The Man Who Sold The World
David Bowie And The 1970s
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
No artist offered a more incisive and accurate portrait of the troubled landscape of the 1970s than David Bowie. Cultural historian Peter Doggett explores the rich heritage of Bowie's most productive and inspired decade, and traces the way in which his music reflected and influenced the world around him. From 'Space Oddity', his dark vision of mankind's voyage into the unknown terrain of space, to the Scary Monsters album, Doggett examines in detail Bowie's audacious creation of an 'alien' rock star, Ziggy Stardust, and his increasingly perilous explorations of the nature of identity and the meaning of fame.
Mixing brilliant musical critique with biographical insight and acute cultural analysis, The Man Who Sold The World is a unique study of a major artist and his times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taking for his unabashed model Revolution in the Head, the late Ian MacDonald's seminal work on the Beatles, Doggett's meticulous song-by-song analysis of David Bowie's "long decade" (1969 1980) is a captivating look at an artist who defined an era. Best read while listening to the Bowie songs in question for appropriate ambience and because Doggett's analysis gets technical when dissecting the chord structure of favorites such as "Changes" Doggett's nontraditional rock biography traces Bowie's early life and career through the 1980 release of his Scary Monsters LP. Throughout, he emphasizes the singer's infatuation with shifting personae, from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke, with Bowie constantly fragmenting himself and incorporating bits and pieces from other media: for example, his Spiders from Mars band is an homage to Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Each song Bowie released during this period is given careful attention from the tonal structure to Bowie's fellow musicians and his (often cocaine-addled) state of mind not just the "greatest hits," though it's especially illuminating that the "decade" is loosely bookended by "Space Oddity" and "Ashes to Ashes." The songs' Major Tom, adrift above Earth, Doggett convincingly argues, is not unlike the Bowie of today: an observer rather than a performer in the modern-day artistic world upon which he certainly left his indelible imprint.
