Pre-Post-Apocalyptic Culture: the future(s) of the Humanities

Popular Music and Society, 2016

This article explores space imagery in the music of George Clinton and David Bowie and argues that different horizons of Black and white terrestrial experience give rise to divergent astral imaginaries. Analysis of song lyrics, liner notes, and statements by the artists in light of their social contexts and the theoretical lens of Bakhtin’s grotesque body shows that Bowie models white imaginations of evolutionary transcendence in contrast to Clinton as provocateur of a Black carnivalesque seeking liberation from lived inequality.

Selected Proceedings from the 11th International Conference of the Hellenic Semiotics Society "The Fugue of the Five Senses and the Semiotics of the Shifting Sensorium (pp.60-71), 2019

Released just two days before his death, “Blackstar” is David Bowie’s swan song. In the “Blackstar” video-clip, Bowie dramatizes and communicates a tranconscious experience of failing/ impairing senses. In this video, Bowie operates as the central architect of a musical-visual universe that is philosophical in nature and poetic in structure. Connecting the dots in retrospect, we can’t help wondering whether there is a hidden and personal in nature discourse linked with Bowie’s impending death. In this paper, we will discuss the relationship between the lyrics, the music, and the visuals – the cohesion /opposition between telling and showing – and the emergent meanings, focusing on the connotations of mortality (cultural, spiritual, ontological, and philosophical), which derive from the vagueness and the polysemy of the narrative. Our semiotic analysis will draw on Cook’s work for multimedia studies, on Goodwin’s theory for music videos and on Barthes’ study of images. Also, we will correlate the representa- tional (mise-en-scène) and non-representational signs (music, editing, lightening, colors, drama) to determine to what extend they bring out the video’s main concept of the (dying) senses and the beyond.

2000

The majority of writings on David Bowie have focussed on his early work. Many feel that Bowie's early work has much merit, as has been made clear by the vast pool of both academic and popular writings regarding his work in the early 1970s, his collaborations with Brian Eno in the late 1970s, and his most commercially accepted works in the early 1980s. However, much ofthe academic writing on Bowie has chosen to focus only on these works and ignores his more recent material. This thesis contributes to the body ofknowledge regarding the more recent work of David Bowie. In 1995, Bowie released the album 1. Outside. Through its music and lyrics, album art, accompanying narrative, music video and live performance, Bowie presents a world ofthe absurd and violent. He engages with the notions of murder as art, body modification as ritual, and the state ofsociety at the end ofthe twentieth century. Bowie, in his comments to Ian Penman in Esquire magazine, suggests that the proliferation of body modification in late twentieth century Western society acts as a replacement for the Judeao-Christian ethic. By applying Victor Tumer's theory ofliminality, it is argued that, through 1. Outside, Bowie is constructing a representation of a space which is analogous to society at the end ofthe millennium. For Tumer, the liminal stage embodies an optimistic "storehouse ofpossibilities," not unlike a gestation period which precedes new life. Rather than creating a space which fits Turner's model ofthe liminal exactly, Bowie suggests a space which is liminoid, not exhibiting the full potential of the liminal. Bowie presents themes of nihilism and the alienation of technology, as well as many juxtapositions in visual performance, which serve to give the album a sense of ambiguity contributing to its ambivalent, and thus liminoid, character.

in 'David Bowie: Critical Perspectives', Edited by Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, Martin Power, Routledge 2015, pp. 19-34.

Popular Music and Society, 2016

This article explores the use of space imagery in the music of George Clinton and David Bowie and argues that different horizons of black and white terrestrial experience give rise to divergent astral imaginaries. Analysis of song lyrics, liner notes, and statements by the artists in light of their social contexts and the theoretical lens of Bakhtin's grotesque body shows that Bowie models white imaginations of evolutionary transcendence while Clinton is contrasted as provocateur of a black carnivalesque seeking liberation from lived inequality.

2017

Macedonia "Black Star" music video was released two days before Bowie's death (January 8, 2016). It bears various implications of dying and the notion of mortality is both literal and metaphorical. It is highly autobiographical and serves as a theatrical stage for Bowie to act both as a music performer and as a self-conscious human being. In this paper, we discuss the signs of mortality in Bowie's "Black Star" music video-clip. We focus on video's cinematic techniques and codes (editing, mise-en-scène), on its motivic elements and on its narrative in relation with music, lyrics, characters, and gestures. We also discuss the video's intertextual references and the broader signification of the black star figure. We adopt a quasi-semiotic approach considering "Black Star" music video-clip as a text which can be investigated through its signs, codes, and conventions of the musical, visual, and cinematic languages as well. Our interdisciplinary tools derive from visual semiotics and audiovisual analysis models (Barthes 1977; Goodwin 1992; Vernallis 2001, 2004), without leaving outside Bowie's musical-artistic and personal history. As it turns out, Bowie created a video clip that is philosophical in nature and poetic in structure, preserving the role of protagonist. With the visuals creating a psychedelic atmosphere, the lyrics often are heard as a personal confession. They both generate cognitive and emotional responses that influence the way the viewers-listeners may experience, decompose, and interpret Bowie's artistic endeavor bridging life and death.

This chapter focuses on Velvet Goldmine (1998) and argues that Todd Haynes represents Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona as a series of phantoms in the Derridean sense. That is, figures that are both absent and present, material and immaterial— figures that affirm that no identity can ever be quite complete since the markers of identity are always enmeshed in a network of differences that can be continually re-coded. Haynes' original script contained several Bowie songs, which he was forced to replace when Bowie refused to give him permission to use the music (Bowie claimed he intended to make his own film about his Ziggy Stardust period). Undeterred, Haynes produced a movie that made no direct reference to Bowie by name, yet recoded Bowie's multiple personas and characters in a parallel cinematic world. Haynes' film invites the spectator to re-think Identity in terms of 'contamination' and 'inauthenticity'. He also establishes a genealogical connection between Oscar Wilde (one of the film's many spectres) and Bowie by making several allusions to the parallels between 19th century aestheticism and Glam Rock. In short, I argue that Haynes' film facilitates a critique of the idea that Bowie's shifting identity is merely a question of aesthetic choice, or an expression of any kind of cultural logic. Rather, I argue that the figure of the Derridean phantom offers a new way to read Velvet Goldmine, and to identify the cultural work performed by Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona.

Celebrity Studies, 2019

Despite the death of David Jones, David Bowie continues to shine with a distinctive luminosity and navigational function. He shines in absence and in repetition in various venues, as on a wall in Turnpike Lane. Our approach to this special issue of Celebrity Studies is framed by the idea that a social, cultural, ideological and semiotic understanding of stardom is entirely fitting for an examination of David Bowie and his legacy. Building on previous research on Bowie’s star personae (Stevenson 2006, Cinque and Redmond 2014, Cinque et al. 2015), this framework can be further inflected by considering the cosmological significance of stars in relation to Bowie. For instance, stars provide constellations of perpetual guiding points which enable enlightened communities to navigate pathways. Stars also have a spectral dimension, since they are luminous, but not always visible. Stars might seem static and omnipresent, but they are constantly transforming, changing appearance, ageing, living and dying. As Bowie has so aptly emphasised in his lyrics and interviews, there are many different types of stars (including his contentious statement that ‘Adolf Hitler was the first pop star’), and it was important that he set the record straight about which type of star he is: ‘… not a film star… not a pop star… not a marvel star… not a gang-star… I’m a star’s star… I’m a black star’.

Double Issue: Celebrity Ecologies/The Unearthly David Bowie, 2013

A longstanding, successful and frequently controversial career spanning more than four decades establishes David Bowie as charged with individual agency. The notion of ‘agency’ here refers particularly to the ‘ability of people, individually and collectively to influence their own lives and the society in which they live’ (Germov and Poole, 2007: 7). That Bowie has influenced many lives is undeniable to his fans. He has long demonstrated an avid curiosity for the enduring patterns of social life which is reflected in his art. Bowie’s opus contains the elements of ideological narratives around sexual (mis)adventure, expressivity, and; resistance to ‘normative’ behaviour. He requisitions his audiences, through frequently indirect lyrics and images, to critically question sanity, identity and essentially what it means to be ‘us’ and why we are here. Here, in this context, ‘dancing with madness’ assumes an intimate relationship, even if brief, where ideas and emotions come passionately together for the purpose of creative expression much like the intertwining and energetic performance of the partner dance Tango. As such, ‘dancing’ is argued here to be an appropriate descriptor for how Bowie has engaged with creative cultural forms but not meant to be self-conscious nor indicate superficiality or ignorance. The idea of madness for its part is a theme in many of his compositions, for example the original album cover for The Man Who Sold the World (1971) depicts an asylum and includes the song ‘All The Madmen’ and Aladdin Sane (1973)—a lad insane--are but two examples. This paper argues that Bowie’s frequently astute contemplations, manifest through his art over a period now spanning more than forty years, continues to draw fans of like mind to his work with the result that he has a legitimate claim to influence and affect.

Harvest Journal of Jungian Psychology, 2017

Since the release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Marsin 1972-a concept album about an androgynous alien rock messiah who comes to save the earth-David Bowie remained one of rock's greatest icons. My aim is to add a specific and unique context to the research of Bowie's work. The power of his legacy was musical as well as historical, mythological, and psychological. Hence, in this essay I will use Carl Gustav Jung's theory about the collective unconscious and the archetypes in order to re-read The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I wish to discuss the subjects of megalomania, rebirth, apocalypse, the hero as a savior, and the conjunction archetypes. My purpose is to give a psychological, mythological, historical, and musical context relating to why this androgynous megalomaniac alien messiah was so important to generations of rock fans. I seek to understand the way this artwork is connected to adolescence and to the development of maturity. In order to address this task, I would return to the history of the era and the mythology, biography and psychology of Bowie and his alter-ego: Ziggy Stardust. This psychological creativity and energy of Bowie's work, as I explain, was rooted in the history of the early 1970's and the post Counter-culture era. Bowie wanted to write the definitive obituary of the sixties, and came out with a psychological self-discovery album about the limits of rock religion. My own basic assumption is that the album projects various archetypes from the collective unconscious that gratify the audience with great spiritual forces. At the end, these archetypes shape our vocation, our everyday life actions, and our common sense of the world. The album connects us to hidden spectrum of adolescence, growing up, and the development of our maturity. Through facing the myths of Ziggy, we may think a little differently about our urge to obtain knowledge of good and evil, transcendental options, and our place in the world. I'm not a prophet or a Stone Age man Just a mortal with potential of a superman; I'm living on.