David Bowie Controlled The Zeitgeist With His Essence
The man has finally fallen to Earth. David Bowie is dead.
It’s not just because Bowie had just released 28th studio album Blackstar on January 8 that we’re particularly devastated by his demise. Rather, it’s in the idea that David Bowie controlled the zeitgeist with his essence that, in realizing that he’s died, we realize that there’s a significant force now absent in the universe. Now, we’re all incredibly uncomfortable as we feel the sudden energy shift of the world re-aligning itself at a different speed and setting course once again.
It’s Bowie who once said, “I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human. I felt very puny as a human. I thought, ‘Fuck that. I want to be a superhuman.’” It’s in the spirit of that quote that personally, as a creative whose goal every day is to literally change the world by controlling the zeitgeist, I always turn to David Bowie for inspiration. Intriguingly enough, I’m actually not so much a fan of David Bowie the musical artist. Yes, music is what he’s best known for creating, but to me that’s actually not where his genius lies. Rather than as a musician, it’s in Bowie wholly embodying the idea that creativity is an art that must be done with an unwavering devotion to an ultra-aware introspection, and that your spiritual essence is the canvas upon which your best work deserves to be shown is what makes him impressive. Even further, I’d venture to say that this is what allows him to stand as one of the most dominant and zeitgeist controlling creative masters across all mediums of art, ever.
There’s a notion that creative mastery must ideally be met with both critical and commercial acclaim in order for success to be best defined. The lesson I learn from Bowie is that this narrow definition of excellence is an idea that stands to be challenged. Pop culture tends to have this horrible habit of honoring the first person to cross an established finish line, turning everything into a game with winners, losers, beginnings and ends. However, there’s a better way that the perpetually evolving David Bowie regarded his own creative excellence in which this isn’t the case.
David Bowie was so gifted as a pop star that he could’ve easily released eight platinum albums between 1972’s Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars and 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). However, as a mark of his truly unfettered creative spirit, he released eight gold albums instead. During those eight years he toured universes and realities both known and unknown on a creative journey that saw him investigate his relationship with race, politics, gender, fashion and hedonism. His engagement with these concepts was so potent that it saw Bowie’s life so definitively altered that his literal physical presentation completely changed at the whim of his creative motivations.
Pushing oneself creatively without a level of commercial largess befitting the level of either a) excellence you’re reaching or b) compensation for physical and certain psychological torment is difficult. However, in the case of artists like Bowie when you earnestly subjugate the body for the art and the spirit for the release of creative output, at some point, something incredible happens. I sincerely believe that David Bowie’s greatest success as an artist came in being the physical embodiment of the magical and mysterious .1% of things we absolutely don’t know about how sociology and physical science operate. In pushing to such a creative depth within himself that he became more of a force than a person, when he then connected with the most powerful creative forces in music, he effectively shifted the zeitgeist forever in his direction.
When David Bowie released his album Let’s Dance in 1983, it wasn’t just his pop-star crowning moment. Rather, if thinking deeper about that album’s success as the extension of the potency of his 1980 hit single “Fashion” plus working with masterful producer/arranger Nile Rodgers on Let’s Dance, it was the wedge that opened the door to allowing him to significantly push the universe in any direction he saw fit. When you read Bowie quotes like, “To not be modest about it, you’ll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I’ve worked with have done their best work by far with me,” and listen to Let’s Dance, you realize that he’s not speaking from a place of hubris, but one of accepting the weight of his unique and iconic gift.
Regarding the recording of Let’s Dance, and the zeitgeist-shifting genius of Bowie, Rodgers tells Red Bull Music Academy, “A lot of people don’t understand that David Bowie didn’t even have a record deal when we did “Let’s Dance. He was between record labels.” Continuing, Rodgers says, “David can talk in very abstract terms, but that abstract language was the same language my parents spoke. It’s the same language all the cool jazz people speak, all the artists. So when David and I were doing tons of pre-production on the album that would become Let’s Dance, David summed up rock ’n’ roll, or what this album was going to be, by a picture he found of Little Richard getting into a Cadillac. David held it up and said, Nile, “that’s rock ’n’ roll.”
Bowie continued to push even deeper into his creativity over the next five years, releasing two more platinum-selling albums, starring the Labyrinth and likely FINALLY able to enjoy the riches he was most assuredly due given the level of push he made to create synergy between mind, body, soul, art and execution. After that point and certainly after noting that so many other creative forces to come were sampling and re-shaping so many pieces of his vast zeitgeist-defining legacy, he faded away, recently popping back up to remind us of who he is and also likely to remind us of why so many things are the way they are.
The lesson here is that creating with the desire to literally change the world is difficult, if only because it requires literally turning your life and essence into the canvas upon which the art is seen. It’s easy to hide behind yourself and broadcast only the things people want to see at any given moment onto a canvas that everyone absolutely desires to watch. The idea of digging deeper, plunging further and working harder within yourself and making that the definition of your creative expression is a rare notion to consider. However, when it works, it’s explosive and literally changes everyone and everything forever.
“I’m not a prophet or a stone aged man, just a mortal with potential of a superman. I’m living on…”
