an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern
cultural sound, text and image
Volume 13, January - May 2016, ISSN
1552-5112
David
Bowie and the Cool of Kitsch
Thorsten
Botz-Bornstein
Was it not
disturbing to receive news of David Bowie’s death on January 10, 2016, at a time
when the media were full of reports of terrorist suicide attacks and the deaths
of innocent people? Bowie
represents everything that terrorists are opposed to. With his glamour,
transgressions, and lust for life, he symbolized that part of Western culture
that puritans can stomach least. However, what did Bowie stand for more precisely? Being a hero
for one day, ashes to ashes… In his last video Lazarus, he
sings “Look, I am in heaven.” This forms a contrast, though at the same time, a
strange consonance with the new culture of heroic death all of which is
captured by the media.
When I was
in high school we were listening to The Clash, Iggy Pop, and Bowie. How did
those elements fit together? The Clash and Iggy were punk and neopunk - but Bowie was pop. The
rationale of this strange synthesis became clear to me only much later.
Thinking back to the early eighties, my friends and I were pegged into the
stuffy postwar world of respectable middle-class parents and neighbors. It was
a suffocating environment that the preceding hippy movement had not been able
to entirely eliminate. We wanted to be different, but how? The Clash and Iggy
Pop were what we wanted to be, but we knew that we never could. Bowie, on the other hand,
was more like us: a thin, white boy, intellectually-tempted, and rather
awkward. A random television interview
available on YouTube shows Bowie
as a seventeen year old youth, looking like the typical suburban kid caught
between submission, modest provocation, and embarrassment. His only answer to
the social pressure of his environment is the shy insistence on being allowed
to wear long hair. A similar awkwardness is still visible in the original video
of Space Oddity from 1969.
Yes, Bowie was very much like
us. The Bromley mock-Tudor houses were similar to the non-descript terraced houses that we
were living in. He, too must have felt tortured by the hypercorrect, hypocrite
behavior of the petty bourgeoisie with its
imbecile expectations and interdictions. In an interview he once said that parents
“fuck you up” and called his mother “repressive”
and “a snob.” Most probably, he did not know how to respond to this environment.
But here
is the thing: Bowie
overcame his initial awkwardness not by imitating the toughness and violence of
street culture. Instead, he did what we believed to know rather well: he worked
very hard. Very early Bowie
took lessons from a pantomime who was showing him how to control his rubbery
arms and legs, how to make his gestures less random and more determined. In Bowie’s body movements we
recognized our own edginess that had been imposed upon us by a functional and
narrow reality; hopeless in both moral and aesthetic terms. The difference was
that his angular movements had become
stylized and aesthetic. On the other hand, until the end, his body movements
remained rather mechanical and robot-like. This even became his trademark. In
my opinion, the most fascinating thing about Bowie is his strange hand movements.
Bowie never acquired the natural swag of
the tough ones. There has never been any rhythm in Bowie either, but his appearance stands for
white and western theatricality. I guess that’s why we could so easily identify
with him. In his last video, Lazarus, he is
receding backwards into the wardrobe that is standing in his hospital room,
dressed like a skeleton. Once again moving like a robot, he appears to be
disappearing into the dark and square-shaped space of his youth that he had
come from sixty years earlier.
For us Bowie was light; he was a
revelation. Maybe we emaciated, nerdish kids from the European suburb could be
cool, too? Bowie
had overcome the constraints of his petty bourgeois space and established a new
reality simply by modifying his own body movements. He had managed to control
his body, to stylize it, to aestheticize it. And he stylized and aestheticized
it very well. He was like a reincarnation of Nietzsche who had written that one
should always look at the philosophers’ feet. Look at how they are walking,
look at their body movements. “There is
more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy” (Zarathustra). The rest (the mind, the
intellect) comes only later. For us this meant that you can eat your cake - and
have it, too, because the mind and the intellect will not be entirely
forgotten. You don’t have to be stupid in order to be cool. That’s what Bowie taught us.
Bowie’s world was made of style, but
there was also some substance. The substance was the coolness that mysteriously
flew out of this entire aesthetization project. This was not the mannerist
imitation of streetwise toughness. The coolness was – strangely – very honest.
It was no pose, but had become an attitude, always linked to the boyish honesty
that he could maintain until the end. Bowie
seemed to be constantly saying: ‘that’s precisely how cool you can get as a
thin, frail, shy, white, suburban kid. Not more and not less. Take it or leave
it.’ Back in the eighties, we tried to take it. Taking this appeared to be easier than taking Iggy Pop or the whole punk
thing. Iggy was tough and, even worse: he was born tough. Iggy could be admired from a
distance, and we felt that Bowie
probably admired him just like us, from a distance. Still he had managed to get
closer to him, but he could do that only because he had been working very hard.
Bowie was not
born cool, but he became cool. That’s what makes him rather unique in the
landscape of twentieth century cool guys.
Not
everybody can be born rich. However, not everybody can be born poor either. The
majority of Western youngsters are white, middle class, provincial kids who
have to count on their skills to be successful. Bromley of the sixties is what
most Western kids are living in. If they want to be cool, they will probably
imitate hip hop styles or try to speak English with a black American accent.
Some – though fortunately not very many – flirt with terrorism because they
find the cool swagger of the ISIS soldier more
tempting than anything else.
Bowie was constantly transgressing, too:
towards punk, towards the feminine gender, towards fascism when adopting the
“emotionless Aryan superman” character of the Thin White Duke, complete with a
Hitler salute in 1976 (he later said that he had been completely stoned, which
is probably true). However, whatever he did, he did so only through
theatricality and play. It was no real transgression. He never stopped being a
poet, which is the main characteristic of a dandy who is not just wearing
clothes, but who is wearing them in a certain way.
Bowie was playing with fire, always
transgressing but never giving in to the simplistic, the clearly defined, the
obvious... In later years, Bowie
abandoned punk and the feminine, but one transgression would remain constant
during his entire career: the transgression towards kitsch. One reason why Bowie was cool was
because he could manipulate kitsch without being absorbed by it. Bowie was “kitsch-cool,”
if such a thing has ever existed. In “Diamond Dogs” Bowie sings of “just
another future song, lonely little kitsch.” Well, maybe he mentions it only
because it rhymes with “bitch.” Few people manage to manipulate a dangerous
item like kitsch without losing their coolness. Warhol could do it. Jeff Koons
could do it. Some hip hop artists can do it, too. Of course, glam rock was
kitsch by definition as it indulged in purple,
orange, lime green, and metallic. In “Space Oddity” Bowie brought in tons of more kitsch:
futuristic kitsch. When glam rock was over, Bowie turned towards other kitsch items. His
crooning style of later songs like “Slip Away” from Heathen sounds like a parody of the
ultimate kitsch song; and this singing style even became his new trademark.
Finally,
the nerdish youth from Bromley had outdone everybody. Kitsch became an
empowerment of coolness. While tough people like punks are not allowed to show
too much emotion, Bowie
could indulge in beautiful feelings without being ashamed of it. And his fans
were indulging in those feelings, too. Among them were some of the world’s most
puritan Western intellectuals who would normally never have come close to such
music.
There is a
Japanese aesthetic term called “iki,” and I have always thought of Bowie when hearing this
term. Iki means “stylish” and “chic” but with certain specifications. The Japanese
philosopher Shuzo Kuki has placed “iki” within the oppositional tension between
“sweet” and “sour” or “astringent.” This is exactly what Bowie impersonates. Kitsch is merely sweet
but Bowie’s
astringent facial expression allows all kitsch to become iki.
Let us now
come back to the other dead people, the jihadi-cool people who decide to go to Syria to fight
for the Islamic State. They obviously believe they are cool while drifting on
their tanks, entirely clad in black, with their long hair flowing in the wind.
However, they are not cool at all because they are merely longing for the
sweetness of death, for unmitigated heroism, and for eternity. That’s the worst
kitsch ever: it is simplistic, exaggerated, and self-gratificatory. What is
lacking is the astringent element. I said above that Bowie taught us that you don’t have to be
stupid to be cool. Obviously, those people did not have the right teachers.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of
postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 13, January - May 2016, ISSN
1552-5112
