David Bowie
David Bowie
David Robert Jones, better known by his stage name David Bowie, was an English singer, songwriter and actor. He was a figure in popular music for over five decades, regarded by critics and musicians as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, his music and stagecraft significantly influencing popular music. During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at 140 million worldwide, made him one of the world's best-selling music...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth8 January 1947
CityLondon, England
Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.
I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn't think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older, you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that's happening to me.
I'm very good at what I do, and I don't turn my hand to something unless I'm very good at it, frankly.
I went to a middle-class school, but my background is working class. I got the best of both worlds, I saw both classes, so I have a pretty fair idea of how people live and why they do it.
I usually don't agree with what I say very much. I'm an awful liar.
I don't like talk and I don't like talkers. Like Ma Barker. That's what she always said, 'Ma Barker doesn't like talk and she doesn't like talkers.' She just sat there with her gun.
Songwriting as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good enough.
A lot of people that I know are bugged with the idea that they have got to have an audience, or they have got to be liked. I think the more that you fall into that trap it makes your own life harder to come to terms with, because an audience appreciation is only going to be periodic at the best of times.
A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle. The rock stars have assimilated all kinds of philosophies, styles, histories, writings, and they throw out what they have gleaned from that.
I'm rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work it's no longer his.
The younger people get into the lyrics in a different way; there's much more of a tactile understanding, which is the way I prefer it.
It would be positively boring if minds were in tune.
I didn't say that wearing a glamorization of the rock artist was any truer from the other thing.
Some of us, I think, us small, pompous arty ones probably read too much George Steiner and kind of got the idea that we were entering to this kind of post-culture age and that we'd better do something postmodernist - quickly, before somebody else did.