Turn and face the strange.
I’m doing some digging into people who have reinvented themselves. This research is for my benefit, to see if there are lessons I can apply in my own life. But perhaps there are some tidbits that might help you, too.
These few paragraphs barely skim the surface of David Bowie’s body of work.
David Bowie seemed to be a master at identity change. Throughout his career he embodied at least five public alter egos: Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, Thin White Duke, Blind Prophet. Personifying these characters was a way to continue his constant evolution. They created a space for his own eclectic and expanding ideas about life and art.
A few of David Bowie’s personas.
The first time I saw David Bowie I was barely a teenager, and he seemed weird and off-putting to me. My goal at the time, having just entered junior high, was to fit in at all costs and NOT be weird. But he had an undeniable magnetism that pulled me in. Whenever Space Oddity came on the radio, you would find me on the living room floor with my ear pressed up against the speaker of the stereo cabinet to absorb the music’s otherworldliness. Though I bought some of his albums in high school and in my 20s, I tended to pick up the needle and drop it back on the one song I liked best, over and over—Young Americans, Cat People, Let’s Dance.
That is, until I got “Pinups” and “Aladdin Sane.” I can’t remember why I bought those two albums on CD decades after they were released, but I played them all the way through numerous times and I started to appreciate David Bowie at a deeper level. I respected his unique creative voice and began to notice the fearless approach he took with his work.
There was a time in the 1980s where Bowie admits he got a little lost. He calls this his ‘Phil Collins period,’ where the music was repetitive and formulaic. A few years later he got sober, igniting yet another round of personal reassessment and reinvention. He learned that the ‘comfort zone’ of making stale hit records, and the seeming freedom and escape provided by drugs and alcohol were both illusions. They stagnated growth and limited opportunities. What he has to say about creative motivation in this video clip is instructive:
Much has been written about Bowie’s chameleon-like nature, inhabiting different personas, with different aesthetics, and different music. But his appearance was always in service to the deeper motivation of genuine self-expression. The engine at the core of David Bowie’s train of creative output stayed the same—it was always his unique perspective and drive to express it.
He called himself a ‘tasteful thief,’ taking existing bits and pieces of existing art, culture, and society and making them his own. He tried on things for size, and altered them to fit (an early influence on his vocal style was Anthony Newley; once you hear it, you can’t NOT hear it).
During the last 20 years of his life, David Bowie was still inhabiting new personalities and making creative discoveries. While his contemporaries were often rehashing their previous work, he was original and unique. His life was his art, and vice versa. He was his own ‘design project.’ And it was a very public project. Did he care what people thought of him? Maybe, like all humans, he liked being liked, but it doesn’t appear that was a major factor in the way he developed his work. He understood that standing still and repeating oneself was the kiss of death for creative thinking.
So as a person pursuing creative growth past midlife, what lessons can I learn from David Bowie’s life and approach to work? I imagined asking him about how to proceed into the unknown, and this is what I heard: ‘Find a subject you’re interested in and pursue it for all its worth. Dive deep, soak it up, and make it your own. Then project it back out onto the world in a unique and personal way.’
Here’s a real quote from him, along with a live performance of Changes, the piece that inspired this article in the first place:
“I feel confident imposing change on myself. It’s more fun progressing than looking back.” — David Bowie
Are you a Bowie fan? Do any of these ideas seem useful for you, or do you have other ideas about how he managed his creative endeavors? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.
