“It’s all pose. It’s all fucking posing,” Keith Richards once scathingly asserted against the late David Bowie. “It’s nothing to do with music. He knows it, too.”
The Rolling Stones’ very own rock ‘n’ roll rum-quaffing pirate was not quite Jack Sparrow on this occasion; he was more akin to Captain Obvious. ‘He’s got an eye patch, neck-high boots, hair the colour of hot ash, and a shirt made of moondust on, Keith, of course, it’s all pose’, any Bowie fan would retort.
That’s the brilliance of it. Bowie subverted the posturing of rock ‘n’ roll and made it interstellar. How many people had the creative ingenuity to pose as an androgynous alien rather than another clichéd snarling rock star? The Rolling Stones are all pose, and they’re all the better for it. Sam Shephard rightly said about the masterful Bob Dylan, “[He] has invented himself. He’s made himself up from scratch… He’s not the first one to have invented himself, but he’s the first one to have invented Dylan.” That’s an invention that changed the world. Rock is, very much, the intersection of art and artifice.
Nobody took hold of this quite like Kiss. The group caked themselves in distinctive make-up and made such a dramatic splash that bizarre rumours that they were so satanic Gene Simmons actually had the tongue of a cow began to circulate. This mayhem played into what they were hoping for. As Simmons would say, “Kiss has always been outside the mainstream — we’re the black sheep.“
The bombastic bassist contained, “We’re like a wild animal peeing on the ground and saying this is our territory, and we’ll be damned if we let anyone else tell us who we are. We are anti-fashion — we’ve never been in fashion. I mean, look at us, we wear more makeup and high heels than your mommy ever did — studs, leather, armour, we blow up stuff.“
But like David Bowie before them, Simmons knew that pose was only half the battle, no matter how heavy you went on it – you need the songs, too. Bowie had some of the best songs ever written. So many great songs, in fact, that he even gave some classics away. “Bowie’s best song, in my estimation, has always been ‘All The Young Dudes’ that he wrote and got Mott The Hoople to do,“ Simmons told Planet Rock.
He gave it away not because he didn’t see the potential in it for himself, but because he always wanted to impact culture in a wider sense rather than concern himself with careerism. As Simmons added, “I have the original Bowie demo of him singing. Against that original track is, you know, goosebumps. I didn’t even quite know what all of the words meant. But I didn’t care. Look, America gave the world jazz, blues, hip-hop, rock, country, rockabilly. But it’s the English, the Irish, the Welsh and all the UK that made it glamorous.”
Bowie wanted to ensure that the sense of glamour that enamoured him caught on, so he wrote songs for acts he admired, not just himself. This move is key to understanding the way that Bowie approached his work. “I was never unaware of my strength as an interpretive performer,” he once opined, “But writing a song for me, it never rang true. I had no problem writing something for, or working with Lou Reed, or writing for Mott the Hoople. I can get into their mood and what they want to do, but I find it extremely hard to write for me.”
Adding: “So, I found it quite easy to write for the artists that I would create. I did find it much easier having created this Ziggy to then write for him. Even though it’s me doing it! I was able to distance myself from the whole thing, but I can become very complicated, fucking fabric with time there. It did bring a sort of sack full of its own inherent problems.” And those problems would later come to the fore when The Thin White Duke plagued the man beneath the facade with a wild drug problem and fascination with fascism. It was, as John Updike once wrote, a case of a “mask that eats into the face.”
However, it is also the strength of Bowie’s art. He was a faithful follower of the power of posing, and as Simmons would learn, he had the songs to back it up.
In the version of ‘All the Young Dudes’ below, he performs the song with Lou Reed and the Spiders from Mars.
