‘There's literally no economic confidence in any one nation in the world. There's not one confident central source anywhere on this whole damn planet. It makes you want to shoot yourself – it's very demoralising. I think we should maybe strengthen up a bit.’
—David Bowie.1
Now a fascist, Bowie moved to L.A. in 1975—‘the least suitable place to go in search of identity and stability,’ he once said—to write his next album.2 In California he subjected his body to ‘torture’3 for nearly a year, starving himself and abusing drugs. Heroic doses of cocaine, amphetamines and elephant tranquilisers supplemented a strict diet of milk and peppers. Drugs and hunger made his physique skeletal, his behaviour manic. Chronic insomnia produced symptoms of psychosis. He became extremely paranoid and delusional, convinced he was losing his mind.4 ‘Days’ of ‘psychological terror’ came and went.5 Withdrawn from society and isolated in his mind, demons, ghosts and constant hallucinations plagued him.
Addicted, anorexic and suicidal, Bowie was in a state of crisis. Somehow he still produced an excellent album – 1976’s Station to Station. But against the disintegration, the unconscious rush unto death, Bowie also developed another new persona. Beset by chaos and terror, this new character departed radically from those of the past. It embodied neither freedom nor desire. Nor did it represent youthful ideals now lost to time. Mobilising the ‘restless nothing’ within him again, Bowie destroyed all vestiges of Ziggy, the Young American, of David Jones. A new character emerged that negated the forces of disintegration in his life. He became the Thin White Duke.
With his art, David Bowie originally wished to be ‘regarded as an individualist.’ Somehow his pursuit of this ideal led him to become a fascist character that opposed almost everything he had represented to date. Ziggy was from outer space; the Duke, from blood and soil. Aladdin Sane was freedom while the Duke was strictness, rigidity, control. If the Young American yearned for post-war liberalism the Duke dreaded and desired totalitarianism. For Bowie, the Thin White Duke was a ‘very Aryan, fascist type’—a ghostly, narcissistic, deceiving, amoral, cocaine-obsessed, existential Führer, in the words of Paul Morley and Tobias Rüther—whose conservative, severe aesthetic matched ‘Hitler’s vision of the perfect Aryan icon.’6
The Thin White Duke was an avid fascist. A radical gap seemingly separates the Duke from Bowie’s other characters, just as it does fascism and liberal individualism. Yet these apparent differences only belie what unites these ideologies and characters. The Thin White Duke negated Bowie’s past personas. He also amplified their most central trait – narcissism. Ziggy was a kind of postmodern Christ, a saviour-figure the artist and fans worshipped like a messiah. The Young American self-consciously personified that nation’s fading ideals. Ziggy’s narcissism was intergalactic, the Young American’s nationalistic. The Duke’s egotism, however, somehow towered above theirs. The Thin White Duke idealised Hitler’s powers of mass seduction. He wanted nothing more than to wield such absolute authority himself, to give the powerful clarity of fascism to the world. Paranoid, grandiose and politicised, the Duke could never be content as a messiah-musician or soul-singer. Seduced by Hitler and disgusted by liberalism, the Duke instead became a vocal proponent of fascist politics. The liberal values of people like Ziggy were decadent, he declared, ‘foul’ and sick.7 The world, he believed, needed to fight the corruption liberals unleashed. Society needed order. An antidote to chaos. And so—again, like Kanye—the Duke yearned to be Britain’s prime minister. America’s president. The fascist ruler of the world.8
The sun burns over the abyss, and a terrible sublime becomes the counterpoint of total annihilation. Dreams of dictatorship oppose the drive for suicide and death. Fantasies of fascist domination ascend to blot out the horrors of life. Fascism is an answer to disintegration. As such, Bowie’s grandiosity reached its absolute limit as he approached the brink of self-destruction. Some critics argue that Bowie was driven to fascism by a desire for knowledge, power and to be special. Bowie claimed he became the Thin White Duke because he hoped to replace his reality with fantasy.9 Both interpretations are correct. Narcissism and the psychotic flight from reality, we know, are responses to trauma. To an intolerable world. To a fear that the self is set to disintegrate. Racked by addiction, anorexia, and the ‘restless nothing’ within him and his society, Bowie’s life was agony in 1976. Fascism’s certainties and grandiosity thus became appealing solutions for the crises he faced. Hitlerian rigidity and narcissism would counter the creative destruction at the heart of liberal, capitalist society. Grandiosity and certainty would stay the fragmentation he felt within. Fascism would contain the ‘restless nothing’ at the core of Bowie’s personality and his culture.
References
Doggett, P. (2011) The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s. London, The Bodley Head.
Morley, P. (2016) The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference. London, Simon & Schuster.
O’Leary, C. (2015) Rebel Rebel. Winchester, United Kingdom, Zer0 Books.
Reynolds, S. (2016) Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and its Legacy. London, Faber & Faber.
Rüther, T. (2014) Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin. London, Reaktion Books.
Sandford, C. (1997) Bowie: Loving the Alien. London, Warner.
Footnotes
https://thequietus.com/articles/03598-david-bowie-nme-interview-about-adolf-hitler-and-new-nazi-rock-movement
Shock & Awe: Glam Rock & Its Legacy, p.498.
The Man Who Sold the World, p.216.
Echoing his earlier remarks that his characters possessed him while he played them, he said his acting role in The Man Who Fell to Earth affected him in the same way during this period: ‘He did, however, confess to “being Newton for six months” after playing the role.’ Bowie: Loving the Alien, p.148.
https://www.bowiebible.com/songs/word-on-a-wing/
The Man Who Sold the World, pp.241 & 255, The Age of Bowie, p.321, and Heroes: Bowie in Berlin, p.32.
Such comments ultimately led the FBI to open a file on Bowie where they described him a ‘would-be demagogue’ and ‘apparent Nazi sympathizer.’ See Bowie: Loving the Alien, p.158.
Shock & Awe: Glam Rock & Its Legacy, p.549.
Shock & Awe: Glam Rock & Its Legacy, p.504, and Rebel Rebel, p.408.