The worst IMO is the Stardust (2020) film. I haven’t seen any David Bowie documentary / life story film which was actually worth viewing… but that was a truly horrible one.
Moonage Daydream is one of the best films I have seen in a very long time. A lovely look into a creative life, totally awesome.
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The fact that he worked with so many influential artists shows how culturally astute he was, thoroughly postmodern, like Andy Warhol in his ability to reflect contemporary culture and thinking
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Sure, he had a knack for finding experimental artists and turning their experimental sound into something sellable to the general public. He did the same thing for multiple “black” musical genres. Hardly on the level or Warhol.
He wasn’t an experimentalist or an innovator, he was a musical interior designer.
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This is by far my favorite Bowie track:
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take the word musical out of that sentence and you pretty much have an accusation aimed at Andy Warhol back in the day
but opinions are many and varied so I am very happy to accept other people see Bowie’s legacy in a very different light to me
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So the opposite of Bowie, who since early in his career has been canonised as the quintessential musical innovator
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If you transported Warhol back to Renaissance Florence, he would fit right in.
I’m not sure “postmodern” really applies to music. Music, like language, has probably always been about quoting/sampling/appropriating anything and everything. It seems more likely to me that the norms of music influenced architecture as cracks were forming in the edifice of high modernism.
Regardless, Bowie made some nice tunes, Warhol had some fun and Studio 54 would have been an amazing place to party.
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Mott the Hoople are indebted to him
Thanks for posting this Carl Wilson review—an entertaining read and it confirms that the things I’d be most interested in at the moment (his collaborators, fresh looks at the later periods) are absent from this one.
I find Wilson’s book about Celine Dion (yes) and musical taste, “Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste” totally delightful, universally recommendable…
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When I was a special educational teacher for kids with autism, I showed them this gem. It went down surprisingly well.
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JesusFacistChrist… Bowie is the Ye of the 70s!?
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Interesting post. I see your point about “postmodern” not really applying to music, but am not convinced by your logic. Speaking from my own expertise, there have always been “postmodern” philosophers, one could argue—including Heraclitus, Protagoras, and Nietzsche—but this does not mean that “postmodern” does not apply to philosophy. And philosophy is a kind of language too, with philosophers appropriating the ideas of others all of the time. Nevertheless, you could be right that the modernist/postmodernist distinction is difficult to apply to music. What makes Mozart modernist, especially when we learn that he appropriated the folk music of his day? It cannot be simply his time period.
Anyway, I think that Bowie’s music, by and large, is amazing, whether or not he is “properly” experimental.
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This is some great insight. I would counter that if you get into some non mainstream dubstep, IDM, or breakcore, these tend to be self referential and counter to the present norms. Wait… Im using words just to sound smart, which Im not always… Im saying that these styles seem to be a reaction to the normal music out there, and if it is brought about from the malaise of current musical trends, that the fact that dubstep went mainstream kinda falls into the trope of all post ideologies being consumed by the mores that they are trying to counteract.
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I think that we have the virtue of seeing a body of work in hindsight with the historical context of Bowies influence. But if you take that away, and put it in the context of his time, it fits that his innovation would influence culture.
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that interview with the gimp mask on infowars… JesusFacistChrist 
Bowie made very appealing art, but I gotta say that he is very flawed as a human. The whole fascist thing really does seem to be in enough interviews to have been more than a drug-induced outburst. And the less I think about the age of his fanbase in the 1970s, when it was permissive to have sex with ‘groupies,’ the better off I’ll be. The curse of knowledge is real.
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this is one of the funniest sentences i’ve read this year
also yeah kinda lmao
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yeah that’s how I feel, it went on for long enough to be at least bizarre behavior, and during his coke-addled era he kind of just went mask-off. like even if it all was just for shock value, a wealthy white artist appropriating nazi ideaology and themes for “shock value” is pretty ethically bad in my book
like again, just for the sake of the argument, if it really is just shock value… who is it for? what is it accomplishing? you certainly aren’t making this group you’re supposedly parodying look bad.
it’s like satire. if your comedy is offensive in a way that is obviously just punching down, that’s not satire, it’s just bad comedy. satire requires some degree of understanding from both the artist and the audience that the characters portrayed in satire are being made fun of
if your satire about nazis isn’t obviously antagonizing nazis for being awful and insane you’re kind of just portraying nazis now… which isn’t great ya know?
same deal for me with shock value. you can do it, but there has to be an understanding between the artist and the audience that the shocking element is telling a greater story and is ultimately punching up at those ideals or themes.
I don’t love the guy but Marilyn Manson is a solid example of using shock value and religious imagery to create satire about organized christianity and the oppression within those structures. like is it heavy handed as fuck? yes. is it also effective? arguably, yeah.
is bowie pretending to be a hitler youth wannabe and also spewing nazi rhetoric in multiple interviews, only to go “whoopsie that was a bit wacky huh” after the fact, effective shock value?
… ehhhhhhhhhhhhh nah.
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