Hello friends,
Because I’m a habitually introspective person, I think I’m on track to have a mid-life crisis a little early. Most people think of a mid-life crises as someone waking up one day around the age of 40 or 45 and realizing they’ve done nothing with their life. I, on the other hand, have been slowly evaluating where I am vs. where I want to be for a long time. Spoiler: I’m not where I want to be! And I think it’s because, paradoxically, I haven’t leaned enough into failure. My frustration with my artistic and activist output can be boiled down to the old adage: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Yeah, I know, we have those sayings about it. “Fail forward.” “Fail better.” It’s easy to give someone else that advice. It’s much more difficult to accept even the risk of your own failures or display them publicly. We don’t have a lot of great models for failure, not because people aren’t failing all the time, but because we tend to focus on success. I am realizing that I need a good model for failure, someone to help me push through fear of failing. And that’s where David Bowie comes in.
It’s been a bit of a New Year’s intention to listen to more music from Bowie’s later career. I’m very familiar with his stuff from about 1969-80, but he was regularly making music with only one sizable hiatus from the early 1960s to his death in 2016. Exploring his later stuff requires some fortitude because it’s a mixed bag, which I think is epitomized in this song and video, “Loving the Alien” from his 1984 album Tonight. While Tonight is generally considered his worst or second-worst album, “Loving the Alien” is considered to be one of the best songs of his 1980s work.
This video was released in May of 1985, the month that I was born. Bowie was 37 when he made this song, the same age that I am now. Having discovered it recently, I am obsessed with my own ambiguity about it. “Loving the Alien” is a good song that’s marred by over-production (which Bowie was always been prone to) and production cliches that have dated a lot of his ‘80s and ‘90s music. And the video is just so weird that you really can’t call it bad or good. Bowie knows he’s fucking gorgeous, but that haircut is awful. He seems to be engaging in self-parody with all his smirking and smiling at the camera but the rest of the imagery in the video is baffling and disturbing. What exactly is he trying to say here? I can’t look away, but I can’t really engage with it, either.
Is it a success? Is it a failure? All I know is that he kept making a lot of music after this.
My stance on Bowie has long been that he was a very talented person who had to work hard to bring that talent to the surface. Even though he was a great songwriter and had a genius for visual presentation, he made so, so many mis-steps.* And these were not just the kind of “I’m phoning this one in and I know it” failures, but also “I put everything into this performance that I think people will love and…oops, everyone actually hates it” failures. You can’t talk about the nadir of his career because he had multiple nadirs.
The prevailing narrative about Bowie is that he was always “reinventing” himself. That word has become such a cliche in pop culture writing that I’m not sure what it means. It is true that Bowie was not willing to do what a lot of his peers have done, which is cash in on one era of his career by keeping that same look and sound. But when people talk glibly about Bowie’s “reinvention,” they make it seem effortless. If you step back and take the long view of his career, however, that reinvention looks less like a masterfully planned artistic journey and more like a lot of failure and struggle punctuated by fantastic successes.
“Reinvention” comes in because he kept pushing through failure. He was trying to find a sound that he liked, he was trying to explore difficult themes in his lyrics, he was trying to find a look that would appeal to an audience. And yes, he was also trying to make money. That’s even true of his work in the ‘70s, which people tend to idealize but had plenty of micro-failures. Have you listened to some of the deep cuts on Aladdin Sane or Young Americans? Yikes. This guy—who played many of his own instruments and often did perfect one-take vocal recordings—was also capable of recording some truly bad music.
For all his flaws,** Bowie always chose the risk of failure over the certainty of succeeding by doing the same thing twice. I don’t know where he got that fortitude. I don’t think it was sheer egotism, because in my experience egotistical artists keep doing the same thing over and over and then get frustrated when people aren’t interested anymore. Bowie didn’t pander to fans, but was also responsive to what people liked. The thing he followed through on was this promise: “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t bore you.”
So Bowie is my Failure Saint. There are a lot of people out there who could serve such a role, but Bowie is mine.
Until next time, perhaps with another failure under my belt,
Emily
*Sometimes literally. He was a great performer, but he could not dance to save his life.
**I am not idealizing the artist or the man. As a person, David Jones/Bowie did a number of unethical things over the course of his career, although the prevailing narrative is that once he got off drugs and out from under the thumb of his crooked manager, he generally became a stand-up guy. This story about Bowie and Trent Reznor, for instance, is pretty heartwarming. Engaging with his work is an exercise in accepting human complexity.