GLR May June

It’s Not About the Music

“D O YOU LIKE GIRLS OR boys?” asked David Bowie in the song “Hallo Spaceboy” (1996), add- ing slyly, “It’s confusing these days.” Since the 70s, Bowie has worked hard to generate similar confusion about his own sexuality through personæ like glam-rocker Ziggy Stardust (with his “God-given ass”), the

author’s musings on Bowie’s wider impor- tance (very little of which pertains to the Spaceman’s sexuality), Rüther rightfully calls the artist’s Berlin phase the “most dar- ing music of his career.” Lacking in continuity and focus, the book’s six chapters range from Bowie’s ar- rival in West Berlin to his triumphant return in 1987 for the “Concert for Berlin,” when

C OLIN C ARMAN

Heroes: David Bowie in Berlin by Tobias Rüther Reaktion Books. 184 pages, $25.

he rallied an audience of 70,000 still under the shadow of the Wall, which would fall in two years’ time. The book’s transla- tor has done the author no favors. You know you’re in trouble when a book’s opening sentence reads: “And from right here, says the tour guide, at that time you could see the Wall.” The content, too, is frequently cockamamie: Rüther, who loses focus

epicene Thin White Duke, and his collaboration, in the 80s, with Queen. In the 90s, Bowie updated his bisexual image once more, declaring on Buddha of Suburbia that the “whole world is queer.” As recently as 2013, Bowie had another comeback, this time with The Next Day , a stellar album in which he sings lovingly of run- ning with the boys—“dirty boys,” that is. Could he be alluding to

easily, suddenly pulls in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik only to posit that the “added K” comes from “kteis,” the word in ancient Greek for “vagina.” Good to know. Rüther’s love of innuendo is sim- ilarly problematic. The fifth chapter concerns the relationship between Bowie and French philosopher Michel Foucault when the two met at the nightclub Dschungel (West Berlin’s version of Studio 54). A somewhat accurate observation— “Both Foucault and Bowie see sex- ual emancipation as a means through which one is free to define oneself or reinvent oneself”—is coupled with something more salacious: Foucault and Bowie “got to know one another better than simply on paper.” But there is an even more insidious form of insinuation throughout Heroes , which is Rüther’s obsessive mis- characterization of Bowie as a Nazi sympathizer. While it’s true that Bowie allegedly made a Nazi salute during his “Station to Station” tour in 1976, he himself has said the pho- tograph caught him mid-wave and that he was deranged from heavy drug use. Indeed the notion of a goose-step- ping Bowie is Rüther’s idée fixe. A perfectly fine chapter, “The Party on the Brink,” begins strongly by link- ing Bowie’s æsthetic sensibility to philosopher Ernst Bloch but loses it-

the urban legend that his first wife caught Mick Jagger and himself in fla- grante delicto? In Berlin for three years (1976– 79), Bowie relocated to 155 Haupt- strasse (not far from Dietrich’s birthplace and Isherwood’s digs in the early 1930s) to beat his depend- ence on cocaine and to reinvent his sound with the help of Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, and Tony Visconti. The output of that storied period, known as the Berlin triptych, occupies a sa- cred place in Bowie’s body of work. Three albums, 1977’s Low and He- roes , followed by Lodger in 1979, re- main essential listening not only because the songs range from the in- strumentally gothic “Warsawza” to the crowd-pleasing “Heroes,” but also because they anticipate the ’80s, when Bowie would reinvent himself once more as the poperatic singer of “Modern Love” and “Let’s Dance.” If Bowie has been metamorphos- ing for decades now—so many ch- ch-changes since his origins in British psychedelia—Tobias Rüther’s Heroes: David Bowie in Berlin only confuses matters more. While it is clear the author wants to approach Bowie from a wider cultural angle— to his credit, Rüther has an encyclo- pedic knowledge of high, low, and popular art—he fails to do justice to an extraordinary phase in a truly chameleonic career. In a book that is less about the music than about the

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