Why Bowie Matters by Will Brooker

Author:Will Brooker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-07-22T17:00:00+00:00

Bowie’s more overtly political songs have, perhaps unsurprisingly in this context, never been his most successful. ‘China Girl’, despite Bowie’s stated intention to parody racist attitudes, and its lyrical suggestions of colonialism (‘I’ll give you television … I’ll give you the man who wants to rule the world’), plays as an uncritical series of ‘Oriental’ stereotypes. His attempts at topical ‘protest’ songs with Tin Machine – ‘Crack City’, ‘I Can’t Read’, ‘Video Crime’ – were often crassly obvious. Precise and deft in so many respects, he was clumsy in his grasp on broader issues of cultural power and oppression, or at least in his expression of that understanding through his music: ‘Valentine’s Day’, towards the end of his career, is a subtler exception, with its discreet references to gun violence.

But Bowie’s 1983 renunciation of his bisexuality was politically shrewd. It was political in the way he understood best – on the personal level, in terms of how changing trends related to himself and his own career. It was as canny as his claim to be bisexual had been, eleven years before; it was a clever adaptation of his brand image, for a very different moment. In 1972, as we saw, ‘gay’ had multiple meanings. By the mid-eighties it had acquired a new one, as Colin Clews demonstrates in Gay in the 80s: From Fighting for Our Rights to Fighting for Our Lives. The British tabloids were rife with stories about the ‘Gay Plague’ or, less commonly, the ‘Gay Bug’. ‘AIDS is the Wrath of God, says Vicar’, reported The Sun newspaper in February 1985. ‘A Million Will Have AIDS in Six Years’, warned the Daily Mail. The Sun, again, reported on social policing and protection from this ‘plague’, offering examples for others to follow: ‘BANNED! AIDS-fear Club Ousts Gay Couple’, ‘Pub Ban on Gays in AIDS Panic’. In terms of career preservation, Bowie had judged the mood perfectly. For his gay fans, though, it was cruel timing.

Mitchell Plitnick’s article ‘We Can Be Heroes’ describes the context of the 1983 Rolling Stone interview.

It wasn’t only Bowie. In 1983, AIDS was really making its way into the headlines and hatred of gay men was rampant. Much of the progress that had been made since the 1960s’ gay liberation movement was being reversed. The gay culture that was so open during the Decade of Disco was being forced back underground under the cloud of a devastating epidemic. Worse for me, bisexual men were seen as the ‘conduit’ the ‘gay disease’ was using to infect heterosexuals.

Ironically, of course, Bowie – whatever his intentions at the time – had helped to further that cause during the 1970s, by inspiring individuals and challenging conventions. As David Buckley writes: ‘for those unsure about their sexuality or who were in agonies about “coming out”, Bowie at least let them know that someone (and someone talented and cool to boot) was listening.’ Mitchell Plitnick again offers a personal example: knowing he was bisexual from an early age, he grappled with ‘shame, denial and an overwhelming fear of discovery.

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