Saturday, February 6, 2016

BOWIE: genius as thief



I remember a caffeine-fueled bull session in the Mesa College Cafeteria in the early to mid-Seventies when I offered to Steve Esmedina, a Bowie partisan, that the future Thin White Duke hadn't had an original musical idea so far in his career. Blubbo, his preferred endearment, didn't argue the point, stating smartly that what's fascinating , exciting , worth talking about in hipster circles and beyond was his particular genius as a synthesizer of genres and emerging trends and taking command of the materials like any true artist would, deconstructing, reshaping, fusing styles and sensibilities together into new kinds of sounds, the influences intact and vital-- Broadway musicals, hard rock, funk and disco grooves, experimental electronics, William Burroughs and Bertolt Brecht--while having Bowie's characteristic imprint on it all. My smart ass assertion was false from the start, since what David Bowie was creating fusion music in the truest sense of what "fusion" is, taking different elements together and coming up with something new, previously unseen or unheard. I could go for the obvious Miles Davis comparison that's lurking in the wings of this career praise, but instead I'll stay with the deservedly much-discussed element of style and fashion in the late artist's work and say that he was one of those creatures radiating the personality that could try on any outlandish article of fashion from any designer's rack and wind up owning the style, making it his; something of great value was added when he liked a style and wanted to work with it. 

The famous quote attributed to Ritchie Blackmore about accusations that he stole guitar riffs from black American blues artists that "the amateur borrows, the professional steals" is instructive. The amateur treats what they've borrowed with too much gentleness and respect, as though they might drop the expensive China they've dared lay a finger on. The results are a species of gutless pretentiousness that glutted an awful lot of art rock in the post -Sgt.Pepper years, music by those who hadn't an idea what they were doing nor the imagination (or nerve)  to pretends they did. The thief likes something and just takes it without permission, absorbs into his or her being until it becomes part of their nervous system , adding their own licks, reshuffling the influx of music styles heard , assimilated, until there is a sound where constituent parts of rock drums, jazz keyboards, atonal guitar skronk, horn funk and Euro serial music emerges, a sound that hadn't roamed over the airwaves or blasted the clubs and concert halls of until the moment when the Thief, the absconder of musical forms, decides that he or she is finished in the creation and releases into the world, fresh, loud, moving as no music before it.

This is what Bowie had done, loving art enough to abuse the formalisms that defined the length and limitations of a genre and make them do more than most had assumed possible. We are living in a world of music that has been formed in large measure by Bowie's decades-long search for new music he wanted to work with. This what David Bowie did. His contribution was immense, and his loss is irreplaceable.

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