David Bowie’s art served as something of a nexus between the works of some of history’s giants of high art and the pop mainstream of today.
He was something of a cultural translator, reflecting hints of artist Marcel Duchamp and writer Oscar Wilde, among many others, as he produced new works that stirred fresh discussion and pushed boundaries. In the same way that fans can see some of William S. Burroughs in the works of Bowie, they can see some of Bowie in the most popular songs on the radio today.
That’s how Shelton Waldrep, a University of Southern Maine professor and author of a recent scholarly book about Bowie, describes the rock icon. Bowie died after a bout with cancer at the age of 69, his family confirmed Sunday.
“I think it’s hard to estimate his cultural impact. His fingerprints are all over the music scene and that will continue to be sorted out for decades,” Waldrep said Monday evening.
“In some ways, he was kind of a cult figure for most of his career — an acquired taste,” he continued. “He was always very cerebral and he always challenged his audience. But if you look at what he did over almost five decades, it was all really, really good, and there was always so much there to appreciate and to think about. There is no area of popular culture that remains untouched by him. … Now, I think, his influence is inescapable, even though people may not realize they’re hearing him in music or seeing him in culture. He’s just everywhere.”
Waldrep’s book is titled “Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie,” and was released in October. The English professor said he first heard Bowie’s 1980 album “Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)” while an undergraduate student at the University of Alabama, became fascinated by his artistry and followed his career ever since.
Waldrep said he corresponded with members of Bowie’s management team at one point, but never directly with the rock star himself.
“I don’t know what he may have known or not known about what I was doing. But he didn’t try to block it. He has a tradition of not commenting on or contributing to projects based on his work, and I just respected his privacy with that,” he recalled. “I wasn’t writing a biography, and I wasn’t writing a fan adulation piece, it was more of a scholarly [book]. I wanted people to understand his work better.”
Bowie challenged gender roles by taking on androgynous personae over the years, defined what became the “glam pop” act carried on today by the likes of performers like Lady Gaga, and experimented with new sounds that have since become commonplace in mainstream music, Waldrep said.
His regular reinventions — going from the alien alter ego Ziggy Stardust to a number of different music styles in the decades after, all the way up to this year’s “Blackstar,” which Waldrep called “essentially an experimental jazz album” — paved the way for subsequent artists to change styles often.
Waldrep said Bowie was a performer who always seemed one step ahead of pop culture trends.
“It doesn’t happen very often any more, but Bowie managed to be a kind of outsider and a mainstreamer at the same time. I think he’s probably he most important rock phenomenon since the Rolling Stones or the Beatles,” he said. “He always claimed he wasn’t a futurist, but someone who was very attuned to the present. He would see things that were happening before other people did and would comment on them.
“Bowie’s work was a real blurring of the lines between high art and pop culture,” Waldrep said.
