Bowie
Simon Critchley
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 194486914X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this concise and engaging excursion through the songs of one of the world’s greatest pop stars, Critchley, whose writings on philosophy have garnered widespread praise, melds personal narratives of how Bowie lit up his dull life in southern England’s suburbs with philosophical forays into the way concepts of authenticity and identity are turned inside out in Bowie’s work. The result is nearly as provocative and mind-expanding as the artist it portrays.
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courses at Stevenage Further Education College (let’s just say that it wasn’t exactly Harvard). I didn’t have the money to buy albums, so I listened to a friend’s copy at the student union during lunchtimes. I was overwhelmed by the self-reflexive brilliance of “Ashes 1 10 CR I T CHL E Y B O W IE 111 DISCIPLINE IN HIS BOOK THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD: David Bowie and the 1970s, Peter Doggett argues that Bowie was an anachronism in the upbeat, libertarian world of the 1960s, but by the
character- a regret. Even when the title track of Station to istic of Bowie’s art. It also ignores the fact that Station shifts tempo entirely around five minutes the track which follows “Always Crashing in the in, with Bowie immersed to the extreme in the Same Car” is entitled “Be My Wife” (provided it’s Magick of Aleister Crowley and the esotericism of not understood ironically as a reference to mari- the Kabbalah, he immediately asks the question, tal bliss with Angie Bowie). The
.net/2013/04/swinging-modern-sounds-44-and-another-day B O W IE 18 3 guests (I don’t know who they were, a woman I don’t want Bowie to stop. But he will. And so and her child), who were being escorted past will I. the guards into the exhibition space. We looked like a rather older version of the Holy Family as I tagged along slowly behind, keeping my head down. I got in. Inside I was amazed by the amount of stuff Bowie had preserved, even the keys to his apartment in Berlin. I mean, who
history of British popular music is Peter Noone’s cover version of “Oh! You Pretty Things,” which did pretty well on the UK charts in 1971. Noone (whose name wonderfully splits open into “no one”—a little like Odysseus’s reply to the Cyclops Polyphemus) had been the frontman of the oddly named but hugely successful Herman’s Hermits. Noone displayed a truly bravura lack of understanding of Bowie’s lyrics, which are replete with references to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. More precisely, the song
asserts the uselessness of homo sapiens and the need to make way for the homo superior. Admittedly, this is all framed in a rather 75 cheap, British, BBC, Doctor Who version of the saw.” But, of course, what is created in this reen- future. But the point is clear enough: the extrater- actment is not the past, but the clichéd schlock restrial strangers have come to take our children of 1950s romantic movies, where “His name was toward a nonhuman future. For us, the nightmare always
