David Bowie is dead, a simple announcement that has rocked the whole world with grief. It has been a sad start to the year musically. The outrageously sideburned bassist, singer and songwriter Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister of the English rock band Motorhead, whose music was one of the pillars of the heavy metal genre, died as the last year was bidding farewell. Barely two weeks later, as a new year dawned, David Bowie died peacefully after an 18-month, privately fought battle with cancer.
A voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy, Bowie maintained a constant companionship with both genres, adding fashion to complete the trio. As far back as 1965, his fashion sense was already decidedly futuristic and later years would see Bowie constantly reinventing himself in the role of the artist who transcended barriers to become popular music’s mercurial ambassador of fashion and fantasy.
The late 1960s was a heady time for science, sci-fi and music. With the first landing on the moon on July 20, 1969, a corresponding shift in the earthly vision of a hippie idyll marked the shift to a back-to-basics focus on life encroached upon by the flexing of muscles by new technology. As sociologist Philip Ennis noted, “It is probably not hyperbole to assert that the Age of Aquarius ended when man walked on the moon. Not only was the countercultural infatuation with astrology given a strong, television-validated antidote of applied astronomy, but millions of kids who had not signed up for either belief system were totally convinced.”
Times were changing. Sci-fi, music and science began bleeding across barriers and 1969 saw forward-thinking authors from both sides of the Atlantic such as Ballard, Delany, Aldiss and Rachel Pollack (nom de plume Richard R Pollack) among others starting to become accessible through a British publication aptly named New Worlds. The major shift in focus common to these authors was the emergence of narrative techniques that challenged the prevalent, simplistic, linear storytelling techniques of science fiction. In their place, New Worlds brought about a flush of narratives that challenged earlier optimism substituting instead ambiguity (both moral and textual), opting for experimentation, challenging taboos and advocating sometimes even outright nihilism. The New Wave was birthed with publication lengths varying from a series of novels to short stories. One such narrative by the editor Michael Moorcock titled The New Programme featured a mysterious, androgynous secret agent who in his spare time was also a rock star!
The parallels between fiction and reality are transparently evident. In the first of many invented personae Bowie metamorphosed into Ziggy Stardust at the height of swinging London’s glam movement. “Androgynous sexuality and extraterrestrial origin seemed to have provided two different points of identification for Bowie fans,” notes Philip Auslander in Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music, “Whereas some were taken with his womanliness, others were struck by his spaciness.”
Fascinated by space, Bowie released Space Oddity in 1969, which catapulted him to enviable fame, stardom and adulation earning the status of the most immediately recognisable sci-fi song in rock history. In an acknowledgement of predestination, an anecdote narrated by Bowie’s mother at the birth of her son still casts a chilling effect. The experienced midwife in attendance is said to have commented that though she had helped birth thousands of babies, “this child has been on earth before”.
In true sci-fi and astronautical hero Major Tom form, Bowie appeared to spin into an endless orbit destined never to return to earth. “I want it to be the first anthem of the moon,” Bowie once said of Space Oddity, adding drolly, “I suppose it is an antidote to space fever, really.” And fever it was.
As the ’60s roared into the 70s, Bowie began pioneering experiments fusing sci-fi, fantasy and music into a heady cocktail fired by the acid-fuelled psychedelic scene in London. From Karma Man’s elaborate body art that ‘tells’ strange stories of wondrous worlds with a clear reference to Bradbury’s 1951 book The Illustrated Man, Bowie’s use of fantasy, conceit and messianic science created a body of work that arched across fashion, art, video, cinema and music like no other. More than anything else, Bowie understood the power of synergy from a younger, marketing career phase and constantly built on a mosaic of futuristic space, music and inspired reinvention.
For the social scientist and music historian, Bowie’s world is a fascinating overlap of past, present and future. His work is constantly informed/inspired by disciplines other than music. Though mythic creatures such as gnomes and elves, as in the peculiar single The Laughing Gnome inspired possibly by a resurgence of interest in J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, originally published in the mid-1950s, as well as his hypnotic presence as the Goblin King in the film Labyrinth, are the stuff of fantasy, it was the future that fascinated Bowie. Similarities between Stanley Kubrick’s stunning 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and Space Oddity are easily traceable and consciously deliberate. As Bowie has noted, “The publicity image of the spaceman at work is of an automaton rather than a human being. My Major Tom is nothing if not a human being.”
Bowie’s hypnotic presence on stage and film, his ability to ‘foresee’ doomsday scenarios with man’s ‘discovery’ of alien life and the devastating possibility of technology going rogue forged a rich bridge across diverse disciplines in his videos and lyrics. Space Oddity did more than cement Bowie’s reputation; it presaged a media revolution where music videos would gain cultural status along with becoming a rarity in sci-fi and fantasy music. It is the only record that offers science fiction on one side – Space Oddity) and fantasy on the other with Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud, the tale of a mystical boy persecuted by villagers whom he wishes to enlighten. It is undeniably Bowie’s ‘cosmic’ work with its aloof, sleekly clad astronaut lamenting “Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do” that trumpeted the first call for an altered world vision steeped in disillusionment.
(To be continued)
The writer is academic advisor at Lahore Grammar School and may be contacted at [email protected]