Two Page Bowie Appreciation In Newstatesman

He flows through your life…

There’s a two-page spread in the current NewStatesman (26 October 2009) with the wonderfully punning headline Hallowed spaceboy and that is summed up thus in the standfirst: “Over 40 years, David Bowie has repeatedly reinvented himself, pursuing the idea that all pop is artifice. Graeme Thomson surveys the career of a revered innovator.”

It’s a well balanced piece that concludes with the following…

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Above all, I love how Bowie has never succumbed to peddling “sincerity”, the dread, dishonest concept that creeps into the body of pop and calcifies its bones. All great pop is artifice, and Bowie stands as the Platonic ideal: a glorious, fluid, preposterous, inspired, contrived fabrication that changed the outline of our cultural terrain permanently.

?In art you can crash your plane and walk away from it. If you have that chance, you should take it.” Coming from anyone else – Madonna, or, more likely, Bono – this would be laughably delusional. From Bowie’s lips, amid the carefully calibrated doses of pretension and preciousness, it has the sharp tang of truth. If he has destroyed more conceptual jumbo jets than he or we may care to recall, that is simply the price of flying so high, so far, for so long.

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Sorry, I know that’s a bit like giving the punchline away first, but the whole thing really is worth a read…and you can do just that, here.