Well, this is on my Christmas list! A book to celebrate Bowie's wild musical career and his equally stunning style evolutions and experimentations. The book is in honour of the 40th anniversaries of two of his seminal works, Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. Bowie's music marked a bit of transition for me, out of the world of blues, r+b and soul that defined much of my earliest musical baptism. I must admit that as much as the music inspired me I found the gender-bending dynamic of his image immensely appealing, it spoke to a part of me that didn't feel at home in the more aggressive male identities of my youth. I grew up in a working class world surrounded by mostly mods, skinheads and suedeheads, which is why I still love polished boots and sharp suiting, but I found some other threads to my life when Bowie glammed up. I liked the questioning posture of his music and his style--it wasn't just for the shock value, it didn't actually shock me at all, but it did seemed to be addressing questions that I was as well, about the nature of identity-- male/female, sexual/gender, authority/liberation, all those binary oppositions that tend to shape the worlds we inherit, which I found and still find suffocating.
Bowie is under-estimated I think--his avant-garde approach to music, to song-writing, musicianship, his theatricality--there are so few like him in the annals of popular music--and playing live? Well if you never saw him, and you may not get the chance anymore, you really missed out on something special--this man can bring it live.
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