David Bowie
David Bowie
David Robert Jones, better known by his stage name David Bowie, was an English singer, songwriter and actor. He was a figure in popular music for over five decades, regarded by critics and musicians as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, his music and stagecraft significantly influencing popular music. During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at 140 million worldwide, made him one of the world's best-selling music...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth8 January 1947
CityLondon, England
I think hip-hop is actually one of the most challenging things that's happened in music in a long time.
The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.
David Bowie emerged as a rock star in the late '60s. And as Ken Tucker wrote, "In the face of the hippy era's sincerity, intimacy and generosity, Bowie presented irony, distance and self-absorption. His song 'Changes' announced the arrival of a new counterculture," unquote.
I really wanted to do, more than anything else, up until I was around 16, 17, was write musicals.
I never really got the book together for the thing, so I had all the songs and the characters. But by the time we'd gotten it on the road and I'd been doing it for 18 months, oh God, I couldn't wait to move on to something else.
I wanted to rewrite how rock music was perceived.
There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I'm surprised aren't being used on MTV.
What I like doing is writing and recording and much more on the, I guess, the - on that creative level. It's fun interpreting songs and all that, but I wouldn't like it as a living.
There's a thing that just as you go to sleep, if you keep your elbows elevated that you will never go below the dream stage. And I've used that quite a lot and it keeps me dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed.
In fact, in Europe, I'm more kind of this bloke what writes lots of stuff.
I don't live for the stage. I don't live for an audience.
I think it's rather a waste of time endlessly singing the same songs every night for a year, and it's just not what I want to do.
A career of nearly 40 years, is not very long.
I'm quite certain that the audience that I've got for my stuff don't listen to the lyrics.