David Bowie changed my life. This is not news for longtime readers of ADDTF (or ITCOTCB before it), of course, but I think it bears frequent repeating, because of the depth of influence the erstwhile Mr. Jones has had on me. It’s not just that I love his music, or admire his life-as-art project, or think he’s the coolest looking man ever to walk the Earth, though all these are true. Rather, it’s the fluidity with which he adopted, adapted, and discarded modes of behavior, style, creativity, and indeed personality, whenever it suited him.
Though I’ve been a fan of what for lack of a better word could be described as alternative music ever since Nirvana blitzkrieged their way into my brain during middle school (though in fairness to myself I was already listening to Jane’s Addiction, R.E.M, and the mother of all experimental rock bands, the Beatles), I always found the keeping-it-real, support-the-scene, don’t-be-a-poseur mentality bequeathed to underground music by the remnants of the punk years tremendously limiting and intimidating. I didn’t understand why it was tantamount to a moral shortcoming to be a 14-year-old from Long Island rather than a 21-year-old from Seattle, but that’s how it was when you went into a record store and showed some interest in snapping up Soundgarden’s back catalog after Badmotorfinger came out. I found myself lashing out at bandwagon-jupmers and defending myself against similar accusations, depending on the band or movement in question, with equal (and equally distracting) regularity.
Then along came Bowie, exploding my notions of the “real” in art and therefore rendering “keeping it real” obsolete. Inspired by Bowie’s constant zeal for self-reinvention, I began truly following my musical bliss, letting record-buying explorations take me everywhere my happy little ears wanted to go. No longer feeling tied to scenesterism or “the Spirit of ’77,” I delved into prog and punk with equal gusto–and didn’t feel guilty about being Johnny-come-lately (or in this case, Joe-Strummer-come-lately). Bowie showed me that identity was amorphous, that all influences could be incorporated when useful and abandoned when outlived, with no shame or guilt or anxiety attached. For a music obsessive and would-be artist, this is burning-bush stuff.
This attitude truly crystallized for me during two interviews I conducted for my magazine. The first was with Portland’s glamedelia elite, the Dandy Warhols. Lead singer and bon vivant Courtney Taylor-Taylor exuded so much anxiety-free enthusiasm for any and all good rock records that he came off, in keyboardist Zia McCabe’s words, like “the rock professor.” Though he’s an incredibly stylish gentleman, style, he said, was not some attempt to live up to the trend of the moment, but (when done correctly) is simply the outward manifestation of what you are on the inside. Here was a man who, like Bowie, had detatched himself from outdated notions of working hard on being this or that, his own personality dictated not by rigid self-placed constraints but by nothing but love for music and art and a willingness to go where it led him. I was duly impressed.
The second was with comics’ own rock star, Grant Morrison. Nattily dressed and extremely friendly, Morrison began relating to me his concept of the “personality upgrade.” He described how, as a young buck in the arty-mainstream comics scene, he found himself resenting Neil Gaiman for his success in the corporate milieu that provided expat UK writers with plush Vertigo jobs. He found himself reacting against Gaiman’s methods–and, not coincidentally, acheiving much less success. Suddenly, he said, he realized how stupid this was. First of all, Gaiman is a nice guy, and had done nothing to merit resentment. Secondly, why waste all this time and energy on jealousy and anger? Why not simply figure out what Gaiman is doing right, and then do it oneself? The brain, explained Morrison, is essentially a computer. When you encounter someone who’s smarter, better, further developed than yourself, simply “upload” those traits of theirs that you yourself wish you possessed. In other words, rather than fret and piss and moan and sit around eating sour grapes, get a personality upgrade. You’re not altering yourself–you’re improving yourself. You’re adapting. You’re evolving. You’re You Version 2.0!
So this is how I try to live now. I wasted so much time in the past trying to define myself with what I stood for, what I stood against, who I liked, who I hated, and so forth. Now I try to take each sensation, each experience as it comes, evaluate how it will work for me, incorporate it into myself, grow, change, evolve, adapt, improve. It’s a life lived with a lot less fear, I’ll tell you that–less fear of self-contradiction, which to me used to be the gravest sin. I guess it’s nothing that the multitudes-containing Whitman didn’t figure out a century and a half ago, but it certainly felt like revelation to me–hazy cosmic jive, if you will…
Postscript: How does Chris Ware enter into this, you ask, since you so observantly noted his name in the subject? I’ve just been thinking for some months now (a thought reinforced by his almost frantically self-effacing Datebook) that wouldn’t it be amazing if his sad-sack “I’m terrible” schtick were a Bowie-esque persona? In real life he’s perfectly well adjusted, thinks he can draw a pretty fine comic, and so forth, but for the sake of his art he’s become the Ziggy Stardust of gloomy self-abasement. How cool would that be?