Bowie and the Short Life of Rock and Roll

Now that the New York Times has quit featuring David Bowie on the front page I can think of what it all means. Like most people I knew Bowie as the androgynous rocker of the seventies and eighties. Cha Cha Changes. Rebel Rebel. Suffergette City. Many many nights spent with overheated amplifiers cranking out Ziggy Stardust in crappy college apartments. I remember the summer I discovered Ziggy and played it over and over on hazy long warm evenings  And then I saw him at U of I on the Lets Dance Tour. And then he disappeared.

Scary Monsters was my reconnection and then he disappeared again. And the word was Bowie the millionaire was living in Switzerland with his super model wife and then he surfaced with Tin Machine that nobody really cared about. He really belonged to the era of Art Rock although people would say he transcended all that. Oh right Under Pressure. He came back for that and everyone listened to Freddie and David belt it out. Then he was gone again.

And then the shock of his death. Bowie was a great rocker and artist but rock and roll as an art form seems to have a very short life. If it really is the flag of youth then it is really all over by thirty. And listening to David Bowie now seems like trying to go back to high school. When you were there it meant something but now it means nothing at all. I know someone who saw his Lazarus musical and he said it made absolutely no sense.

That is fitting. You can't pick your art form but Bowie said it best. "Look out you rock and rollers, one day your gonna get older."

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Mad Dogs and Englishmen

So we were sitting there at dinner when on comes a revolution. The young Englishmen were in the streets in London getting bashed by the Bobbies. Blood streaming down foreheads and shouting young men being pulled back into the crowd put me back to when I was kid watching the college demonstrations for that Indochina war that never quite worked out. The footage stopped dinner and everyone stared in silence while the British Police in riot gear tried to get the young Englishmen to behave like well young Englishmen. But they wanted to behave like the Young Americans from forty years before.

Remember that Bowie song. Young Americans....young Americans.. It was an anthem to the students taking to the streets and screaming Hell NO WE WONT GO. Bowie was tipping his hat, saying at least the Young Americans are doing something. Seems the Young Englishmen have had enough and don't like the fact the Banks and Big Business are getting bailed out and lavishing employees with million dollar bonuses while they lose their jobs and their homes. Those touchy Young Englishmen. Don't they know that demonstrating is passe in the twenty first century. They should take some lessons from their cousins across the Big Pond and just chill and send a an email.


We used to carry that mantle of outrage, but we have become so wired or placid or bored or turned off or just don't give a damn that the best we can do is blog or email or that moment of organized outrage..the Webcast! But those Englishmen seem to have had enough and have taken their rage to the streets. It was eerie seeing all those people in the streets with the billy clubs swinging and the riot geared police trying to take the streets. It did look like anarchy. It did look like populist rage. But this was England! Weren't we the ones who had the tea party and said no taxation without representation? Weren't we the ones who made the world safe for democracy? Weren't we the ones who tell the world where to get off with our flaming youthful indignation against the old order? Seems like everything else, even our fiery disrespect for the powers that be has been usurped by someone else.


David Bowie is going to have to pen another song if we don't wake up soon. But this time he won't have to look across the ocean. This time he can just turn on the telly and watch those Mad dogs and Englishmen raise hell.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/