David Bowie: Mu wo utatta otoko (David Bowie: The Man Who Sang Nothing)

David Bowie (1947-2016) was an English musician known for songs such as “‘Heroes’” and albums such as Ziggy Stardust. In this book, I examined Bowie’s albums that form the core of his work, from his 1969 hit song “Space Oddity” to his album Blackstar released for sale two days before his death, in chronological order with the goal of discovering motifs running through these works based on a thorough investigation of the lyrics and his singing voice.
 
What I emphasized in this book even more than the meaning of the lyrics and the musical composition was my analysis of the raw nature of Bowie’s singing voice with which he approached his audience. For this reason, it is recommended that the reader use the Spotify playlist to listen to each of the songs as they read. Because of this emphasis on the timbre of Bowie’s voice, I have relied heavily on rubies [hiragana or katakana readings of words placed above the word], which are unique to Japanese, in my transliterating Bowie’s singing voice.
 
Bowie, who arrived on the scene in the late stages of the golden age of rock and roll, rose to rock stardom after his release of Ziggy Stardust, which was a kind of meta-rock album that was, at the same time, a critique of the rock genre. Running through Bowie’s expressive endeavors from that point on and throughout his career is a powerful impetus to venture outside of the rock and roll genre while at the same time using rock and roll as a means to this end. He never completely abandoned rock and roll as a form but continued to repeatedly modify the form without ever getting tired of it.
 
The avant-garde nature of Bowie’s music led to the creation of the linguistically experimental album Low. The characteristics of Bowie’s voice include processing to raise the pitch of his singing voice, lyrics that evoke the babblings of a baby, and an adoration of descending melodies typical of nursery rhymes. The fact that the word “nothing” appears frequently in the lyrics is another characteristic. Bowie’s lyric “Nothing will help us” has a double meaning: “there is nothing that can help us” and “nothing is what will help us.” This is a traditional rhetorical device used in English literature known as the “paradox of nothing.” Bowie’s works contain a surprising diversity of literary, artistic, and ideological backgrounds, including the influence of novels by Evelyn Waugh and MISHIMA Yukio, modern art, his deep connection to Japanese culture based on collaborations with YAMAMOTO Kansai and SUKITA Masayoshi, and his knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism.
 
Partly because of the queer makeup and costumes he donned for his performances, Bowie’s music, especially his early songs, had a liberating effect on adolescents by teaching them that there were alternative ways to grow up. For such young people, listening to Bowie’s music in earnest served as a type of rite of passage that was different from the conventional social maturation. What this book reveals is Bowie’s shaman-like role as a mediator guiding the rite of passage to an alternative world, which he accomplished by continuing to present his alternative lifestyle to audiences through his works and on stage throughout his entire life. Bowie’s music personifies the plasticity of life, continually reinventing itself while moving back and forth across the boundaries between genders and between life and death.

 

(Written by TANAKA Jun, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2021)