"I’m ever reluctant to take our predictive narratives totally seriously because I think that in spite of our best efforts at prediction, I think that our self-regard defeats us in the end. That we tend to—we imagine relatively heroic outcomes, and no one wants a prophet standing on the corner saying that everything is going to be hideously stupid and banal. Utterly atrocious, and that’s just the nature of things. It lacks even the—well, the appeal of the apocalypse is closure and a sort of clarity. Yes! The world is ending. And yeah it’s kind of a banner one can get behind, in a way. Its opposite is this kind of willy-nilly nihilistic absurdist narrative that one can feel one is living in."
"[The Luxembourg] report notes that following the 2008-09 financial crisis, few market sectors rebounded as robustly as art – particularly contemporary art, which has doubled in value since the beginning of the financial recovery.
"But since art has no fundamental value, it is difficult for economists to apply economic principles to it. It is harder still to trade in art as an asset class, as the market has clearly attempted to do. [...]
Levin said the bubble was inflating in part due to the prevalence of high-end money laundering being done through art, and how the two have come to affect one another. Buy art in one country and pop it in the private jet, the theory goes, and by morning you’ve moved $100m between tax jurisdictions.
"'In certain countries, art is very effective way for collectors to transfer wealth,' Levin said. 'It’s highly mobile and there’s a tendency for it trade up to whatever the strongest currency may be.'"
In other news: I guess for years now NYCers have been saying that the city's been taken over by rich wankers. I guess this confirms it as fact.
image: Damien Hirst; "What Comes Up, Must Come Down", 1994
Some straggling, tangential thoughts; re legacy, canonization, etc....
Monday’s news eventually had me reaching for England Is Mine, Michael Bracewell’s lenghty rumination about the role of dandyism in shaping Anglo modernist cultural history. Flipping to the section where he addresses the Glam years of the early 1970s, in which the author frames Bowie and Roxy Music as staging some variety of sci-fi musical revue for the nuclear age:
“Hot on Bowie’s stacked heels were Roxy Music, who mingled science and artifice into a cabaret futura of decadent romance -- playing with nostalgia as Bowie played with the future. [...]
And yet Roxy Music and David Bowie, throughout the first half of the 1970s,...propounded notions of time travel that were heavily tinged with death, disorientation and decay. From Bowie’s ‘Five Years’, as an imagined response to the imminent end of the world, to Roxy Music’s ‘The Bob Medley’ (1972) in which the strains of an interior elegance are drowned out by gun-fire, the ultimate destination of their glamour was shaped by a romantic sense of mortality -- a plastic Keatsian ‘half in love with easeful death’. This strong sense of death beneath glamour...would be crucial to those post-punks who looked to the Glam age for their own aesthetic of death, dehumanization and Weimar decadence. As the sensual images of pin-up girls and swooning sirens on the covers of Roxy Music’s first four LPS hovered close to pornography, so too did their music move closer to the gloriously lurid, subverted by a arcane knowingness which crystallized their luxurious image into a sealed world of erotic melodrama: Edith Piaf meets Helmut Newton. Ferry -- ever the trend-setter -- would drop into German on the goose-stepping chorus line of ‘Lullaby’ (1974) to proclaim that the end of the world was nothing when one was stranded between love and art, thus setting into place, more or less, the entire agenda of New Romanticism.”
(At which point some readers might elect to supplant that “more or less” with a “for better or for worse.” No matter, Bracewell continues...)
“In terms of drama, David Bowie and Roxy Music turned pop concerts into rallies and Goth-Futurist theater, with the trashy rock-’n’-roll finding a natural home between the atmospheric, synthesized soliloquies of love and loss. Bowie singing ‘Sweet Thing’, as a lover lost in an urban future, could compete with Bryan Ferry singing ‘In Every Home a Heartache’ as a lover lost in Harrods; Roxy Music’s ‘A Song for Europe’, with its punning on the Bridge of Sighs, fitted nicely with Bowie’s double serenading of Jean Genet and Iggy Pop in ‘Jean Genie’. A whole new language had been invented for radical English pop, a kind of neo-Platonic plutonium plush, which was a world and a time away from the previous tyranny of American rockism over pop cool.”
Many of the Bowie obits and tributes that piled up on Monday and the following day featured the same component -- the blahblahblahing about the scope and extent of the artist’s influence on so much music that came afterward. Which prompted me to think about something I said in my prior post, the admission that I had gone nearly 25 years without listening to Bowie, without having much reason to think of him. Perhaps that was in some way testament to the degree of his cultural influence; that it was -- in certain aspects -- so pervasive in the pop industry (once again for better or worse) that it became all to easy to take that influence for granted -- it became such an inherent given, such an element of the environment that it like some sort of cultural wallpaper that was there when you moved into the premises, and long ago stopped noticing.
And the lazier tributes making it sound like Bowie was Glam rock, all but claiming that he’d invented it. Much like the lazy accounts of Pop Art that have it all beginning and ending with Andy Warhol. Like Warhol, Bowie was a somewhat late arrival on the Glam scene. And as such was initially dismissed by a few as a bandwagon-hopping opportunist.* But let’s be honest, were it not for him and Roxy Music, glam wouldn’t have ultimately amounted to much more than a footnote in the annals of pop music. If it had boiled down to the like of T. Rex, The Sweet, Slade and Gary Glitter, the whole thing would be remembered as little more than some Bubblegum 2.0 fad whose popularity was largely confined to the U.K.. (Next up, kids -- the Bay City Rollers!)
Which of course is the “authenticity” argument, the bulkiest and most unwieldy folder from the “rockism” file. Which I never fully understood, because the Authenticity party line was mostly a product of the late‘50s-early ‘60s folk movement, having only marginally spilled over into the ascendant rock scene in the years that followed.** Whatever the case, you can deem it as part of the cultural baggage from the 1960s that Bowie, Roxy, and other artists of the period decided could be readily done away with. (Relatedly, I saw this morning that Simon had posted something about the entrance of “meta” into the pop-music spectrum, via a 1980 interview with Brian Eno.)
And I realize that in siding with Bracewell’s argument, I place myself on one side of a dubious polemic adhered to by some people. That being the polemic that roughly goes: Sod all that high-minded, pretentious art-school hijackers’ alt-canon bullocks -- like a tosser who brings a book to a party, coming along and taking all the fun out of everything.
As far as Glam is concerned, I have no idea if either party Bowie or Ferry were privy to Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” essay; which is probably neither nor there because both parties they had something vaguely similar in mind. Ushering in the entrance of postmodern irony into the pop music arena, while showing notion of authenticity the door. Something pop-music artists and listeners have been mindful of ever since. All of which, of course, mostly has to do theater, presentation, image-making, artifice, public spectacle and the like, and -- one could argue -- nothing to do with music, per se. But hey, they don’t call it show biz for nothing.
* One can imagine the sort of incredulity that broke out in the Leo Castelli stable when the gallerist decided to take Warhol on, with Lichenstein, Rosenquist et al. grumbling, “Who’s this interloping Johnny-come-lately? Oh, he already has a successful career...and a pile of cash to go with it? well, fuck him!” ** Which of course is the “authenticity” argument, the bulkiest and most unwieldy folder from the “rockism” file. Which I never fully understood, because the Authenticity party line was mostly a product of the late‘50s-early ‘60s folk movement, having only marginally spilled over into the ascendant rock scene in the years that followed. Admittedly, this would change in later years, by which point rock-related notions of authenticity were often tangled up with issues about economic class -- was such-and-such an artist from a true working-class background/”the streets”/whatever.
Momus on this morning’s news, and the “theatrical timing” of Bowie’s passing:
"Apparently he’d had cancer for eighteen months. What a keeper of secrets, just as he was when he used to sneak in and out of Bromley bedsits, playing girls off against each other, giving everyone a different story! Sneaky David who lied to everybody because it really wasn’t any of our business! He even got Tony Visconti to lie about him being healthy and strong! I’d heard the cancer rumours, but I believed the lies. I preferred to, needed to: the lies were so much more palatable.
"But it wasn’t really 'unexpectedly'. His songs — the public statements that really matter — had all the while been spelling things out stark and clear to those of us willing to listen. I felt uncomfortable singing, in my Blackstar cover: 'Something happened on the day he died / Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside...' It was totally clear who 'he' was. And then came Lazarus, with 'Look up here, I’m in heaven...' And that video which has him disappearing into the wardrobe at the end. To Narnia, some said."
Of course there’ll be an avalanche of tributes hammered out and posted today and in the days to come, but I think I may stop reading there.
It’d be fair to say that Bowie was formative musical input during my early teenage years -- Station to Station being the first full album of his that I sank into, roughly about a year before the release of Scary Monsters. In the several years that followed, I did the backtracking and absorbed all of his back catalogue. But come my late teens and about 20-plus years of my adulthood, I paid him little attention -- never listened to his music (new or old), rarely had reason to even think of him.
What changed?, what prompted a revisitation after a long absence? I don’t know -- maybe it when younger critics, those who weren’t around back when Bowie was a big artistic entity -- began to appraise the man’s career at a more objective remove. Or maybe it was hearing Seu Jorge’s delicate versions of Bowie songs for the Life Aquatic soundtrack; hearing those songs in a more naked and humble form, stripped of their multipart arrangements and electric bombast, and realizing that underneath lay some very peculiar and at times lovely songwriting.
It prompted me to gradually revisit the early Bowie albums, curious to see how they’d strike me now that I’m much older and have the benefit of my own distance from the work’s period of origin. I found that my preferences hadn’t changed much over the years. The much-heralded, hit-making, high-concept Glam years -- good, but (as before) not among my favorites. Instead I found myself more deeply drawn to the fore-and-aft transitional phases -- particularly Hunky Dory and the “Berlin Years” material. The years when Bowie didn’t in advance know what direction he wanted to go, and was operating more by intuition and curiosity than by design.
But yes, back to the matter of timing. I’d spent the past few days noting the reviews of the new (and now final) album, Blackstar. Unanimously positive of the half dozen or so that I’d read. I couldn’t help but wonder if the verdicts of “his best album in decades” weren’t partly because of the element of unexpectedness of the project’s jazz-tinged experimentalism -- the surprising change of direction as proof-positive that the man still had a sense of artistic adventurism after so many years. Each accompanied with a checklist of reputed musical inspirations and influences on the project: Kendrick Lamar, Death Grips, and (perhaps mostly puzzling of all) Boards of Canada. None of which are, to my ears, apparent throughout the album. But a number of critics mention one possible inspiration that does make much more sense when I’d only heard excerpts from the first few of the Blackstar songs --- the music of Scott Walker. A bit ironic, that; considering Walker was a figure who has at the height of his pop fame at the time that David Jones took the stage-surname Bowie, spending the next several years floundering about in the U.K. pop market, before finally becoming the artist as he's now known and remembered.
And agin about that timing: I only got the album yesterday, giving it first spin around sundown. Yes, it’s frontloaded with the more experimental, more challenging tunes; but it ends with three songs that are -- by my reckoning -- among the most gorgeous things Bowie ever did. And the voice -- that distinctive throaty croon of his -- was undiminished by the years. By the time the album’s last song, “I Can’t Give Everything Away”, was in full sweep, my wife came into the room, practically clutching her heart. “This is really good,” she said to me. “Fucking hell. To think it was made by a man almost seventy years old. Maybe he really is an alien, after all.” Only then to awake to this morning’s news, which cast her comments -- as well as much of Blackstar's lyrics -- into an uncanny context. Fucking hell, indeed.
In other entertainment news: Gio at BBB offers further reflections on the mass ornament; and at 555 Timh ruminates over the banalization of the apocalypse and the end of the end of history.
Headspillage, tangents, fragments & ruminative riffing. Guaranteed to sustain a low level of interest, intelligibility, or lucidity for most outside parties.
