In a culture generally unaccustomed to theatrical displays of male plumage, the glittered, feathered, frequently half-naked David Bowie of the glam rock 1970s presented an affront to traditional notions of gendered norms, introducing instances of “gender expression” some forty years avant la lettre. Fast-forward to the relatively conventional final decades of Bowie’s private life, andContinue reading “Bowie the Rebel and Romantic Typology”
Tag Archives: david bowie and literature
Bowie in Berlin, Part 2
The new persona that we might call “David Bowie in Berlin” was created through a turn to the art of a past era that also grappled with capitalist realism: Expressionism, an artistic movement that deepens the Romantic vein of expressing emotional experience. . . A future is mourned in the spectral fade-out that closes “SpeedContinue reading “Bowie in Berlin, Part 2”
Bowie in Berlin, Part 1
It is the spring of 2003, midway through my first year in graduate school, and my friend Nathan has earlier that day acquired a used vinyl copy of David Bowie’s Station to Station from Amoeba Music. Some months later, we are driving down Sunset Boulevard listening to the song “Negativland” from New!’s 1972 debut album.Continue reading “Bowie in Berlin, Part 1”
David Bowie and Romantic Androgyny
My fifteen-year-old self couldn’t assimilate Bowie’s gender subversion: both of his appearances as a male that night [on SNL in 1979] were completely artificial, one kind of boy doll or another, the former’s movement completely restricted and the latter’s hyperactively unnatural. . . Bowie’s theatrical androgyny disrupted a culture of authenticity that was already, butContinue reading “David Bowie and Romantic Androgyny”
Writing about Rock / Writing about Romanticism
Why specifically rock and Romanticism? Why Romanticism at all?
The Philosophy of Contemporary Song 