https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist
Every of us has a different concept of when, precisely, the sixties finished, not as a decade, however as a distinct cultural period. Some have a notion of the “lengthy sixties” that extends properly into the seventies; if pressed for a specific last yr, they might do worse than leveling to 1972, when David Bowie made his epoch-shifting seemance as Ziggy Starmud, backed by the Spiders from Mars, on the BBC’s Prime of the Pops. It was additionally the yr he launched music movies for “Area Oddity,” the single that had begun to make his title on the time of the moon landing in 1969, and “Jean Genie,” the primary single from Aladdin Sane, an album impressed partly by the debauchery of the American Ziggy tour he underneathtook after blasting off into stardom.
Having struggled within the sixties to discover a swimsuitin a position identity and audience, the younger Bowie developed an unusually sturdy underneathstanding of not simply the music indusattempt, but in addition the culture itself. One period was giving technique to another, and no one knew it wagerter than he did. When all these hirsute figures in beards and denim, singing with ostentatious earnestness about love and freedom, disappeared, who would change them?
In Bowie’s imaginative and prescient, the subsequent part belonged to clean-shaven, made-up androgynes in flamboyant designer costumes working grand, someinstances science fictional, and infrequently inscrutable themes into what would strike concertgoers as virtually complete theatrical experiences — and he could be the primary and foremost amongst them.
Bowie, in other phrases, made the seventies his personal, operating on his knowlfringe of and instincts concerning the media environment of that decade and the way pictures could be made in it. By that point, he’d seen too many flashes within the pan of pop music to get complacent about his personal prospects for endurance. The reception of “Area Oddity” as a novelty music did its half to motivate him to provide you with his bisexual space-alien rock-star alter ego — and to motivate him to terminate that persona on stage in 1973. A couple of years earlier than that, he had already sung of the importance of modifications, a sort of manifesto that may information his profession by all of the many years that remained. Never would Bowie adhere to a particular musical or aesthetic type for very lengthy, an abiding tendency vividly on display in this playlist of fifty music movies on his official YouTube channel.
The experience of placing out music movies within the seventies positioned Bowie properly, especially compared to other artists of his generation, to make his mark on MTV within the eighties with a stadium-ready hit like “Let’s Dance.” The nineties discovered him taking the shape in new directions, as with the cinephilically astute video for “Soar They Say” and the daringly action-free visual deal withment of the reflective “Thursday’s Youngster” (from the album Hours…, which started because the soundmonitor to the computer sport Omikron: The Nomad Soul). Other than this playlist, his channel additionally contains music movies for his later songs from the two-thousands and twenty-tens, from “New Killer Star” to “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” to “Blackstar” — the character of stardom having been a preoccupation for the reason that startning, regardless that he stored on changing to the very finish.
Related Content:
Watch David Bowie Star in His First Movie Position, a Brief Horror Flick Known as The Picture (1967)
Watch David Bowie Perkind “Starman” on Prime of the Pops: Voted the Niceest Music Performance Ever on the BBC (1972)
David Bowie Pervarieties “Life on Mars?” and “Ashes to Ashes” on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Present” (1980)
David Bowie’s Music Video “Soar They Say” Pays Tribute to Marker’s La Jetée, Godard’s Alphaville, Welles’ The Trial & Kubrick’s 2001
Watch David Bowie’s New Video for “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” With Tilda Swinton
When Bowie & Jagger’s “Dancing within the Road” Music Video Turns into a Silent Movie
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the guide The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
