Good question, and maybe not from the perspective of actually composing or creating as it is always building upon millennia of tradition. BUT! I do think that in the context of popular music, the last truly modernist movement was the punk movement, and specifically post-punk (Killing Joke, Joy Division & PiL). Back in the 50s, 60s, 70s up until the early 80s musical trends drastically changed every few years and young musicians didn’t really want to repeat their immediate predecessors. I think this all changed with MTV and the era of pop superstardom, first moving onto the underground (electronic music, punk, hip hop) and then gradually disappearing in the late 90s. Now we are truly in the postmodern era of popular music, where the vast majority sounds vaguely like something from the previous decades and on purpose.
For me the most fundamental idea of postmodernism in relation to the arts was that that it “locates meaning and even structure in listeners, more than in scores, performances, or composers”, this wikipedia article IMHO does a good job in summing up a postmodern attitude towards music (but not in the part that is shown as a summary here 
):
And yet Punk also challenged (“deconstructed”) the dominant culture of a hierarchy in music (e.g. between the star and the audience, or the mere idea that music has to be “artful” in any way at all) in a way that I would definitely consider postmodern.
Really? I mean folk music was exactly that, no hierarchy nor artfulness. I think punk as a movement just took rock music back to the basics of blues, it didn’t reinvent it. The previous generation, e.g. the bands that stole black folk music and claimed it was their own making were the exception in my opinion.
I don’t know why people like you always phrase these statements in such maximalist terms. See e.g. typical Radiohead topics. I would agree on your statement that Bowie was great in bringing more experimental stuff into the spotlight by streamlining it.
But why do you need statements such as the one above? Sure Bowie made a lot of classic rock albums and was generally rather song oriented. But then there’s e.g. the second half of „Low“, which ditches traditional vocals and lyrics altogether. „Warszawa“ is definitely not pretty standard rock music.
I love that figures like Bowie made pop interesting by flirting with more experimental stuff. Best of both worlds, I don’t understand why you have to make this a „nah, that‘s just rock music and REAL experimental music sounds different“ thing. No offense, but that sounds a bit like unnecessary gatekeeping to me. Sure there‘s always wilder music, but that’s a bit beside the point. This was and is music that many people listened to, which was wilder and more daunting than a lot of stuff.
…whatever u think of bowie…
he was the eye opener and gate keeper to all crossdressing genderfluid self expressiveness…
many might not relate to that, but in his early days, the world was really a different and pretty narrowminded place to be…so, face it or not…he remains the root of all kinds of pop culture genres…
simply can’t argue that…
Hah, I’m not gatekeeping. If you think that a marriage of pop and some experimental sounds is the best of both worlds, great! But our culture has a tendency to raise some artists on a pedestal, which is often not deserved. In the case of Bowie, he was as good as his collaborators, in the case of Low Brian Eno and Tony Visconti. He hired the right people, that’s great. He made very ambitious pop music. But he didn’t really innovate, nor experiment. He hired people who did, and incorporated their ideas into his music.
Disclaimer: I think the Berlin trilogy is really good.
…ooops…somebody is really underestimating here…
get a decent overall grasp on pop culture…all sorts of experimental included…
and sure he did not play along alone…the days of lonely single persons struggeling in self promoting wonderland is nothing but the latest where it’s at…
only a decade ago, that was almost impossible…while working together still rules…
we’re all better, if we’d only find likeminded people to work with TOGETHER…
and hey…brain eno is great…but like hans zimmer is great… pretty spoiled childhoods and lot’s of vorsprung durch technik…u know, back in the days, u needed quite some big bux to afford to be experimental…and we’re not talking working class heros here, like throbbing gristle…
we’re talking bowie…back in a time where there was no way around the music industry…
and his biggest “talents” were redefining beeing a big pretender, one of THE essential skills in the whole game and last but not least…writing lyrics and make them fit into melodies against all odds…
Okay I agree with you, but that differentiation sounds a lot different than this quote, which kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
It’s true tho, hah. They are mostly basic rock music, aren’t they?
…looking back is easy judgement…looking forward is a different beast…
not beeing able to judge from a truu retro perspective is just standard flat line surfing…
u have to put stuff in it’s timeframe to really make a point…
I’ve read much on Station to Station because I love the album. I think you nail the general vibe of things here. Yes, Bowie was surrounded by incredible session musicians/friends. Guys that have admitted that they couldn’t believe the talent in the room. All of them seemed to agree that the songs just simply would not have turned out as fantastic as they did without Bowie’s direction (for want of a better word) and many, if not most, were there because they recognised talent and that “something special” thing that likely only comes around once or twice if you’re lucky. None of this happened by accident - it was all through some seriously hard graft on Bowie’s part.
Despite being coked off his tits, he’s a guy that still managed to roll up and single take incredible vocals ffs! Rick Wakeman is a bit of a fanny but listen to him talk of Life on Mars - he just wouldn’t have gotten there without Bowie at the songwriter helm.
He’s an odd fellow to place. You can look at Prince and identify clearly the instrumental talent. Same with Jackson with stories about how he’d turn up to studio and basically multitrack songs using his voice/mouth to structure them before Jones would fill in instruments. Very clear where the talent is. With Bowie, it’s sort of more elusive. It’s definitely there - not sure how anyone can deny it - but actually putting your finger on it isn’t easy. Well, not to me at least.
No. Put “Warszawa” on a “Best of Rock Music” or “Classics of Rock” playlist or CD. I’m sure 95+ percent of people would irritatedly skip it. Others will listen up and be interested in this unusual sound, for some of them it might be the introduction to all kinds of music they didn’t know before. Few will just sit there and not notice the track because it’s just another rock song. No guitars, no clear vocals or discernible lyrics, no straight chrous/verse.
You would put “Ashes to Ashes”, “Space Oddity” or “Let’s Dance” on these playlists. All of these tracks are from the same person. The fact that he chose all kinds of different artists to make these radically different kinds of music doesn’t lower his status to me. He could have just released ten Ziggy Stardusts and would probably have been quite successful. He may not be the most experimental genius of all time, but that doesn’t mean he just took the fame for other people’s visions, inspirations or talents.
Maybe to you it is just “mostly basic rock music” because you listen to a lot of different music that you compare it to. Fair enough, but I think you have to take into perspective that this is not the context into which these albums were released.
Disclaimer: I’m not the biggest Bowie fan and am only familiar with parts of his discography. I just didn’t like the way you phrased some statements. I used to mainly listen to Metal and Hardcore and refused to listen to any music that maybe someone not that into music might know as pop shit only made by people without inspiration that only want to make money. This kept me from bonding with lots of great music at a time when I had a lot of time to listen to music and was curious to discover new stuff. I don’t listen to Metal or Hardcore anymore. Nowadays I appreciate that there are and were some artists that are popular yet still draw from very different inspirations and try to make it a bit more consumable/song oriented. It’s not black or white.
…i’m also no bowie FAN…but i can respect his influence…
his berlin albums for example might look pretty standard from unreflected todays point of view just looking back…
but if u know when they took place in ever evolving pop culture and switch to that point of perspective as reference, u clearly recognize, just as one little example of coutnless ones, without this special darkish inbetween vibe of these plain and “simple” rock albums made in berlin, there would be no next steps leading to stuff like joy division and what not…
no foundation of that berlin vibe at all, that was the root and main sparkle again of stuff like depeche mode growing into what made them what they became, no nick cave who got lost for the firat time in his life there, no overall neubauten vibe…the list is endless…
all depends on what came before…
it’s all evolution…one step after the other…next step always to come…
Yup. And when I first listened to “Low” two years ago and reached the second half, I was still blown away by how modern this music released in early 1977 sounds. And if there is other stuff from the time that sounds similarly modern nowadays, it doesn’t take anything from Low.
Also: which other popstar in 2022 (or any other time period for that matter) that most people know is releasing comparably experimental music and collaborates with artists at the forefront of innovation?
Bowie was a catalyst for other superb musicians to do what they felt like, “Heroes” was written by his band jamming it out, then he brought in the theme and lyrics followed by Fripp’s amazing guitars to create a seminal masterpiece.
I never fanboy anything. Every prophet is a false one.
And this guy is dead. If there’s a god somewhere up there, it’s his job to judge him. All is left for us are only memories of him, we can contemplate on them, mull them over and learn from his mistakes. But we cannot judge him as we will never know what kind of battles this guy fought in his head back when he was alive. That would be unjust.
All in all, Bowie was just a musician and a man of his own epoch. A famous one, but still, in humanity’s timeline, just a mere, random celebrity that will be forgotten a few hundred years away from now.
Bowie was anything but a random celebrity? He was a maverick visionary
Oh wow, that’s a good one. 
By the way, that’s not sarcasm. That’s a good video, I shared it with my friends.
Just listened to the second half of Low.
Nice music, not sure I’d call any of it experimental, but pretty decent stuff.
Bowie is the Al Gore of music!