David Bowie in concert at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, February 26, 1976.Dennis Robinson/The Globe and Mail
It's one thing to write your own epitaph or even to choreograph your own funeral but it takes a special kind of person to make death a multimedia, multiplatform global commercial launch. David Bowie did that and because he was one of the greatest artists of the late 20th century, he orchestrated his passing with verve, drama, pathos and great personal insight.
He also made it a commercial success because, for Mr. Bowie, that was terribly important. Blackstar, the album he released days before he died, is soaring up the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. A jazz-infused collection of reveries about illness, fear of death and life's transience, it is not what you might call pop music but if Mr. Bowie made it so, it is because he was more than a great artist, he was also a marketing genius.
Mr. Bowie was not the only rock star to indulge in periodic musical makeover but he exploited image, PR and marketing in ways that his rivals (he was fiercely competitive) could never reach. His transitions from Ziggy to Aladdin Sane to the Thin White Duke were artistic creations but they were also invented in a deliberately methodical way, a process he described in 1976 in a Playboy magazine interview: "I realized I had become a total product of my concept character Ziggy Stardust. So I set out on a very successful crusade to re-establish my own identity. I stripped myself down and took myself apart, layer by layer. I used to sit in bed and pick on one thing a week that I either didn't like or couldn't understand. And during the course of the week, I'd try to kill it off."
It's almost as if Mr. Bowie was investigating a soft drink or a laundry detergent in need of rebranding but there is no marketing department on earth that has the discipline or creativity to undertake the scale of redesign that Mr. Bowie prescribed for himself "layer by layer."
He knew who was listening. It was "the girl with the mousy hair" in his song, Life on Mars, whose "mummy is yelling no." And he didn't just give her a saccharine-coated love story, the standard confection of the pop industry. Instead, on the cover of her vinyl LP, she found an alien from outer space, eerily beautiful, oddly effeminate but also virile, singing about what it was like to be a stranger in a strange world.
And the market segment of emotionally fragile girls (and boys) with mousy hair was growing fast. The teen population was almost a fifth of the U.K. in 1971 – today it accounts for a mere 12 per cent. In the United States, the 12-to-17 cohort numbered 18 million in 1960 but 10 years later, it had grown to 25 million. By 1990, and despite overall population growth, the teen population had subsided to 20 million. As consumers, adolescents and young adults in the 1970s had a lot less money than today's teens but they had enough to spend a few dollars on a vinyl LP. As Mr. Bowie reached into the hearts of girls and boys with his ballads about loneliness and alienation, he dipped into their pockets.
Mr. Bowie was as much a commercial as an artistic phenomenon. There is no shame in that; every successful artist, from Leonardo to Picasso, was a master at selling. Mr. Bowie was more: He anticipated social and cultural trends and understood how he could reach out and grab them for artistic and commercial gain. His declaration that he was "bisexual," his praise of "fascism" were all poses, designed to shock. The latter comment, also in the Playboy interview where he described Hitler as "one of the first rock stars," he lived to regret and he blamed it on drugs. However, it is quite clear from the text that Mr. Bowie was lucid; he was not flirting with Nazism but simply revealing his fascination with the use of music, acting and the media to manipulate minds.
In this respect, Mr. Bowie was a high priest of the market, a hero of capitalism, for more than one day. Sadly, it's not apparent that his like will be seen again. The demographics of the marketplace no longer work for rebellious teen culture and it is no accident that the airwaves were full of Mr. Bowie long before his death. The media plays to the market and the market is middle-aged, hence the success of Adele and her retro-styled torch songs or the safe, bubble-gum pop of Taylor Swift.
Yet, demographics may upset the cultural zeitgeist again. The teenagers in Europe and North America who embraced Mr. Bowie were receptive to his ambiguity over sexuality and gender. But today's expanding youth demographic is not among white Europeans or North Americans but in the Middle East and North Africa. The Arab Spring was a political revolt of young males and the violence that followed has sent vast numbers of young men migrating to Europe.
Their cultural background could not be more different than the liberal, libidinous world of Berlin, Stockholm, London or Paris. We don't yet know what music, if any, these new young people may care to listen to but we can be fairly sure it won't be David Bowie.
Carl Mortished is a Canadian financial journalist based in London.