Overkill

[jean]

If I had doubts before I've got even more now.

[Anna]

Richard, thanks for posting The Times article, I wondered about doing the same, so you’ve saved me some typing having just typed this early this morning!

As for doversoul’s Guardian essay which I see is written by a clergyman: "Yet mesmerised by the starman’s sexual chemistry, we all mouthed along the lyrics of this unearthly vision of radical singularity."

This article is pretentious rubbish mixed with a dollop of psycho-babble and a sprinkling of Neitzche, equating Bowie as some kind of Messiah-like role model, the sort of article that gives Guardian readers a bad name. I genuinely liked the music he made. He did assume various personas, projections, they existed in fantasy and imagination, but he offered escapism not a manifesto. Did he become a role model? I don’t think so. He wasn’t suggesting everyone became Ziggy, (which in fact is about alienation. Most of his lyrics were about that, and fear, and anxiety) but that it’s ok to be different. I don’t think a love of Bowie ever stopped anyone from paying their council tax or being a responsible member of society. He himself, when not working, preferred to be anonymous and low-key in the 'real world'. And latterly he devoted a lot of his time to being a father, which suggests he was well aware of the difference between 'on' and 'off'; his earthly responsibilities,

“ We knew relatively little of his life and he gave few interviews. This is partly how he retained the inscrutable glamour of quasi-shamanic mystery”
A bit like Jesus then. It’s a pity the Anglican Bishops of Africa don’t embrace a bit more of Bowie

I think you've hit on something important but overlooked in this discussion, DS. A number of archetypes were brought together to form the changeling Bowie persona and sit uneasily together, and I attempted to approach this problematic from a parallel perspective to Giles Fraser in my last message, but one which situates the Bowie problematic ontologically and socially rather than morally.

I’m sorry but I don’t understand why people have to be so analytical and ultimately bring Marx into it. Was it because he was a capitalist? He once said something like “I’m working class, therefore I want to make as much money as I can, I always feel I won’t have enough money to leave to my family”

As for Bogart: I think he’s great, love his films. I imagine in the drab post-war 1940s a lot of young men wanted to be like him. I doubt that many people who first came to Bowie in the 80s with Let’s Dance ever wanted to be a clone – it was a different age where you could express individuality.

Time I stopped reading The Guardian.

Jolly good idea dovers!!

[jean]

...It’s a pity the Anglican Bishops of Africa don’t embrace a bit more of Bowie...

As far as I was aware of Bowie, I never felt the sexual ambiguity/transgressiveness was any more than a pose; it did not seem to me liberating in any helpful way at all.

[Beef Oven!]

I don't think it was contradicting what Alpie said

Seems it does. Eine Alpensinfonie said that no one was interested in Bowie last week, ER pointed out that he had been playing his music and EA came back with 'I meant the deafening silence of the media'.

No great signs among the younger members of our family (all under 40) that he was recognised as an exceptional formative influence, aside from his music. The eldest - just coming up to 40, and a journalist - posted a long musing about mortality, but this seemed more related to the deaths of his mother and his closest friend (the same age as himself) during the past year.

Similarly here, all in their 20s, none of whom could even name a song by him! I was even asked "would I know any of his music?" - I mean, how would I know!?

I hadn't initiated the discussion with any of them, they started talking to me, because they knew I like his music.

So I still think Bowie's wider influence was appreciated most by those now in their 50s and 60s.

As would be expected, surely?

IMV, what this is about is the fact that a number of people resent artists like Bowie, Lou Reed (we had the passive aggressive comments like 'Who is Lou Reed?' on the RIP Lou Reed thread, but it didn't take off like it has with Bowie), in the first place and feel the need to tell us - which is fine, I just wish they'd be more honest about it.

[Tapiola]

I genuinely liked the music he made. He did assume various personas, projections, they existed in fantasy and imagination, but he offered escapism not a manifesto ...

Bingo. My feelings exactly, Anna.

[doversoul1]

IMV, what this is about is the fact that a number of people resent artists like Bowie, Lou Reed (we had the passive aggressive comments like 'Who is Lou Reed?' on the RIP Lou Reed thread, but it didn't take off like it has with Bowie), in the first place and feel the need to tell us - which is fine, I just wish they'd be more honest about it.

I don’t think that is the point. What bothered me was the way in which the media behaved as if they couldn’t tell the difference between real and fantasy*, or as in The Guardian article I posted up-thread, between personal grief and reaction towards a public figure's death. I find all these worryingly infantile. If those people had been as sensible as Anna and you (), I’m sure the whole thing would have been rather different.

Whilst I have no interested in his music, I can still admire him for staying creative in the world of popular music for so long. He obviously knew his art and business.

*Anna’s post #137

[Beef Oven!]

I don’t think that is the point.

Not for you, but I don't count you or Anna in that number.

What bothered me was the way in which the media behaved as if they couldn’t tell the difference between real and fantasy, or as in The Guardian article I posted up-thread, between personal grief and reaction towards a public figure's death.

I find all these worryingly infantile. If those people had been as sensible as Anna and you (), I’m sure the whole thing would have been rather different.

True, IMV.

Whilst I have no interested in his music, I can still admire him for staying creative in the world of popular music for so long. He obviously knew his art and business.

[P. G. Tipps]

It’s a pity the Anglican Bishops of Africa don’t embrace a bit more of Bowie

The mind well and truly boggles ...

[teamsaint]

in the end, I am convinced he will primarily be remembered, as Richard Barrett intimated, for his music. the many great singles and albums, and the effect they had on the vast numbers who heard and bought them.
anybody who knows anything at all about pop/rock also understands the quite extraordinary influence he had on generations of pop ( and other)musicians. I would say, ( and I am really not a die hard Bowie fan as such) he was more influential on subsequent generations of musicians than anybody else I can think of.
I certainly get fed up of listening to his imitators decade after decade.

the other stuff around Bowie, personas , sexuality etc, are important, but without the music, nobody would have been that bothered, because others ( Bolan for example) would have filled the gap. That isn't to say that those things weren't interesting or expertly presented.
But people lose interest when the records are no good.

[french frank]

[french frank] So I still think Bowie's wider influence was appreciated most by those now in their 50s and 60s.

As would be expected, surely?

Yes - but it explains why many (here and elsewhere) who DON'T fall into that age group were not only not enchanted but bemused at the scale of his influence. It exonerates them since they can't help not being in their 50s or 60s.

IMV, what this is about is the fact that a number of people resent artists like Bowie, Lou Reed (we had the passive aggressive comments like 'Who is Lou Reed?' on the RIP Lou Reed thread, but it didn't take off like it has with Bowie), in the first place and feel the need to tell us - which is fine, I just wish they'd be more honest about it.

Whoever this 'they' are. Some people, possibly. I didn't know who Lou Reed was and I'm not sure that I registered that he'd died. But being passive-passive, I didn't enquire.

As for popular culture, my attention was drawn to another Guardian article today in which a university professor (I think) was defending his 'Kimposium' - a symposium on Kim Kardashian.

I found this relatively enlightening because every time I've inattentively read the name Kim Kardashian I've been mistaking her for Kim Kashkashian. So I now find I had no idea who Kim Kardashian and the other Kardashians are. Where would you be for your education without the Guardian?

[Serial_Apologist]

Another quote from the article:

Hmmm. A (friendly, by an admirer) opinion piece in yesterday's Times, by Daniel Finkelstein, comes to a rather different conclusion. He refers to Bowie's answers to the 1998 Proust Questionnaire: DF writes: 'The most revealing, however, was in his response to the question "Who are your heroes in real life?". Proust had cited Emile Boutroux, the 19th century historian of philosophy. Bowie replied, truthfully and insightfully: "The consumer". '

Finkelstein argues that Bowie was very much, and consciously, a construct of capitalism, and in a good way. Pop music was stamped on in the 1960s by the Musicians Union (who did not like too much recorded music being played on the airwaves because it takes work from live musicians) and by a Labour government - Tony Benn supported the state initiative to close down the pirate radios. 'Commerce', writes DF, 'is and always has been the engine of rock music. And rock was never the counter-culture, it was the culture. It didn't rebel against the postwar era, it created it.....When Bowie recorded "The Bewlay Brothers" for his "Hunky Dory" album he quietly said to the producer: "Don't listen to the words, they don't mean anything. I've just written them for the American market, they like this kind of thing". '

DF goes on, "He was possible because in a consumer capitalist society nobody can ultimately stop anybody doing anything. He understood this better than almost all his contemporaries.....To say that David Bowie created a product - himself - and then recreated it to suit changing tastes is not to belittle him. It is simply to argue that pop, with Bowie at it's head, saw that consumerism isn't base and philistine. It can be the ally of artistic endeavour. Commerce, liberty and art, arm-in-arm. That was the great David Bowie".

Well worth a read.

As for me - I'm one of those on this thread who just didn't get him, but following Anna's excellent advice I'm not worrying about it.

Having read Mr Finklestein's so-called "article" I find myself for the first time in complete agreement with what you say here, Richard, albeit, as I am a critic of capitalist culture, coming from a different perspective.

[subcontrabass]

As for popular culture, my attention was drawn to another Guardian article today in which a university professor (I think) was defending his 'Kimposium' - a symposium on Kim Kardashian.

A "Reader" rather than a "Professor" - one grade lower in the academic hierarchy. Also "her", not "his".

[french frank]

A "Reader" rather than a "Professor" - one grade lower in the academic hierarchy. Also "her", not "his".

Going from memory - thought it was Peter someone.

No, I see now it was someone called Meredith which may have been the source of the error (someone else I hadn't heard of ).

[zola]

Interesting article on the BBC web site about the power of the obituary. It talks a bit about the media response and dares to broach the taboo subject of what happens when the Queen dies !

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35292372

[doversoul1]

As for popular culture, my attention was drawn to another Guardian article today in which a university professor (I think) was defending his 'Kimposium' - a symposium on Kim Kardashian.

Just come across your article.

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/jan/14/whats-wrong-with-studying-the-kardashians

When you think of the Kardashians, is it Kim’s lauded bottom that comes to mind? Or Kris’s reputation as a controlling “momager”?

…and

I found myself wondering whether a symposium around, say, Bear Grylls, would have caused the same furore.

I find these statements quite amazing. This Jones person seems to have no doubt whatsoever that who Kardashians and Bear Grylls are is universal, common knowledge. And this is in the Higher Education and not in the Entertainment sencion.

…and this sounds rather familiar (change students to .listeners…)
Speaking to students in familiar cultural language is invaluable.

Sorry, off topic.