Text: Dmitry Konstantinov MANNY BARITON, OCTAGLE JUGGLING, KALEIDOSCOPE OF INSTRUMENTS AND SCENE IMAGES - ALL OF THIS WILL NOT BE REPEATED ANYMORE. David David Robert Jones, more famous as David Bowie, the man of the legend, who has not only enriched the musical universe with his creations, has gone away from life, but he also lost a little time. As Paul McCartney said: "David played a significant role in the history of British pop music, and I am convinced - he had a tremendous influence on people all over the world."
Before friends and relatives had time to ward off, journalists already made a chart of 25 musicians who admitted that the deceased had a decisive influence on their work. And on October 26, 2012, when David was full of energy and announced that he was working on the next disc, a three-day conference on “bowing” was held. Reports on the British showman's contribution to contemporary art were read by dozens of experts from America and Europe. Which musician in history could boast such close attention of cultural scientists during his lifetime?
It is interesting that the “chameleon from rock music” itself, having tried many styles in its work (and some of which it has personally generated), never claimed to be a mentor-mentor. On the contrary, he even somehow admitted that his company does not lead to anything good. “Everyone I come to is given a strange way of oak after some time,” Bowie complained after Mark Bolan crashed in a car accident, died of a heart attack on a Bing Crosby golf course, and John Lennon was shot on the street by a maniac. Those who were more fortunate, after a brief conversation with the artist, experienced an inexplicable, but successful transformation of their own work, and some of them radically changed their stage image. This unique talent of Bowie, it seems, was not fully aware of himself - he simply worked, experimented, traveled the world, carefully avoiding air travel and the metro.
By the way, the music also made him controversial. At the age of 15, David Jones received in the eye from a classmate George Underwood. The frontman and bassist of the group "George and the Dragons" did not share a fan. Bowie put the ring on Underwood’s finger for four months in a hospital bed, the British ophthalmologists saved the eye, but the midriatally dilated pupil and iris, which changed color from blue to brown, remained forever. During the treatment, the patient got acquainted with the work of Kerouac and Orwell, whose books were brought to the hospital by brother Terry, who later killed his life by throwing himself under the train. Relations with Underwood after the ill-fated fight were not interrupted: David and George subsequently repeatedly collaborated, jammed and toured.
LET'S DANCE
There were too many 60s of vocal and instrumental ensembles in swinging London, so it was not easy at first to break up to Bowie. Most of the problems were with vocals, which school teachers rated as "mediocre." But he wanted to sing, David even dropped out for the sake of this technical college, where, among other things, he studied design and printing. The love of music, apparently, turned out to be hereditary - his father, a promoter of the charity foundation, bought American records - Elvis, Platters, Little Richard. Subsequently, Bowie admitted that, having played Tutti Frutti for the first time, he seemed to hear the voice of God.
The vocals were vocals, and the same plastic for David Jones was considered by the same teachers to be excellent. Adding to this a few lessons from mime Lindsay Kemp, a kind of British Marceau, dressing up musicians from traditional jeans in costumes of his own design and taking in imitation of Mick Jagger the “knife” pseudonym Bowie, David created not just a group, but a troupe that gave performances in one of London pubs. “Glam rock, as a matter of fact, was discovered by two - I and Mark Bolan from T-Rex,” Bowie recalled. Intuitively catching the impending craze along with 70 aliens and UFOs, the creator of glam rock tried on a mask of Ziggy Stardust ahead of time in which he successfully toured all over the world, reaching Japan and Australia.
Glam rock quickly left the stage, leaving a few names in mind - Queen, Yes, Duran Duran. In one of the first video clips - “Bohemian Rhapsody” of 1976 - Mercury associates appear in all its glory of this popular Bowie style: curled ringlets, cambric lace, frequent transition to falsetto. The band has never officially recognized Bowie's influence on their work (unlike Duran Duran). In 1981, when Bowie recorded “Under Pressure” with Queen, Freddie spoke rather sparingly about this event: “I went by the way, drank some bottles of wine, jammed”. Bowie generously refused the authorship of the guitar riff, which lifted the song to the charts, but the bassist of the group, John Deacon, has repeatedly stated that "this is all the work of Master Bo." While Freddy radically changed the stage image to a brutal short-cut barbel, another interesting personality was formed in the music world.
Michael Jackson, who attended the Ziggy Stardust and His Spiders from Mars concert in Los Angeles in 1974, was extremely inspired by Bowie's moonwalk, which in fact was part of the arsenal of any self-respecting mime. Several photographs from the casting of the film "Labyrinth" have been preserved, where Bowie played the role of the goblin king and to whom he wrote seven songs. In these photos, Jackson is embraced in a hug with producer George Lucas, screenwriter Terry Jones from Monty Python and Bowie. This is 1986, Michael is already famous here, otherwise he would not have been invited to the casting. Ahead - the title of king of pop music and expensive operations to change the image, inseparable from the rest of life. According to the singer himself, the musicians of Bowie and Queen had a noticeable influence on Jackson’s first successful Thriller CD.
Speaking of “Master Bo,” one cannot ignore Boris Grebenshchikov. In 1973, David Bowie crosses the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Express. Three years later, he returns to Moscow with Iggy Pop, where he hangs out more thoroughly. Then the musicians leave for West Berlin, and after a couple of years in Leningrad, the Aquarium group gains popularity - an unusual set of instruments, unusually intelligent texts and a frontman in high boots, carefully copying on stage the then new image of Bowie - the Emaciated White Duke. About the same thing, but Vyacheslav Butusov does in Sverdlovsk a little later. The success is deafening, fans are on duty at the entrance to Grebenshchikov, some write with blood on the peeling walls "Bob is God."
In America 70s Bowie attracts the excitement of the researcher of "black" music. In collaboration with Lennon, he creates the "plastic soul" style, without which, probably, there would have been no Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and Grace Jones, and all further development of African American pop music would be reduced to rap and roulades in the spirit of Whitney Houston. Here, Bowie met with the group Velvet Underground and its leader Lou Reed. “Without Lu’s guitar, many modern bands simply wouldn’t have arisen,” Bowie says in an interview with William Burroughs, modestly silent that he was the one who led Reed to solo swimming.
In 1980, Bowie's iconic single "Ashes To Ashes" was released. David Prokofiev, who was interested in the creative work of that time, was experimenting with the “forbidden” note re. At the same time, he conjures over the creation of the so-called non-linear reverse rhythm, giving the illusion of time reversed. Prior to that, Bowie had already tried to play back-to-back music with Brian Eno. The new composition not only brought to life a number of successful imitations (from the hit Grace Jones "Libertango" to the music of Astor Piazzolla to the soundtrack of Sergey Kurekhin for the film "Mr. Designer"), but also “folded” the entire future Depeche Mode. Martin Gore and David Gahan, at least, do not deny this. He did not deny the influence of the master on punk culture and the late Sid Vicious.
Bono recently stated that without Bowie there would have been no U2, Madonna - that without this musician she would not have gone beyond the image of a rebellious teenager from the Midwest.
At the end of the zero showman and musicologist Mikhail Kozyrev sadly noted the decline of the music business and, as a result, the frightening lack of new high-quality hits. Their production has made the Internet unprofitable with its accessibility. The same Internet where David Bowie first laid out his disc in 1999. And in 2001, apparently sensing what the thing smells like, he funded the creation of a children's radio, which was supposed to familiarize people with music of all styles from classical to punk. In a situation where the performers had to either write the music themselves, or sample what was created earlier, Lady Gaga’s creativity (controversial, but certainly high-quality) turned out to be a really fresh and powerful breakthrough, both musical and visual. “My inspiration is David Bowie,” the new transformationist succinctly comments on her success.
Three Acts of Magic
In the fall of 1980, the play "Elephant Man" takes place on Broadway, in which David Bowie plays the main role. The theatrical program, where Bowie’s name is surrounded by a mourning rectangle, is found during the arrest of Mark Chapman. At the police interrogation, Lennon’s killer admits that David was listed on his death list at number two.
But we are no longer talking about music. David Lynch is filming his Elephant Man a year later. Without Bowie, the musician has already returned to London. David, as an FBI agent, appears briefly with Lynch in the movie Twin Peaks. Is it possible to assume that the Bowie game inspired the idea of filming the theatrical play of the novice filmmaker in 1981, and the further transition to a truly surrealistic cinema with white wigwams and time reversal is also due to the influence of the White Duke? Maybe. At least now Lynch is passionately composing music in his own recording studio.
In 1982, Quentin Tarantino, an employee of video distribution, caught the attention of the track "Cat People", written by David Bowie for the movie of the same name by Paul Schroeder. “There was definitely something in this song,” the director admitted in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. “I immediately wanted to shoot an episode on this subject, for about twenty minutes.” Subsequently, Tarantino will insert "Cat People" in his picture "Inglourious Basterds" - where the heroine sets fire to her own movie theater.
Another master of the surreal non-linear plot, Christopher Nolan, in 2006 will invite Bowie to the role of Nikola Tesla in his film "Prestige". Examining the mechanics of magic in detail, the director is actually trying to analyze the phenomenon of creativity. “Nothing complicated, everything should develop according to a three-act scheme,” one of the heroes teaches. As if mocking the inertness of the voiced approach, Nolan in The Dark Knight realizes the most unexpected plot twist, and then also shoots the film Interstellar, where all the cosmic special effects fade before the turns of the script. I believe that all the other screen incarnations of David Bowie (even the roles of Pontius Pilate and Andy Warhol) fade before the influence he had on these three specialists of screen illusions.
AND SWEDISH AND THE REAPER
Both the first and second wife of David Bowie were supermodels, so not to mention the influence of the musician on the world of high fashion would be impolite, if only to them. Probably the most “affected” by Ziggy Stardust’s radiation, Jean-Paul Gaultier, but there were other precedents. At different times with a zipper on his face, in imitation of the cover of the 1973 Alladin Sane CD, not only the frontman of the shocking rock band KISS flaunted, but also the fashion models Dior and Saint Laurent. The jacket of the White Duke with a characteristic black and white ornament in 2010 was reproduced on the Givenchy spring fashion show. Kate Moss, Iselin Steyro, Raquel Zimmerman - these and other supermodels periodically adorned the covers of Vogue and Elle in makeup "under the Bowie"; the collections of recent years, Balmain, Emilio Pucci, Dries van Noten, to some extent borrow the development of the musician with the education of the designer or color combinations of his paintings. In 2013, the London exhibition of Victoria and Albert opened an exhibition of paintings by David Bowie.
The musician wrote about three dozen paintings at different times in his life - in Berlin, in London, in the USA, preferring the good old German expressionism. With some gloomy style, his watercolors attract attention with interesting color combinations, and the works created under the impression of a trip to Africa seem truly bright and life-affirming. It even seems that on these prototypes of patterns the whole design bureau of Artemy Lebedev has grown.
Named the most influential musician according to a New Music Express survey, David Bowie motivated his refusal of a knighthood in 2003 with the words: "This is not what I have been working for all my life." Paradoxical in everything to the end, the artist could hardly have articulated “for what exactly”, even to himself, but with the opinion of one of the brothers in the workshop (The Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr), he would probably agree: “There are people who even they don’t suspect David Bowie’s influence. "
