Member Since: 8/23/2011
Posts: 11,596
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Gaga "closest thing to pop titan"
BOWIE FEVER: FROM DRAG QUEEN TO INTELLECTUAL RESPECT: THE POP STAR AS PERSONA: THE MASK AS PUBLIC FIGURE: A PERSONAL TAKE ON THE SUPREME UNIQUENESS OF DAVID BOWIE
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London is in the grip of Bowie fever these days. His first album in 10 years is top of the charts, and a V & A museum exhibition, "David Bowie Is," devoted to all things Bowie and drawn from his personal archive, is the greatest thing that this august establishment museum has ever put on: double the ticket sales of any previous exhibit in its 160-year-long history.
Selfridges has pop-up stores where you can buy Bowie T-shirts and stuff, and there's a makeup kit for you to Bowie-make-over your quotidian visage. His album is tipped to win the Mercury prize. Not a day goes past that there is not a Bowie pic or article in the popular press. There's even been an April Fool's joke about Bowie opening a pet shop called Spiders from Mars, which would sell some of his favorite spiders as pets.
How has this happened? Well, credit the marketing of no marketing. No publicity buildup. Bowie dropped his album The Next Day out of the blue. After a decade of silence. Surprise, surprise. The subsequent impact may also bespeak the paucity of any great popstar breakout in the last twenty years, since the era of rock titans of the sixties, seventies and eighties. We don't seem to have such titans today. Beyonce, maybe. Social media -- so democratic, so pervasive, so accessible -- have led to isolated monad pockets of excitement; nothing ranging wide across the entire culture. Frank Ocean is hardly a hugely impactful phenom, even if he's a black guy who admits to being partial to other guys. Lady Gaga is the closest thing we have to a recent high-and-wide-impact popstar, but if she weren't such a good songwriter, her meat dress and other performance-art Haus-of-Gaga stunts would've relegated her to New York's underground scene -- just another Klaus Nomi figure, of which Manhattan has had plenty.
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2. His big break-through album, Ziggy Stardust, featured his first character, a bizarro sci-fi alien. This was the introduction of Glam Rock, later taken to its nadir by the LA Hair Metal bands. Before Bowie, there had been no such thing as a popstar changing characters, an act that has only been exploited by Madonna since. Almost more important, Bowie was the first rocker to resonate with up-all-night club kids -- that interesting melange of gender-fluid drug-sodden dressing-up fly-your-freak-flag mixed-up teen misfits as a tribe, who later flocked around Madonna, and who were totally emblemized by Boy George, and who these days are the "little monsters" who form the core of the Lady Gaga cult. Bowie could be said to have discovered this demographic; maybe he even created it. He was also one of the first art school-type rockers -- along with Glam Rock folks like Roxy Music. He also bent gender in a way more upfront manner than the androgynous figure introduced by Mick Jagger. At the time, Bowie said flat out that he was bisexual, when it was still a shocking thing to admit; at that point only French actor Alain Delon had made that daring claim. Later on, Bowie demurred that this was a big mistake, and that he'd always been "a closeted heterosexual" -- a statement which kept alive the whimsical, teasing way in which he played with sexuality.
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This is a really informed, well-written piece on the legend himself; I'd highly recommend reading it in its entirety.
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