30th Century Boys

As you may or may not know, Scott Walker and David Bowie (roughly) shared a birthday this weekend. Unsurprising, as they have quite a lot in common. David (Jones) was admittedly deeply influenced by Scott (Engel), not least in their respective capacity for reinvention, image modification, and (at their best) a lyrical yearning to step outside themselves. Both played with teenybop-friendly images to make their first splash; and had a far better grasp of using TV in the service of pop; unlike most of their peers, for whom it was the other way round. Both had an uncanny knack for appealing to very diverse audiences. They also built a mystique around conflicted sexual ambiguity, "that tearing ache of limitless desire" as William Burroughs would have it (note how many of Walker's own songs are crooned to boys). Bowie's would retract eventually, as he became fully embedded into the mainstream and a publicly happy marriage. Walker would go in stranger directions; emerging after long intervals with increasingly perplexed, inarticulate, and violently troubled statements. Tilt and The Drift appeared in accordance with an ever more uncertain New World Order, within which Bowie would settle into an incredibly wealthy (and musically conservative) old age. It was as though their eccentricities, and capacity for experimentation, went in opposite directions. 

Both of them are also very much concerned with the idea of 'Europe'; as a much darker, lonelier, uglier, perverse place than its Hegelian ideologues would have us believe. Restless children of the Cold War, the horrors that led to it lurk around their best work. A strangely passionate inertia emerging from empires collapsed, or in stalemate. Exile would become a key word in their biographies. Walker, an American, would hit heart-throb status crooning Tony Hatch arrangements in Britain. Bowie would score his first U.S. number one borrowing from James Brown and Philly Soul. They would both go into highly-publicised meltdowns shortly afterwards, before finding the distinct 'voices' that would make them canonical - as opposed to mere stars - in the ruins of an older world. Without them, British pop could have taken a very different course indeed; remaining transfixed on the other side of the Atlantic, while ignoring the other side of the Channel, and its recent history.

Literary, theatrical and cinematic influences on both would come to the fore; with themes of stunted desire, decay, decadence, alienation, totalitarianism, sexual confusion, and the irresolvable regrets of youth; common to any number of mid-century European writers and artists, from Isherwood to Fassbinder to Bacon to Pasolini to Beckett. The queering of British pop (in performative, rather than sexual, orientation) starts with Walker's bruised and haunted solo albums; before it was repackaged by Bowie with Warholian savvy (the difference between a modernist and a postmodernist, I suppose). It was always present in the business of post-war British pop, but mainly closeted behind an almost caricatured hyper-masculinity; its poses and voices borrowed from the U.S. Behind the carefully-crafted slickness of their sound, Walker and Bowie's lyrics frequently required double takes, or entendres. Walker continued to push that beyond mainstream acceptance; long after Bowie had jumped ship into safer waters. But the series of albums Walker closed the sixties with, and those with which Bowie ended the seventies, stand outside, subvert, and move ahead of the generic rock 'movements' that lazier critics defined those years with. It wasn't all working towards a collective telos of youthful abandon. The European canon was here.

(Note: Post re-edited at a more lucid hour)

Look Good in Ruins (or: Twenty-five Tangents about Bowie in "Berlin")

1.

By all accounts, he had to get away from L.A. That much is a matter of undisputed public record. Some claim it was little more than a tax dodge, but others argue it was Bowie's attempt at breaking the maeslstrom of drugs and increasing psychosis that was consuming his life -- the obsession with Aleister Crowley, the traffic, escalating paranoia, the $500-per-diem cocaine habit supplemented by a diet of milk and peppers. Or maybe it was all of the above. But it had to start with leaving, getting out and getting away, extricating oneself from certain endangering circles, breaking with destructive habits and everything that fuels or enables them, and hopefully changing course and salvaging what's left of one's creative energies before it's too late. First to Switzerland, then -- eventually -- to Berlin. Leaving Los Angeles and all of its snares and poisonous associations behind. To hell with it all. Looking back, he would later say of Los Angeles, "The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the planet."


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2.

No big surprise, really, that Bowie would inevitably wind up in Berlin. He'd been enthralled with Germany for some time -- fascinated, as some recent recorded comments and reputed gestures suggested, to a worrisome or problematic degree. He was deeply taken with its art and its music, with the decadent cabaret culture of the Weimar era, and -- more alarmingly -- with a certain sordid chapter of its 20th-century history.

But mainly it seemed like a good place to go to detox and collect one's wits. Bleak, depressed, somewhat coldly (and dingily) modern, furtively wrestling with its own history in the most repressed of ways, physically divided, socially and politically adrift in the throes of its Cold War limbo. That was the impression of the place as it existed at the time, anyway – the picture that the word "Berlin" commonly painted in a person's mind. A "come-down" city if ever there was one. You wander down a given city street, only to come to its sudden and abrupt end, the point of stoppage at which you find yourself facing the Wall. Some histories aren't so easily left behind, some histories leave harsh reminders.


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3.

It was Christopher Isherwood who put the idea of moving to Berlin into Bowie's head. Bowie had long been a fan of Isherwood, whose Goodbye to Berlin had undergone a recent revival in popularity from loosely providing the inspiration for the musical Cabaret. Attending the Los Angeles stop of the Station to Station tour in 1976, Isherwood and artist David Hockney had made their way backstage to converse with the singer afterward. The topic of Berlin came up. Isherwood would later claim that he tried to disabuse Bowie of the notion of going there, going so far as to dismiss the city as "boring." No matter, as it prompted Bowie to decide that a lack of distractions and some anonymity were what he needed to clear his head, and it wasn't much later that he started packing his bags.


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4.

Bowie wasn't the only one fascinated by Berlin in the 1970s. Far from it. A quick survey of the American cultural landscape revealed that a certain number of people in the U.S. shared a similar interest. Lou Reed's Berlin LP might've played some small part in the matter, with the way it sketched its setting in the gloomiest and starkest of tones. And there was also the popularity of the Broadway and film productions of Cabaret. Plus, the novels of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass sold modestly well, with the films of Herzog and Wertmüller and Fassbinder and Wenders drawing crowds at the cinema in New York and reviews from urbane film critics.

As far as how the idea of Berlin was conceived and held in the American public imagination -- it represented something, must've served as some kind of metaphor. But a metaphor for what? Nobody ever said precisely, and perhaps nobody actually knew. Something having to do with trauma and unthinkable sins, with atonement and the weight of history, about rebuilding from the wreckage without looking back, of not being able to speak of the past, of living in a historical limbo. And about modernity. Because Berlin seemed deeply modern, but in a way that was as hard-won and enburdened as any form of modernity could be.


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al-Bowie

"In the first half of the ninth century, Baghdad enjoyed its high noon as the greatest and richest city in the world. In 861 however, the reigning Khalif, Mutawakkil, was murdered by Turkish mercenaries, who set up a military dictatorship, which lasted for some 30 years. During this period the empire fell apart, the various dominions and provinces each assuming virtual independence and pursuing its own interests. Baghdad, lately the capital of a vast empire, found its authority limited to Iraq alone.

The works of the contemporary historians of Baghdad are still available. They deeply deplored the degeneracy of the times in which they lived, emphasising particularly the indifference to religion, the increasing materialism, and the laxity of sexual morals. They lamented also the corruption of the officials of the government, and the fact that politicians always seemed to amass large fortunes while they were in office.

The historians commented bitterly on the extraordinary influence of popular singers over young people, resulting in a decline in sexual morality. The ‘pop’ singers of Baghdad accompanied their erotic songs on the lute, an instrument resembling the modern guitar. In the second half of the tenth century, as a result, much obscene sexual language came increasingly into use, such as would not have been tolerated in an earlier age. Several Khalifs issued orders banning ‘pop’ singers from the capital, but within a few years they always returned."

Sir John Glubb, "The Fate Of Empires"