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InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
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Bowie, David
Considering his influence on music in the 70's, it is incredible to consider that besides his three antiseptic funk singles from the Young Americans album, David Bowie only had one top 40 hit during that decade (and it was "Space Oddity", a song that dated from the 60's). No artist better represents the rift that formed between “album rock” and pop music during those years than Bowie. Although his seminal album Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars was chock full of potential hit songs, absolutely nothing from that album charted as a top 40 single. His next album, Aladdin Sane, was equally commercial but also went unrepresented on the singles charts. Perhaps it was the aggressive androgyny of his image or the experimentation of his various styles, but American pop audiences simply didn't want to hear from Bowie, while progressive FM audiences found him to be a futuristic visionary.
Bowie, along with Marc Bolan (of T. Rex) and Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno of Roxy Music, tore to shreds the supposed honesty of expression that blues-derived rock and roll bands of the 60's meant to represent. Integrity of emotion might have once been essential to rock and roll, but it had been subverted by the ironic and aloof posturing of these glamorized thespians. Bowie might have been little more than a carefully constructed image, but he was clever enough to manipulate the press and his audience into believing that image was enough. This lent him an amorphous quality that, like hot air, could continually change its form. Ironically, musicians who tried to follow in his footsteps and carry his image into the 80's were misunderstanding the entire point of Bowie's work. Whether it was Gary Numan or the Human League, they displayed barely a fraction of Bowie's musical inventiveness. Furthermore, they lacked the vision and element of surprise that kept Bowie in the public eye for so long. He wouldn't stay the same long enough for an audience to grow tired of him. In contrast, their lack of imagination and inability to transform themselves into anything other than Bowie-influenced clones meant that their careers would be short-lived.
Meanwhile, Bowie grew tired of being pegged into a definable role, even if that role was one of constant innovation. As another means of reinventing himself, he decided to move his style front and center into the thick of popular tastes. By enlisting Sigma Sound Studios - which was the home base for Philadelphia International Records and artists such as Teddy Pendergrass, Billy Paul and the O'Jays - Bowie made his first foray into dance music. Here, he recorded deliberately funkified arrangements of his songs. The sessions yielded "Fame" (#1), "Young Americans" (#28) and "Golden Years" (#28) and also established the beginning of Bowie's “thin white duke” phase. From here, Bowie extracted himself from the mainstream and headed in a decidedly more experimental direction. He recorded his next album, Station To Station, in California, and it featured some extremely clever and experimental music set to Bowie's most narcissistic lyrics yet. Fed up with the sycophantic nature of California's music scene, Bowie decided to relocate to the comparably austere surroundings of West Berlin, Germany. Here, with fewer distractions, he recorded three of his most interesting albums. Low, "Heroes”, and Lodger were all recorded with input from producer/experimentalist Brian Eno and netted some of the most artistically satisfying work of Bowie's career. Artistic success did not come with financial reward, however, as none of these three albums yielded so much as one hit single (even the magnificent "'Heroes'" failed to make an appearance on the Hot 100).
Lodger and his next record, Scary Monsters, were equal parts wild experimentation and deliberately commercial balderdash. The result was both fascinating and bizarre, showcasing some of Bowie's most interesting and visual music yet, as can be attested through his ingenious videos for "D.J"., "Boys Keep Swinging", "Fashion" and "Ashes To Ashes". With these videos, Bowie became the most recognizable of chameleons. Still, none of these songs charted as hit singles.
Once again, Bowie decided to enter the mainstream. He hired Nile Rodgers (one-half of the Rodgers/Edwards production team, which was responsible for Chic's "Good Times") as producer and went to work on the most straightforward album of his career. The title track, "Let's Dance", became Bowie's second #1 single, while "China Girl" and "Modern Love" also became substantial hits. By the time "Modern Love" was released as a single, most people who were interested had already purchased the album, so it hindered sales enough to cause it to stall at #14. Still, it was easily one of Bowie's most commercial recordings yet. An energy-infused dance number with confounding wordplay made for a thoroughly satisfying slice of pop art. With less pretension than he had ever displayed, Bowie's artistry as a melodist was in full view, as was his finely honed talent for holding the attention of an audience. "Modern Love" showed that David Bowie might have enjoyed playing the role of the man who fell to Earth, but he was quite capable of performing what ordinary earthlings loved to hear.
 
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