Dr Michael Jones is Director of MA Music Industry Studies at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Popular Music:
“There will many hundreds of thousands of words written about David Bowie in the days and weeks to come; deservedly so, Bowie was an innovator. The point is, though, that he was someone whose innovation was not confined to music.
The break-up of the Beatles in 1970 created a popular cultural vacuum: Bowie stepped into that vacuum and while he might not have filled it completely, what he developed ‘in plain sight’ was an array of strategies that have gone on to become the ‘commonsense’ of popular culture and of business, itself.
Popular culture
The Beatles were the driving force of behind the rise of ubiquitous popular culture. Before the Beatles there was Elvis Presley. Presley was a puppet of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and confined by him to a business model that was becoming rapidly outmoded: convert a teenage following into a movie audience.
The Beatles tore up this rule book and, in so doing, presaged the decline of the mixed economy – they made a virtue of innovation and they made music an index of lifestyle.
What business learned from the late-70s onwards was that commodities needed to be sold in ways that chimed with individual decisions about self-expression and identity. Bowie was the pop star who embodied this logic.
Ziggy Stardust
After a faltering start in pop music, in the creation of ‘Ziggy Stardust’, Bowie united the visual and narrative conceits and conventions of science fiction with those of pop in a way that allowed him to at once be and yet not be that invented character.
Having gained an audience, it was then a business masterstroke to kill off this successful creation and to trust that his audience was now primed to accept and delight in successive incarnations and their associated musical genres.
This allowed Bowie to always be ‘himself’ (whoever and whatever that was) while enjoying the licence that came with this trust to pioneer electronica, funk and emergent dance music and to use print, stage and video design to create symbolically rich and dramatic settings for the personas he adopted to carry and complete the latest musical and visual change.
Branding
Bowie presaged branding and showed how a successful brand should conduct itself – with verve, panache and cultural insight.
Bowie developed a rapid astuteness in managing himself as a brand: he limited access to his personal life but his challenges to sexual convention were both brave and headline-grabbing; his musical collaborations were also guaranteed to fuel his myth – Bowie is probably the only popular cultural figure who connects Bing Crosby with Freddie Mercury.
So strong and savvy was this brand-management that he survived a decision leave Victoria station in an open-topped Mercedes while waving to a waiting crowd in a way that recalled (deliberately or not) the style of fascist leaders. For anyone else this would have been a fatal career move, but Bowie survived it to supplant the Beatles as a popular cultural force.
Influence
In a range of ways, visually as well as musically, Bowie’s influence shaped UK popular music for two decades from the mid-70s – there would have been no Human League, Culture Club, Scritti Politti, Spandau Ballet or Joy Division without Bowie, but there also would not have been the type of ‘indie rock’ that traced its origins to the Velvet Underground.
The key difference between Bowie and the Beatles was that, while the Beatles were a key ingredient in the ‘Summer of Love’ of 1967 and took their cue from the US West Coast bands, Bowie embraced the New York sound of the Velvet Underground and the art sensibility of Andy Warhol.
Warhol’s representation of consumer packaging as art has brought us to a culture in which pop stars embrace rather than repudiate commodification. Bowie was a conduit for this and his later foray into the financial markets (Bowiebonds 1997) and Ecommerce (Bowienet in 1998) demonstrate what a fine, and easily-crossed, line there is between the desire to be a self-defining individual and the process of destroying collective structures so that the only defence the individual has when reduced to the pawn of market forces is to become more marketable.
Late 80s
Bowie declined as someone who could sell pop records from the late-80s onwards. In the UK, the club culture that Bowie’s music helped to inspire gave rise to the DJ and the producer as the new force for innovation, while rock music, in the form of Oasis, reached back before Bowie for its inspiration.
Subsequently, even as his cachet remained high, Bowie’s health faltered, notably following heart surgery in 2004. His comparative inactivity over the past decade can be attributed to this and his recent release of Blackstar (2016) now appears to be obviously valedictory.
None of this diminishes him as an inspirational force where this ‘force’ is popular cultural rather than musical; as business, more widely, learned from and now informs popular cultural production it should revere, among other entrepreneurs, David Bowie as one of its muses.”