Alexander Larman is the author of “Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie,” which will be published next month.
Amid the countless reactions to the 9/11 terror attack, one came from a source that some might have found unexpected. David Bowie, charming in interviews, and leaning toward the abstract and allusive in his lyrics, was not given to weighing in on news events. But Bowie, who by then had been living in Manhattan for about a decade, wrote the next day on his website, “Life here will continue,” and lauded his fellow New Yorkers as “a resilient and fast thinking people. In this way they really do resemble my own Londoners. They came together quickly in massive community support and silent determination.”
Jan. 10 marks the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death from liver cancer at age 69. He is often thought of as the quintessential modern Englishman abroad — yes, a rock star, but also simply well-dressed figure of immutable Britishness. But this underestimates the influence that America had on both his life and work. He first visited the United States in January 1971, not to perform — he did not have the visa that would allow him publicly to play songs off his recently released “The Man Who Sold the World” album — but to give interviews and to emulate one of his great heroes, Oscar Wilde, as a European exotic coming to the New World to show the curious what, exactly, he was capable of.
Bowie liked America, and it liked him back. Before long, he began recording albums in the United States, starting in 1973 with “Aladdin Sane.” The album was heavily influenced by his impressions and experiences of touring the U.S., most notably on such dystopian accounts of urban decay as the songs “Drive-In Saturday” and “Panic in Detroit.” Bowie said of the album, referring to his alter ego Ziggy Stardust, “It was Ziggy Goes to Washington: Ziggy under the influence of America.” This homage was even more overt in 1975 on the album “Young Americans,” a skillfully wrought “plastic soul” record, as he called it, that showed Bowie’s chameleonic ability to absorb influences — including from the then little-known Luther Vandross, who sang on the album — and turning them into something inimitably Bowie-esque.
“Young Americans” was his first significant hit in the States, going into the top 10 of the Billboard chart (“Starman” and other songs had already made him a chart fixture in Britain), and he began recording most of his subsequent albums in America. Some of these were magnificent (“Station to Station,” “Scary Monsters,” “Let’s Dance”) and some were less successful, such as the embarrassing 1987 flop “Never Let Me Down.” But Bowie was increasingly less a Brit using American producers and musicians — including Tony Visconti and Nile Rodgers — and more someone in thrall to the excitement and opportunities that the country offered.
When Bowie moved to New York around the time of his 1992 wedding to the supermodel Iman, he seemed to be committing himself to his adopted country just as he was to his new wife. Although Bowie never became an American citizen, and liked to tease the British media with the promise of a return to the country of his birth, he remained rooted in Manhattan, where he lived downtown in SoHo and delighted in becoming a fixture of the city’s arts and social scenes.
Just because Bowie lived in America, however, does not mean that he was a fully paid-up devotee of life there. Several of his most interesting latter-day songs touch on his ambivalence toward the United States, most notably “This Is Not America” in 1985, in which he sings “Falcon spirals/ to the ground/ So bloody red, tomorrow’s clouds,” and the more aggressive “I’m Afraid of Americans” in 1997. On the latter, Bowie decries consumerism in the form of the song’s everyman protagonist, “Johnny,” who’s interested only in sex and automobiles, but the songwriter also accepts, resignedly, that “God is an American.”
Bowie could see inequalities and tensions in America — his 1993 album “Black Tie White Noise” was in part a response to the Los Angeles riots of the previous year. Though he clearly relished living in the U.S., he was hardly uncritical: In 2002, he reflected that “it’s all about America first and that’s kind of scary” and that is what makes Europeans “resent America so much.”
But his persona-shifting side also welcomed the opportunity the nation offered for immigrants, himself included, to build a new life for themselves on their own terms. For the last three decades of his career, Bowie used almost exclusively American musicians on his albums and for his live performances. He lived in New York for longer than he ever did in London, Switzerland, Berlin or anywhere else that he called home at one time or another.
Fittingly, when he died, there were hundreds of tributes left outside his Lafayette Street apartment building. One of them said, simply, “Starman Forever.” Bowie was as much an American artist as he was a British one, and will be remembered this week in both nations with the respect and fondness that he deserved.
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