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
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.
The public, obviously, they takes things in a very simplest fashion and so they should. That's why we have such wonderful television.
TV has eaten up everything else, and Warhol films are all that are left, which is fabulous. Pork could become the next I Love Lucy, the great American domestic comedy. It's about how people really live, not like Lucy, who never touched dishwater. It's about people living and hustling to survive.
The media is either our salvation or our death.
We were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the 21st century in 1971. That was the idea. And we wanted to just blast everything in the past, rather like the vorticists did at the beginning of the century in the Britain or the dadaists did Europe, you know. It was the same sensibility of everything is rubbish, and all rubbish is wonderful.
Sexuality and where it is going is an extraordinary question, for I don't see it going anywhere. It is with me, and that's it.
I thought that I could do some kind of vehicle involving rock musicals and presenting rock and characters and storyline in a completely different fashion.
I probably also wanted to be black at that particular time [ 9 years old] as well.
I guess Ziggy would have been the perfect vehicle to have done with.
I wanted to rewrite how rock music was perceived.
I never really got the book together for the thing, so I had all the songs and the characters. But by the time we'd gotten it on the road and I'd been doing it for 18 months, oh God, I couldn't wait to move on to something else.
People don't get a chance to think, "Why am I a consumer?" Because the decisions come at them so fast and furiously, they're not [even] given time to think, I am a consumer.