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
I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement - it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.
From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.
When you are an artist you can turn your hand to anything, in any style. Once you have the tools then all the artforms are the same in the end.
It makes me sad when I see artists who come alive when they go onstage, because, gee, I really come alive when I'm home.
It always felt like you were trying too hard to look like the audience or something. That whole thing about the artistic integrity, which, of course, I've never bought into - with any artist. It's just not a real thing.
I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.
There's just some dysfunctionalism with artists. There are good things and bad things about being an artist, and the good thing is, sometimes you get an inside line on what's really happening. You develop these strange antennae that clue you in to what's really going on.
I'm rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work it's no longer his.
I didn't say that wearing a glamorization of the rock artist was any truer from the other thing.
There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I'm surprised aren't being used on MTV.
And it's always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn't want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you're dead as an artist.
Every time I've made a radical change it's helped me feel buoyant as an artist
What is very enlightening for me right now is that I sense that I'm arriving at a place of peace with my writing that I've never experienced before.
I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.