Word: concertizer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rockers or New Dancers dancing to New Music who do not owe him an abiding debt. Everyone from Gary Numan to Talking Heads and Human League and Culture Club ought to make a deep bow in his direction. If the success of his new album and the galvanic concert tour are any indication, then Bowie is setting the direction once again...
...album's wonderful opening, Modern Love, which becomes the climactic clincher of the concert, ticks off the failing solaces of contemporary life, such as love and religion, while a bouncy chorus invokes "God and man" as if they were the co-owners of the corner candy store. Let's Dance, a love song rilled with the promise of passion and the threat of impermanence under "this serious moonlight," has one of those weird, hypnotic choruses that uses the colors and objects of dreams like surrealistic talismans: "Let's dance/ Put on your red shoes and dance the blues...
...Really horrendous" is the way Bowie describes the title track now, "just dreadful. It was a joyful anthem to nihilism." He had also become nuttily enamored of the "mythology" of fascism and would allow in interviews that he would make "an excellent dictator." At the end of a 1976 concert tour, he finally crashed, appropriately in Berlin, feeling "empty, drained and rotting inside...
...There is no definitive David Bowie," he once remarked. Ziggy and the Duke have been slithered out of, like shucked snakeskins, but their creator remains a well-nurtured enigma. Perhaps by design: in concert or in conversation, he always seems like a scrupulous creation. The body, even relaxed, seems conscious of pose. The face?Leslie Howard sketched by George Grosz?can be nearly beautiful, but the mouth splits its sculpted lines when it turns up into a toothy, gratified grin, like Chaplin's as he watched a fat man fall. Bowie's eyes, always appraising, seem to look straight down...
...stalwart stepchild of Roeg and Oshima, Bowie works hard on his video outings. He sketches out each shot, consults with the director on everything before stepping in front of the camera. The results, startling and often funny, are more than musical presentations. They are essential refractions of the songs. Concert personas are thus definitely superfluous. Bowie can become a new character, fixed with the permanence of tape and film, with each new song...