Some time last year the rock star David Bowie made some overtly right-wing statements in an interview. Since that time there has been a fairly uniform dismissal of his musical contribution on the left by the throwaway phrase 'oh, that fascist'.
Such a response is useless and inadequate. The relationship of politics to art — particularly in the case of one individual artist's politics — is a far more complex question than such an equation would recognise. I will show this in reference to Bowie's latest LP Low (RCA PL 12030 Stereo) — a record that what I shall characterise as a 'vulgar reductionist' position cannot possibly come to grips with.
Terry Eagleton has already set the tone for this discussion in his useful book Marxism and Literary Criticism when he said: 'What needs to be added is Marx and Engels' "principle of contradiction": that the political views of an author may run counter to what his work reveals.' He refers elsewhere in that book to the fact that Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence and Pirandello all flirted with fascism or became fascists and asks whether this means that their work should therefore be automatically dismissed.
So too with David Bowie in this day in the field of contemporary music, though of course there are no implications of comparative 'artistic worth' in the analogy. Bowie's persona and art is complex, and in particular I am not able to discuss in this article the important politico-sexual implications of some of his lyrics or his supposedly androgynous 'image'. However, it is undeniable that for a period he nurtured the ultimate in self-conscious, 'super-star' characteristics, which inevitably slipped over into a grossly self-indulgent and repulsive narcissism.
Certainly, too, his lyrics have often echoed strong overtones of a Nietzschian super-man/super-race philosophy, which was historically the intellectual precursor of fascist ideology. Nevertheless, much of his output was original and socially revealing, exposing dilemmas in gay/heterosexual relationships in an amusing and often original manner. Original too was his capacity to adopt and synthesise, sometimes in a chameleon-like manner, many of the musical strands in post-war popular culture.
The latest LP Low, on which he collaborates in part with ex-Roxy Music member Eno, is a whole new departure and cannot be understood by the application of political or sociological criteria alone. I would argue that in this work Bowie, despite his fairly recent overt political pronouncements (which we would condemn and attempt to discourage physically should they obtrude publicly in the future) has produced something which one could justifiably categorise as 'progressive', abused as that term has been. It represents, in some ways, a significant break with the function, form and social content of most contemporary popular music and certainly Bowie's previous records.
If there were a genuine danger that popular music, as practised by Bowie and others, could be used by the forces of reaction in a direct and effective manner, then one would expect to see the increase of several features in that music. First, the use of overtly and clearly articulated vocal messages in the songs, conveying reactionary or racist themes. Second, the utilisation of simplistic compulsive rhythms to intensify the phenomenon of [passive] mass emotion, or what has been called 'mass hysteria'. Third, the build-up, through various audio-visual techniques, of the central, individual 'charismatic' super-star, divorced from any collective, collaborative musical context, to play the quasi-führer role.
What is amazing about the current LP Low is that almost all of these tendencies have been negated or reversed and steps even taken to challenge the whole conservative musical approach represented by the rock genre. Even the album-cover and the title express this changed stance — the Low of the title surely being an abbreviation of 'low-key'. Gone is the contrived and gaudy razzamatazz of many previous albums. [illegible] The record as a whole is obviously a collective and collaborative project with others, particularly Eno and Carlos Alomar, the guitarist. Gone is the up-front [illegible] of the Bowie persona, [illegible] Compare Low with the schizoid, self-reverential preening of Ziggy Stardust, for example.
The first side of the album is composed of [illegible] rock numbers, in line of descent from his more [illegible] rather colourless albums. Turn the record over and extraordinary things begin to happen. Here Bowie, in collaboration with Eno on two of the four tracks, rides right over the conventions and form of mainstream pop into completely new fields. On the extended and most remarkable track 'Warszawa', they dispense with the orthodox driving rhythms of the other side and launch into a multi-layered electronic lament, reminiscent of (but far more textured than) Pink Floyd or Mike Oldfield. Particularly interesting is the way that Bowie's voice is used in relation to the instruments. Eno and Bowie totally reverse and re-work the relationship between the normally central, dominant vocal component and the other instruments — in a sense the music is 'decentred'. In addition, all cognitive content is taken out of the 'lyric', so that Bowie assumes an almost aboriginal tone, counterposed to the strictly twentieth-century 'backing' — which of course isn't 'backing' at all, in the conventional sense.
A central problem in rock is the imposition of a 'hierarchy' of importance between the instruments/voices, which comes down into the stage appearance itself. Eno himself has called the phenomenon 'ranking', whereby the patriarchal (sexist) form of contemporary capitalism has embedded itself into the conventions and relations between various instruments and musical components. In other words it is a culturally determined form which embodies ideology in contemporary music, not simply the lyrics. To put it even simpler, revolutionary music will have to change the dots as well as the words.
It seems to me that what Eno and Bowie have attempted on the second side of Low is firstly a progressive re-structuring of these central relations within music, displacing (yet still using) the human voice, and secondly a fracturing of the orthodox audio-hierarchy which maintains it. It is surely interesting (and needs to be explained) how two male bourgeois musicians (and even 'fascist') can be examining and helping to solve some of the problems that feminists and socialists must begin to tackle if a musical practice is to be forged which is in line with our social and political aspirations!
Of course, there are many other problems involved alongside these 'internal' ones, such as the complex relationships with the audience and the reduction of all such work to commodity status under capitalism. These are areas which Bowie has not shed any light on to date.
However, the turn which Bowie has taken here is completely out of tune (some would say in more ways than one!) with either his overt political utterances or the fears which the left has had about the increasingly reactionary social role he could play. There is no way that fascism could make use of such numbers as 'Warszawa', 'Weeping Wall', or 'Subterraneans'. This is cerebral music, challenging the audience into intellectual involvement and interaction with it, not passive, emotionally over-loaded acceptance. Similarly, there is no way that such music could be used to magnify Bowie's previous, potentially demagogic, 'super-star' stage-persona — it is a clearly collective, non-individual product. This is a remarkable evolution which, although in no way self-consciously political, has very explicit 'progressive' implications, both musically and socially. It certainly validates the quotations from Eagleton mentioned earlier as applied to music, and equally certainly puts paid to the crass reduction of art to politics (which I too have been accused of) prevalent in large sections of the left.
CARL GARDNER