By immersing himself in the life and work of David Bowie, the journalist Michka Assayas did not expect the shock he experienced. In this book from a program produced last summer for France Inter, he “simply” tells how he converted to David Bowie.
Nothing like a late convert to defend an idea, a cause or an artist. The journalist and writer Michka Assayas was not a devotee of David Bowie. Until France Inter commissioned a nine-part radio series from him last summer on the man with a thousand faces, the book version of which has just been published by GM editions. Plunging into the mysteries of the work of the author of let’s dancehe discovered how much Bowie’s disguises, his theatricality and his supposed superficiality hid treasures of depth.
No fascination at the start
“For me, Bowie was singles and hits. I had no fascination. I found it something stuffy, fabricated, even if brilliantly crafted. I had trouble with his cold side and with his very theatrical voice, a bit old school“, he confides to us. Looking back on his life and his work has been a game-changer. “While doing my research, I discovered that behind the multiplicity of his avatars there was the visceral need to fill a void and a spiritual, metaphysical quest. I ended up understanding that there was precisely in this production and this distance something incredibly authentic that I had not fully grasped.
Bowie actually seeks to find out who he is by adopting various personas and getting lost in them.
Michka Assayasat franceinfo Culture
As a good convert, Michka Assayas develops in her book (based on her reworked radio program) a fine analysis, sometimes admiring but without affect, and goes to the essentials. In doing so, he takes a fresh look at the artist, at the right distance, far from that of the obsessive fan or the nostalgic of an era. “Bowie will make the madness that gnawed at him, or at least watched him, one of the central themes of his work as a musician.he writes about Silly Boy Blue, one of his first songs. And further : “In Bowie, this central intuition is always expressed that the dream is dead, that everything is deteriorating and that the human never stops falling and annihilating himself.
A host of details
Even knowing Bowie honorably, we learn a host of details in this book, whether it’s the meaning of words that we had escaped (John Genie talks more about Iggy Pop than about Jean Genet and All The Young Dudes is a cry of disappointment to the hippie generation, not a celebration of youth), or facts never brought to our attention (for example, the fact that the mime Lindsay Kemp, with whom he was briefly the lover, was the first to speak to him about Antonin Artaud and the theater of cruelty, where what we see on stage overflows from the stage and endangers the artist and his audience).
Michka Assayas also unearths some enlightening statements gleaned from the period press – ” I am simply a man of images. I have a very strong awareness of images and I live within those images”, he confided to the NME in 1972. And he also returns to some captivating anecdotes. For example, this trip that Bowie made with Brian Eno in Austria in 1994 in a psychiatric clinic where polytraumatized patients during the Second World War were invited to evacuate the memory of the abuse suffered by means of artistic expression. A patient who thought he was an angel inspired Bowie to write the song I’m Deranged. More pleasing, the story of the real scene that inspired his most universal hit, heroesor even how Brian Eno’s wacky tarot deck guided the daring musical experimentation of the hit Boys Keep Swingin.
But what resolutely tipped Michka Assayas into the camp of converts was the visionary side of David Bowie, he tells us. “There is an incredible anticipation in the sounds. Especially with post-punk. Warszawa, the top of the album Lownot only inspired the first group name of the future Joy Division but he also inspired them the second side of their album Closer . There I realized that he had understood many things before everyone else and I am very admiring.”
It’s amazing, he anticipated everything that the music was going to become. It had antennae.
Michka Assayasat franceinfo Culture
Innovative and prophetic
What surprised him even more, he confides to us, is how David Bowie’s quest continued until the end, when, considered a rock dinosaur who no longer surprises, he continued to innovate in relative obscurity. “Its renewal struck me and in particular the little publicized albums like heathen (2002) and Reality (2003) which are magnificent. Those two really impressed me, and I think Bowie’s vocals are much warmer there. Also interesting is Earthling (1997), which contains I’m Afraid of Americans in duet with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and the experimental Outside (1995) which is quite fascinating.”
“His curiosity and understanding of what’s new in society doesn’t stop at music, far from it. (…) Shunches are sometimes surprisingly prophetic“, notes the author. “With the internet, music will become like running water and electricity“, he anticipated in 1997, before being one of the very first artists to create his own site, bowienet. Just twenty years ago, Bowie analyzed society as follows: “We can no longer rely on anything. Knowledge is dead. Only there is the interpretation of the facts that overwhelm us day after day.“How can we better sum up the present?
Very Good Bowie Trip by Michka Assayas (GM Editions, €20) was released on May 12, 2023