FROM E. Michael Jones’s article, “David Bowie Was: Berlin, the CIA and Heroin Chic,” in the March issue of Culture Wars magazine:

As Elvis Presley demonstrated in the 1970s, the best career move an aging pop star can make is dying. Like Elvis and Michael Jackson, David Bowie’s career took off the minute he died. What united all three men was their sense of style. They became iconic figures whose music remained secondary to the persona that their music allowed them to project. David Bowie was without a doubt the most style-conscious of the three. He had the distinction of building a towering career as a singer songwriter on a virtually non-existent foundation of musical talent. Before the Bowie fans get en-raged, let me ask a simple question: can you hum one melody from the David Bowie songbook? Even if you can hum the first three bars of, say, “Heroes,” can you hum one tune from beginning to end? The answer, I would wager, is no. All of his songs were overproduced studio creations, whose elaborate arrangements were calculated to disguise the fact that there was, musically speaking, nothing there. If melody is the soul of music, David Bowie’s tunes were musical zombies wandering around an elaborately produced MTV video in search of musical purpose. The sound that emanated from a David Bowie album was calculated to showcase a series of personae which Bowie created over the course of his career. They had names like Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, etc., and they had elaborate costumes, but the music always came across as an afterthought.

— Comments —

Paul writes:

Bowie had a lot of musical talent.  Here is a sample.  Based on this, I expect there is much more to find if one looks hard enough.  His voice had considerable range.  This is further shown in Young Americans, the only popular song of his that I liked without equivocation.   Certainly I recognized his talent but considered it a guilty pleasure because of his embracement of homosexual fashion and the (erroneous?) presumption he was an active homosexual (which I can’t prove).

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