Brexit
What did Bowie’s death and the release of “Blackstar” unleash, through their respective spacetime-warping force? If we play along with this speculative fiction, Brexit is the most relevant geographic, historical and political effect. I’ll begin with two quotations from novelist Hanif Kureishi after Bowie’s death:
“Bowie attended the same school as me, Bromley technical high school in Keston, but 10 years earlier. It is important to note what a shit-hole it was: bullying, violent, with incompetent teachers. Education, in those days, for working- and lower-middle-class children, was hardly considered essential or even necessary. We were being trained to be clerks for the civil service…[t]he more imaginative boys, or the ones who could draw, went into advertising, which Bowie did after school, working on a campaign for a slimming biscuit called Ayds.”
“British pop had always been lower middle class and came out of the art schools rather than universities, which is where all the other British culture – theatre, movies, the novel – came from. Pop was always more lively: the music-mad kids were rebellious, angry and ornery. They always had a chip on their shoulders when it came to class and education. Social disadvantage has always been essential to pop: the hilarious incongruity of kids brought up in small houses without central heating and eating Spam for tea suddenly finding themselves living in mansions after writing a song.”
This narrative is repeated again and again. Let’s use two additional examples from post-war British pop: John Lennon and Brian Eno. Lennon, a child of a single mother in Liverpool, attended art school in Liverpool after failing out of high school (his O-levels). Without the ability of a child from a single-parent household to go to art school with poor grades and less money, the history of pop music would be quite different. Eno, the child of postman, went to two different art schools—one associated with the technical college in Ipswich, the other the Winchester School of Art—neither of which were in the university system at the time. While a postal worker’s son might have opportunities not afforded to the child of a single mother, nevertheless, both biographies suggest a social safety net allowing for children of the working and service class to transform art (in this case music) in significant ways. And, yes, advertising was quick to snag these aspiring artists, but it was a time when advertising, whether we like it or not, often spurred their creativity rather than stifling it (Andy Warhol, favorite of Bowie's, would be an American example of this).
What also marks this generation of pop artists is a willingness to experiment as well as an openness to other cultures and musics. Again, both Lennon and Bowie flirted more than once with the uglier aspects of dominant British culture (misogyny and colonialism in Lennon’s case, White Nationalism and Crowly-ish “homo superiority” in Bowie’s case); and Eno has always been guilty of a type of paternalistic, professorial quality, often deflecting his own role in the creation and continuance of the dominant neoliberal culture through conceptual obfuscation. Yet, at least in Lennon and Eno’s examples, the type of materialist critique has never been far from their public personas: Lennon’s deep, to the point of self-parody, commitment to U.S. leftist politics of the late 1960s during the early 70s; Eno’s outspoken views in the last several years on Palestine, war crimes, debt and, yes, Brexit (I write more about Eno's politics here: https://sevendeadlyfinns.blogspot.com/2016/06/brian-eno-ship.html).
The relationship of Bowie’s art to history and politics is more complicated. Shortly after his death, the philosopher Simon Critchley gave an interview explicitly about Bowie’s politics:
“You can’t really identify Bowie with an obvious, normal political position—he didn’t support the Conservative Party or Labour Party as far as I am aware, but I think the way he saw it was that there was something about art, and particularly pop music, that had insurrectionary quality and could question and bring down authority. For him, music was a political tool or could be used as a political tool to question forms of political and theological authority.”
I think that’s true, but it is often this open-ended, repressive hypothesis, that popular music is a tool for questioning authority and is therefore, in itself, political, has led to its cooption into a dominant consumerist culture at least since the 1960s. Mark Fisher writes about this in Capitalist Realism:
“The protest impulse of the 60s posited a malevolent Father, the harbinger of a reality principle that (supposedly) cruelly and arbitrarily denies the ‘right’ to total enjoyment. This Father has unlimited access to resources, but he selfishly—and senselessly—hoards them. Yet it is not capitalism but protest itself which depends upon this figuration of the Father; and one of the successes of the current global elite has been their avoidance of identification with the figure of the hoarding Father, even though the ‘reality’ they impose on the young is substantially harsher than the conditions they protested against in the 60s.”
In a world where the authority figures Critchley cites have been supplanted by the likes of David Bowie, it becomes harder to ascribe Bowie’s critique of authority any political weight. As the chiding subheading of the interview with Critchley mentions, proving the pointlessness and toothlessness of Bowie’s insurrection : “Though there was that attack on the Crusades.”
For Critchley, Bowie’s political intervention lies is in the politics of gender and sexuality:
"The cool thing about Bowie is why working-class heterosexual boys like me found in Bowie a new landscape of possibility in relation to identity. We were dying our hair red and wearing mascara. And women were doing the same. What Bowie brought about was a kind of plasticity, or malleability, around questions of gender and gender identity. For him, there was something absurd about the standard heterosexual understanding of sexuality, and sexuality required a larger field of possibility and imagination. I think the liberating effects of that were felt by his fans.”
I think this political dimension to Bowie’s work cannot be overstated, and can be connected back to his time in art school. Though the gender and sexual critique can still be viewed through the lens of Fisher’s larger critique of capitalism and rebellion (it’s worth remembering that Bowie would later “out” himself as a “closeted heterosexual”), as someone who is neither gay nor transgender (but am happily raising a transgender child), I cannot imagine what Bowie’s permission must have felt like on a corporeal level. Yes, from the larger system of ideological critique, it’s important to be critical of this type of liberation politics, but, as Michel Foucault teaches us, there are multiple ideologies being played out on the body each and every day. In a sense, the idea of being able to imagine oneself, one’s sexuality and one’s gender as an aesthetically mutable costume, and having that mutable costume available to working class kids, many of whom are gay and transgender, really is a revolution of the self.
The following are quotations from Theresa May’s speech to the Tory party October, 2016:
“[I]f you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means [….] Just listen to the way a lot of politicians and commentators talk about the public. They find your patriotism distasteful, your concerns about immigration parochial, your views about crime illiberal, your attachment to your job security inconvenient.”
Brexit is a cultural-political event, as much, if not more so, than an economic event. Part of the reason that the aftermath of the Brexit referendum has been so chaotic is that there never was an economic plan to put into effect, but was always about cultural politics. The Brexit campaign was about resentment:
“On June 16 the Farage wing of the Brexit campaign unveiled its most dramatic poster. Entitled ‘Breaking Point,’ it featured a bedraggled column of Syrian refugees marching toward what was, in fact, the Slovenian border. It had little to do with Brexit as such, but it gave new meaning to the slogan of taking back control” (Crash, Adam Tooze 553).
Brexit is about a cultural politics that would reassert the prominence of the British once again on the world stage, while shrinking the experience British citizens would have of foreigners and the world outside of the UK. It’s as if they all listened to the Kink’s Village Green Preservation Society and imagined themselves as the narrator of the title track listing all of the things he “missed” about the local village green:
“They [the Brexiteers], in fact, imagined that leaving Europe was a way to restore Britain’s greatness and freedom” (554).
Someone once sang that the film, this film, is a saddening bore, because we’ve seen it ten times or more. That generation of “rebellious,” “angry,” and “ornery” working class kids had already pointed out the vacuousness of this form of cultural parochialism. Here’s the second verse of Bowie’s “Life on Mars?”
"It's on America's tortured brow
That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
Now the workers have struck for fame
Because Lennon's on sale again
See the mice in their million hordes
From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads
Rule Britannia is out of bounds
To my mother, my dog, and clowns"
Part of what makes Bowie’s politics difficult to pin down is his unwillingness to give us a coherent point of view with an articulated political statement. Even Eno, notorious for ascribing little meaning to his often random lyrics, entitled a B-side after the Red Army Faction in West Germany, concluding with the voice of Judy Nylon screaming “No sacrifice!” There’s little politics to be easily discerned from the “girl with the mousy hair.” Even so, the provincialism of “rule Britannia,” as well as the sneering use of mummy and daddy at the beginning of the song, demonstrates a longing outside of the world constructed by capitalism (“America” “Mickey Mouse” growing up to be big as a cow, workers striking because their favorite pop hero “Lennon” is on sale again) and the exclusionary nature of nationalism (if America’s metaphor is “Mickey Mouse,” England’s synecdoche is “Rule Britiania!”).
In that sense, the constant reference to the titular question “Life on Mars?” suggests a desire to escape a world constricted by the binaries of American capitalism and British nationalism (and Soviet communism filtered through the homonym Lenin/Lennon). The possibility of this outside was opened up to working and lower middle-class kids through outlets such as a robust Arts Council (which was founded by the economist John Maynard Keynes). The decline of art and aesthetics being a possibility of escaping the life one was leading as a working class or lower-middle class youth has been replaced with ossifying the either or choice between global capital or provincial nationalism:
“Sixty percent of Labour voters turned out for Remain. But that went only to show that in much of the country, the Labour Party was largely divorced from poorer and less-well-educated voters. Apart from education, the other socioeconomic variable that weighted heavily in the balance was the pain inflicted by austerity since 2010, and that hurt worst where decline was a long-term phenomenon” (Tooze 553).
The program of austerity that the UK had enacted during the financial crisis of 2010-2012 has inflicted such acute damage to the poor and working class of England, that even outside observers are beginning to have grave concern about the country’s ability to properly care for the most vulnerable members of society: the poor and the young. On a less urgent, but no less damaging, level, funding for education, arts and cultural programs have been devastated since the beginning of the decade.
This is all to say that when we all collectively agree that there will never be another David Bowie, that we don’t fall into the trap of the genius that has cursed aesthetics at least since the eighteenth century. Yes, David Bowie was amazingly talented and creative. Yet, that talent and creativity does not exist in a vacuum. He was a living breathing being in a society that afforded him the opportunity to be “rebellious, angry and ornery.” Having the space and material support to experiment through those feelings, though one might have grown up eating Spam, must also be seen as part of Bowie’s genius.
I’m reminded of a quotation from one of my father’s (who also passed away in 2016) favorite authors, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. In 1979 Gould concluded his essay on the shape and size of Einstein’s brain with the following:
“The physical structure of the brain must record intelligence in some way, but gross size and external shape are not likely to capture anything of value. I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
This is the true “blackstar” opened with Bowie’s death and Brexit: the feeling post-89 that the narrative we had held onto for a long time in which thought, freedom and subjectivity cannot be conditioned by history, politics and economics is false. Bowie in life seemed to embody this very walking fiction, and we all enjoyed it. A genius who had the means and talent to teach the world how to be, at times, in the best and freest sense possible. But those fictions must be put to rest, Bowie tells us with "Blackstar," , even if it means violently ripping the mask off our own spacetime to reveal the world we inhabit. A world undergoing a sixth extinction, in which the fate of the human is not so certain.
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