GLR May June

“D

O YOU LIKE GIRLS OR

boys?” asked David

Bowie in the song “Hallo

Spaceboy” (1996), add-

ing slyly, “It’s confusing these days.” Since

the 70s, Bowie has worked hard to generate

similar confusion about his own sexuality

through personæ like glam-rocker Ziggy

Stardust (with his “God-given ass”), the

epicene Thin White Duke, and his collaboration, in the 80s, with

Queen. In the 90s, Bowie updated his bisexual image once more,

declaring on

Buddha of Suburbia

that the “whole world is queer.”

As recently as 2013, Bowie had another comeback, this time with

The Next Day

, a stellar album in which he sings lovingly of run-

ning with the boys—“dirty boys,” that is. Could he be alluding to

the urban legend that his first wife

caught Mick Jagger and himself in fla-

grante delicto?

In Berlin for three years (1976–

79), Bowie relocated to 155 Haupt-

strasse (not far from Dietrich’s

birthplace and Isherwood’s digs in

the early 1930s) to beat his depend-

ence on cocaine and to reinvent his

sound with the help of Iggy Pop,

Brian Eno, and Tony Visconti. The

output of that storied period, known

as the Berlin triptych, occupies a sa-

cred place in Bowie’s body of work.

Three albums, 1977’s

Low

and

He-

roes

, followed by

Lodger

in 1979, re-

main essential listening not only

because the songs range from the in-

strumentally gothic “Warsawza” to

the crowd-pleasing “Heroes,” but

also because they anticipate the ’80s,

when Bowie would reinvent himself

once more as the poperatic singer of

“Modern Love” and “Let’s Dance.”

If Bowie has been metamorphos-

ing for decades now—so many ch-

ch-changes since his origins in

British psychedelia—Tobias Rüther’s

Heroes: David Bowie in Berlin

only

confuses matters more. While it is

clear the author wants to approach

Bowie from a wider cultural angle—

to his credit, Rüther has an encyclo-

pedic knowledge of high, low, and

popular art—he fails to do justice to

an extraordinary phase in a truly

chameleonic career. In a book that is

less about the music than about the

author’s musings on Bowie’s wider impor-

tance (very little of which pertains to the

Spaceman’s sexuality), Rüther rightfully

calls the artist’s Berlin phase the “most dar-

ing music of his career.”

Lacking in continuity and focus, the

book’s six chapters range from Bowie’s ar-

rival in West Berlin to his triumphant return

in 1987 for the “Concert for Berlin,” when

he rallied an audience of 70,000 still under the shadow of the

Wall, which would fall in two years’ time. The book’s transla-

tor has done the author no favors. You know you’re in trouble

when a book’s opening sentence reads: “And from right here,

says the tour guide, at that time you could see the Wall.” The

content, too, is frequently cockamamie: Rüther, who loses focus

easily, suddenly pulls in the Red Hot

Chili Peppers’ 1991 album

Blood

Sugar Sex Magik

only to posit that

the “added K” comes from “kteis,”

the word in ancient Greek for

“vagina.” Good to know.

Rüther’s love of innuendo is sim-

ilarly problematic. The fifth chapter

concerns the relationship between

Bowie and French philosopher

Michel Foucault when the two met

at the nightclub Dschungel (West

Berlin’s version of Studio 54). A

somewhat accurate observation—

“Both Foucault and Bowie see sex-

ual emancipation as a means through

which one is free to define oneself or

reinvent oneself”—is coupled with

something more salacious: Foucault

and Bowie “got to know one another

better than simply on paper.” But

there is an even more insidious form

of insinuation throughout

Heroes

which is Rüther’s obsessive mis-

characterization of Bowie as a Nazi

sympathizer. While it’s true that

Bowie allegedly made a Nazi salute

during his “Station to Station” tour

in 1976, he himself has said the pho-

tograph caught him mid-wave and

that he was deranged from heavy

drug use.

Indeed the notion of a goose-step-

ping Bowie is Rüther’s idée fixe. A

perfectly fine chapter, “The Party on

the Brink,” begins strongly by link-

ing Bowie’s æsthetic sensibility to

philosopher Ernst Bloch but loses it-

It’s Not About the Music

OLIN

ARMAN

Heroes:

David Bowie in Berlin

by Tobias Rüther

Reaktion Books. 184 pages, $25.

The Gay & Lesbian Review

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