In Bowie’s music, fragmented voices often appear, sometimes as splintering perspectives contained in a single narrator. In the most striking reflective lyric of “Changes,” Bowie tries to confront himself in the mirror, but in his turning, the chance of meeting the same person always seems to slip away from him: the breakdown of identity is revealed as its own aesthetic. Across his songs, Bowie allowed for nonsense rhyme and hip street slang, along with allusions to totemic writers and thinkers, to clash and combine interchangeably. This synthesis of elements gives way to the brittle syntax of “Ashes to Ashes” and the extended rant that closes “Bewlay Brothers” bridged at the broken lovers of “Scream Like a Baby.” Under the surface of Bowie’s songs, there is always the instinct of repressed derangement trying to contain itself, desperate to find a new language and make itself heard.131
The internal schism of dueling characters housed within the inauthentic self of “David Bowie” came to the fore in the songs where Bowie refused to flesh them out into completely rounded figures, instead teasing costumed aesthetics alongside lyrical and musical cues that revealed an incomplete portrait of their pathology. It was here that David Jones could offload his private neuroses in the open and introduce new ones in a deliberate act of fantastic mystification, all within the narrative lifeblood of the four-minute pop song.132 Glenn Hendler also debates the idea of full-blooded personas in Bowie’s work: they are merely aspects of a whole delivered in fleeting expressions of pure artifice.
Toward the end of “Scary Monsters,” Bowie sings that he loves the little girl “and I’ll love her till the day she dies.” He has already imagined her death as the music thunders toward its close. As the spirit of the song, it is the girl, not the singer, who must pay the price for the corrupted relationship. The narrator’s pain comes from knowing he has caused her sad decline, and because he is tougher and more experienced, he will outlast her; she is survived only by his guilt. This is another example of the upside-down world that Bowie’s songs of 1980 inhabit—he can see that everything is wrong but doesn’t know how to make it right.
John Lennon
My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
On December 7, Bowie was interviewed by Andy Peebles in New York for BBC Radio. Just the day before, John Lennon had been the guest on the show. Broadcast in January 1981, Lennon had told Peebles the joys of living in New York: “I can go out this door right now and go to a restaurant. Do you want to know how great that is?” Having endured the intensity of Beatlemania across the world and tired of bourgeois English attitudes and the racism experienced by his wife Yoko Ono, New York gave Lennon a second chance at an anonymous family life, as it would for Bowie.133 Flâneur journalist Fran Leibowitz spoke of being left alone in a city of millions; the few who stopped walking in the busy flow of humming streets were tourists asking for directions, soon to be mowed down by the rush of human traffic. In Berlin, no one recognized Bowie. In New York, no one even spoke to him; he was a ghost in a city of lost souls.134
On December 8, Lennon would be murdered, shot five times outside the Dakota Building by Mark Chapman just as he turned his head when his name was called. Earlier that evening, Lennon was captured in a photo signing an autograph for Chapman; a few hours later, around midnight, he would return home, where Chapman would be waiting. His death cast shock waves throughout the world, sparking a vigil of thousands of fans outside his apartment and generating a media cycle that would last for weeks, rolling into years of analysis and debate.
Bowie’s deranged voice on “It’s No Game (No. 1)” was an invitation to violence: “put a bullet in my brain / and it makes all the papers.” By December 1980, his words would seem eerily prophetic were it not for the painful cruelty of coincidence.135 But as a commentary on the relentless trajectory of public interest and the media’s need to capitalize on tragedy, the song has real force.136 The biggest news makes the biggest splash; a blur of blood and ink becomes a feeding frenzy where the death of one celebrity—and later the infamy of his killer—would always carry more weight than the murder of a nobody civilian, a person reduced to a number and a name—turn the page and move on.137
The circumstances of Lennon’s murder fulfills the cliché of lonerism, with Mark Chapman as the outsider victim to Catcher in the Rye syndrome. At the time of his arrest, he was clutching a copy of J. D. Salinger’s classic novel and an LP that Lennon had signed for him earlier that day.138 A 1950s coming-of-age American classic that wrestles with a self-absorbed youth who feels he can be the “catcher” to rescue innocent children from running through the fields off a cliff—though he seems unable to help himself— would become a totemic symbol attached to many would-be American assassins. Chapman scapegoated the book as a fiction that he retreated into away from reality, disassociating himself from the crime and its true motive.139 For the book’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield, everyone else is a “phony”; by contrast, he is sincere looking for something real and authentic. This isolated stance reaps mental health struggles and reflects the lot of people forced into the margins of society toward deeper alienation; each time they are pushed out, they remove themselves further apart.
Chapman felt himself to be “different” in some way that explained his actions, affording him the label of a certain kind of monster, a result of the outpouring of love for the loss of a beloved former Beatle. Lennon’s death became absorbed as a “cultural trauma” for which society at large was not willing to take any responsibility.140 Chapman would employ the insanity defense to explain his actions as a direct result of mental illness, claiming that he was both a victim and a consequence of the public obsession with the famous, and with fame itself. The right-wing perspective simplified the idea of the dangerous loner, where people in trouble became people who make trouble; as both victims and perpetrators, they were damned both ways (Jenkins 2006).
Speaking years later in an interview with Larry King, Chapman, still serving his sentence, referred to himself in the third person to distance his current self from the other “evil” Mark Chapman, the nobody who sought to become notorious, as if killing Lennon, deposing another one of Catcher’s “phonies,” in the public eye would raise him up in his stead. By this argument, the real monster was “fame,” with Chapman in thrall to its all-pervasive influence. In the psychology book Scary Monsters (Duffett and Hackett 2021), the authors point out that Chapman made himself special, a “mental alien” existing outside of the parameters of humanity, when in fact the ability to commit murder is as human as life itself. Chapman hid behind this defense, exploiting his outcast status to separate himself from culpability for his crime.141
By clinging to the stereotype of a damaged and vulnerable person turned accidental killer, Chapman tarnished people suffering mental illness as loco wing nuts incapable of managing their own lives or making moral choices, pushing the outsider further into the realm of the dangerous unknown, another “other” to be feared, institutionalized and reduced to the status of something less than human.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Bowie was distraught. Coco Schwab asked May Pang (a former girlfriend of Lennon’s142) to come over to his apartment. She found him repeatedly screaming at the television: “What the fuck is going on in this world!” as he continued to watch the news coverage until dawn. In his frustration, we hear the angered voice of “It’s No Game (No. 1)” finally breaking through the safety glass, forced to confront firsthand the tragic inheritance of twentieth-century American violence, now brought to bear in homes across the nation. Reflecting on the loss two years later, Bowie said, “A whole piece of my life seemed to have been taken away; a whole reason for being a singer and songwriter seemed to be removed from me. It was almost like a warning” (Trynka 2011).
Carlos Alomar recalls that Bowie was “destroyed” by Lennon’s death, remembering it as a brutal time: “You must understand that David was living in New York with his son. He had just gotten to a great place in his life where he was coming back. He felt comfortable walking around the city. And then you find out that your friend, who also felt comfortable walking around, got shot—and you were supposed to be next?” (DeMain 2020).143
Incredibly, Bowie would continue his Broadway run of The Elephant Man until its end on January 4, 1981. All talks of discussion of a proposed tour in support of Scary Monsters went down the drain. Instead, Bowie entered a period of relative incubation, leaving New York for trips to Japan and his tax-exile retreat in Lausanne, Switzerland. He took a break from recording a new album, it is believed, in order to let his contract with RCA lapse and for the ten-year payment plan of royalties owed to MainMan to come to an end. In 2010, Bowie explained his decision to go underground: “I was second on his list. Chapman had a front-row ticket to The Elephant Man the next night. John and Yoko were supposed to sit front row for that show, too. So the night after John was killed, there were three empty seats in the front row. I can’t tell you how difficult that was to go on. I almost didn’t make it through the performance.” Chapman had previously been seen photographing Bowie at the stage door of the Booth Theatre. In Chapman’s hotel room, police found a program for the play with a black circle drawn around Bowie’s name.144
There was no emotion in my blood. There was no anger. There was nothing. It was dead silence in my brain. . . . I aimed at his back and pulled the trigger five times and all hell broke loose in my mind.
Mark Chapman, 1980
Notes
131 For Terry’s funeral, Bowie sent flowers with a note borrowing from Rutger Hauer’s speech at the end of the movie Blade Runner: “You’ve seen more things than we could imagine, but all these moments will be lost, like tears washed away by the rain.”
132 Speaking of “The Bewlay Brothers,” Bowie said, “I wouldn’t know how to interpret the lyric of this song other than suggesting that there are layers of ghosts within it. It’s a palimpsest, then.” For this track, Bowie avoided using his stage name or Terry’s surname, adopting the brand of pipe he used at the time from a chain of tobacconists.
133 “The reason I suggest that one speaks of a false-self system is that the ‘personality,’ false self, mask, ‘front,’ or persona that such individuals wear may consist in an amalgam of various part-selves, none of which is so fully developed as to have a comprehensive ‘personality’ of its own” (Laing 1960).
134 Lennon’s murder as assassination would cast him forever as the lost genius, his narrative arc cut cruelly short as he entered the mature period of his private life.
135 Some have suggested that living in New York as a dangerous metropolis was a contributing factor to Lennon’s death, that its chaotic and threatening atmosphere infected the mind of Mark Chapman, pushing him to the edge. But Lennon’s finding peace and anonymity in New York’s chaotic energy pushes back on this theory, preferring to live there rather than in the smaller and comparatively safer city of London.
136 Looking back, it’s hard not to hear this line and think of John Lennon’s iconic round glasses, broken and covered in blood, this aesthetic shot expressed more of the public image of Lennon than a graphic photograph of his body could have done. Controversy surrounded Yoko Ono’s decision to present the glasses on the cover of her 1981 album Season of Glass. She defended her choice as a representation of life with and without Lennon, the presence of his absence.
137 Stemming from the intense coverage of the Iran hostage crisis, 1980 led to the creation of more intense and biased news outlets, such as ABC’s Nightline show and Ted Turner’s CNN (Jenkins 2006).
138 On “It’s No Game (No. 1),” the Japanese lyrics push forward the inflated style of tabloid reporting: shinbun wa kakitateru—“the newspapers will write about it in an exaggerated way.”
139 Links have also been made to the John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, another fan of the book.
140 And again, in 1981, John Hinckley Jr. would attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan; out of six shots fired, only one hit Reagan, who was wounded with a cracked rib and coughing up blood. Hinckley outraged conservatives when on March 30, 1982, he was later found not guilty by reason of insanity, stoking the fires for calls to return to a harsher penal system, dedicated more to punishment and retribution than to rehabilitation. As Kevin Young (1993), observed, “In spite of the shootings of John Lennon and Ronald Reagan in the early eighties, Reagan’s own vigorous reassertion of American traditions ensured that no federal gun control legislation was even seriously considered during his presidency.”
141 In 1982, the poet Allen Ginsberg would describe Lennon’s shooting as “like slashing a Picasso,” whereas Paul McCartney would almost brush it off as evil banality performed by a nobody, where it made no difference who pulled the trigger—when, of course, Chapman’s actions were specific and directly attributable to him (Duffett and Hackett 2021).
142 In 2006, Yoko Ono would read an open letter arguing that Chapman should be denied parole to avoid encouraging other crazies to follow his path, where “violence begets violence,” avoiding repeat situations, “which may bring further madness and tragedy into the world.”
143 May Pang, a former girlfriend of Lennon’s, would later become the wife of Tony Visconti after meeting him and Bowie three years earlier when the three stayed up until dawn, having consumed much cocaine and brandy with Bowie and leaving around dawn, pleased as punch with a caricature portrait of himself drawn by Lennon.
144 In March 1972, after writing “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” Bowie mentioned in an interview his new fear of being killed onstage, that the song might encourage his own assassination, dying for art as if by his own hand. In a 1990 interview with Musician magazine, Bowie referred to the recurring image of snipers on rooftops he remembered from his first visits to the United States in 1971–1972, already imbued with fierce paranoia: “There were snipers all over America, on tops of buildings.” Chris O’Leary noted that Bowie might have made the connection to Charles Whitman, who killed fourteen people in 1966 during his sniper rampage from the clock tower at the University of Texas, Austin. The fear of assassination this sparked in him, causing severe anxiety before his 1987 Slane Castle gig, is embodied in the line about “the sniper in the brain” from 1973’s “Time.”
Adam Steiner writes about music, street-art culture, architecture, poetry, and transgressive fiction. His previous books include Into the Never: Nine Inch Nails and the Creation of the Downward Spiral and the novel Politics of the Asylum. Twitter: @burndtoutward
minor literature[s] 