began the year at number one with ‘You’re So Vain’, John Tavener premiered his Variations on ‘Three Blind Mice’ for orchestra, the year when The Godfather won Best Picture Oscar, when the Bond film was Live and Let Die, when Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff, opened, when Sofia Gubaidulina’s Roses for piano and soprano premiered in Moscow, when David Bowie was Aladdin Sane, Lou Reed walked on the wild side and made up a ‘Berlin’, Slade were feeling the noize, Dobie Gray was drifting away, Bruce Springsteen was ‘Blinded by the Light’, Tom Waits was calling ‘Closing Time’, Bob Dylan was ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, Sly and the Family Stone were ‘Fresh’, Queen recorded their first radio session for John Peel, when Marvin Gaye sang ‘What’s Going On’ and Ann Peebles’s ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’, when Morton Feldman’s Voices and Instruments II for three female voices, flute, two cellos and bass, Alfred Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style for violin and piano and Iannis Xenakis’s Eridanos for brass and strings premiered, when Ian Carr’s Nucleus released two albums refining their tangy English survey of the current jazz-rock mind of Miles Davis, when Ornette Coleman started recording again after a five-year pause, making a field recording in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, when Stevie Wonder reached No. 1 with ‘Superstition’ and ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’, when Free, Family and the Byrds played their last show, 10cc played their first, the Everly Brothers split up, Gram Parsons died, and DJ Kool Herc DJed his first block party for his sister’s birthday in the Bronx, New York, where he mixed instrumental sections of two copies of the same record using two turntables.

the radical inventions like public art and graffiti. When we think of the eighties, we think more about the music than the art in popular culture. We think about Madonna. Keith and Jean were right there with Madonna, Bowie, Eno. That may be the core of the eighties. I

My favored stick of rock was glam, where Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy Music, Sparks, and Cockney Rebel provided the soundtrack to my youth. Each had an individually captivating sound, and together they told the story I wanted to hear through those times in Britain. Other kids at school were lost in a haze of Pink Floyd and Genesis, or were queuing endlessly to secure Led Zeppelin tickets. We were all members of different factions, but wherever you belonged, the music was inspirational. It was an important voice in our culture, a way for our generation to express its singularity.

That said, I am supremely confident that there would be one exception: We would unanimously agree upon David Bowie being the common pivotal influence on all of our collective musical styles.

Rock ’n’ roll, the superhero to a new generation of misfits, was my lifesaver. A magical conduit to a celebration of outrageousness, sexuality, and decadence came through the music. I could hear it, see it, and feel it. I knew Bowie or Marc Bolan would never have fit in where I was either. The same guys who dug their music would have tortured them as schoolmates.

I went into the control room with Mike and noticed a synthesiser on a desk in the corner. It was a MiniMoog. I’d never seen a real synth before, and it was a fascinating machine to look at. Dials and switches from one side to the other, the rear section tipped up like a portable control panel. In many ways it reminded me of the control panel my dad had made for me as a child, except this one looked incredibly high-tech. I’d always associated synths with prog-rock bands like Yes and ELP, and that sort of music had never really been of any interest to me. I’d liked some of what Kraftwerk had done, and really liked some of the things Bowie had done with Brian Eno, but none of it had ever made me think of synths as a way forward for me.

The pall bearers were holding Pete's coffin, waiting to walk down the aisle—just like bridesmaids. The music began and they started to move, trying to keep pace with David Bowie's 'Changes'.

Self-destructing – in rock, in public, in fact anywhere – is not good for the human spirit, not to mention the lungs, liver and kidneys. Artistically, it’s best approached the way David Bowie did it in the mid-1970s. His cocaine addiction turned him into a withered stick-insect figure of a man but also inspired the best music of his entire career. Then he sorted himself out and became the golden-haired survivor we know and love today.

The opening couplet of ‘Rebel Rebel’, where he sang ‘got your mother in a whirl; she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl’, simply cemented his stature as the figurehead of the disenfranchised.

A tawdry realm of shifting, insecure employment and fleeting glimpses of high reward for little effort. A world where strings are pulled by complete cretins while those who work hard at the creative coalface are at the bottom of a steaming dunghill of vacuity, broken dreams, and empty promises.

For my mother, the experience was emotional. When my music was evolving, I hadn’t allowed her to hear it. For years up on Cloverdale, I had always locked myself in my room, not letting anybody hear what I was doing. Then, after I moved out, I never invited her to hear me working in the studios. So, when Let Love Rule was released, she was completely shocked. She could hear how everything that I had experienced on my journey came alive in that album: Tchaikovsky; the Jackson 5; James Brown; the Harlem School of the Arts; Stevie Wonder; Gladys Knight and the Pips; Earth, Wind & Fire; Miles Davis; Jimi Hendrix; Led Zeppelin; KISS; the California Boys’ Choir; Prince; David Bowie; Miss Beasley’s orchestra; the Beverly Hills High jazz band; the magical spark between me and Lisa; the spirit of our daughter. More than anyone, Mom knew that I had poured every aspect of my life into this effort. That was enough to make her proud. But what blindsided her—and me as well—was the sight of thousands of fans singing lyrics that I had written—and most of those fans didn’t even speak English.

There were girls here with fire-engine-red lips, and boys with such pronounced eyeliner that it looked permanent. And as you moved back to the dancefloor, the music overwhelmed you: Yellow Magic Orchestra, Space, Ultravox, Eno, Fad Gadget, Sparks, Grace Jones, Thomas Leer, Cerrone, Psychedelic Furs and Bowie, obviously, lots of Bowie. On and on it went, a constant swirl of automated Germanic beats – hard-edged European disco, synth-led, bass-heavy … all very angular: Kraftwerk and Gina X, Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, and some early Roxy Music.

The album is still a treasured possession and a source of pride that “not only was I to cover [a] Velvets’ song before anyone else in the world, I actually did it before the album came out. Now that’s the essence of mod.” In forthcoming years, David Bowie would become the world’s best-known champion of the Velvets, but in 1967, his attempts to assimilate its narco-deadpan thuggery resulted in some of his most ludicrous music.

Having written the definitive anthem of the 1970s, David simply gave it away. Some thought that this was a self-serving act, designed to underline his own musical omnipotence. Bob Grace, the man who’d overseen most of Bowie’s recent songs, is emphatic that in giving away the song, Bowie paid a price: “I thought that was a mistake. If David had put out ‘All the Young Dudes’ himself that autumn, he would have been huge beyond our comprehension. It was great he gave [Mott] the song, but I’m convinced it cost him.” The argument ignores the fact that Bowie remained, at heart, a fan. This was simply a spontaneous act, and in any case the music was pouring out of him.

Neil Tennant: I liked anything that had a slightly artificial construct to it. I’ve never really been that interested by authentic music. I think authenticity is a style. But I loved Bowie when he went electric with Low and ‘Heroes’, and I really loved electronic music. Although I wasn’t officially gay at this point, I had gay friends who I would occasionally go to nightclubs with, and you would hear what we would think of as gay disco music. That was heavily electronic. I really loved electronic music, like Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine, and at the same time I loved new-wave music. I liked the pop end of it, the Jam and stuff like that. Then the Human League came along, and OMD’s first album was great. Then, of course, at the same time you had Giorgio Moroder, who wasn’t, lest we forget, cool at this point. In fact, he was quite naff. There was a designer who worked at Marvel Comics who would put on ‘I Feel Love’ because he could put it on, go to the toilet and come back, and it was still playing.

Paul Humphreys: In some ways it was a bit annoying when we found out about the likes of Gary Numan and the Human League, because we thought we’d found our alternative music, and all of a sudden we realised that all around the north of England people were listening to the same things we were – Kraftwerk and Neu! and Bowie and Roxy. Everyone had discovered synth. Synth was this new way to make music, this huge palette of sounds that had never been heard before. Our biggest influence was Kraftwerk, because they were classically trained musicians and so included harmonic structures in what they did. They were brilliant, but they did it in the simplest way. Simplicity, but with great melodies

The Bowie Bond, as it was known, was attractive to insurance companies, which have to make regular payments to their beneficiaries years into the future. Owning a long-term bond, like a Bowie Bond, is how they hedge risk, because they need an asset that offers a regular stream of payouts. Prudential paid $55 million and in exchange got a 7.9 percent interest payment on their principal for fifteen years.* These interest payments were financed by the income generated by royalties from Bowie’s albums recorded before 1990. If for some reason the music did not generate enough revenue (and exhausted a reserve fund), Bowie’s catalog would be owned by Prudential. But that did not happen, since the income from music royalties is fairly stable for older artists with established catalogs.

by refusing to repeat it, much to the despair of their record companies. Both wrote gorgeous sci-fi ballads blatantly inspired by 2001—“Space Oddity” and “After the Gold Rush.” Both did classic songs about imperialism that name-checked Marlon Brando—“China Girl” and “Pocahontas.” Both were prodigiously prolific even when they were trying to eat Peru through their nostrils. They were mutual fans, though they floundered when they tried to copy each other (Trans and Tin Machine). Both sang their fears of losing their youth when they were still basically kids; both aged mysteriously well. Neither ever did anything remotely sane. But there’s a key difference: Bowie liked working with smart people, whereas Young always liked working with . . . well, let’s go ahead and call them “not quite as smart as Neil Young” people. Young made his most famous music with two backing groups—the awesomely inept Crazy Horse and the expensively addled CSN—whose collective IQ barely leaves room temperature. He knows they’re not going to challenge him with ideas of their own, so he knows how to use them—brilliantly in the first case, lucratively in the second. But Bowie never made any of his memorable music that way—he always preferred collaborating with (and stealing from) artists who knew tricks he didn’t know, well educated in musical worlds where he was just a visitor. Just look at the guitarists he worked with: Carlos Alomar from James Brown’s band vs. Robert Fripp from King Crimson. Stevie Ray Vaughan from Texas vs. Mick Ronson from Hull. Adrian Belew from Kentucky vs. Earl Slick from Brooklyn. Nile Rodgers. Peter Frampton. Ricky Gardiner, who played all that fantastic fuzz guitar on Low (and who made the mistake of demanding a raise, which is why he dropped out of the story so fast). Together, Young and Bowie laid claim to a jilted generation left high and dry by the dashed hippie dreams. “The

What was going on with this guy? It was hard to tell, all through his forties. He was more beloved than ever, though his new music had no impact at all. He looked divine posing for photos with Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, who presented him with one of his many Lifetime Achievement Awards. He was excited about his Web site. He had shiny new teeth. He’d become one of those Thanks for the Memories guys, which wasn’t really the kind of artist he’d ever wanted to be. His pop albums were Bowie trying to guess what might be popular; his art albums were Bowie trying to guess what might be cool. But these albums were neither popular nor cool. It turned out nobody wanted to hear Bowie sound unsure of himself. Nobody held it against him. He’d given the world enough.

When I was a teenager I had posters of all of my favorite musicians up on my bedroom walls—David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Edgar Winter’s They Only Come Out at Night, and the first KISS album. My dad didn’t really know what to make of it. One time he came into my room while I was listening to music and looked at all the posters and said, “You’re a fag, aren’t you?” This was an actual one-sided conversation we had.