Dey Street Books

Like so many vital figures in British pop history, from Pete Townshend to Paul Weller, Bowie came from a blurry region of British society that encompasses the educated working class, the socially precarious petite bourgeoisie and what could be called the uncomfortably-off middle class, i.e. professional or office workers whose income didn’t quite match their aspirations.

That’s one of the things David Bowie came to show us—we go to music to hear ourselves change.

We’ve lived for just these twenty years, do we have to die for the fifty more?”—felt totally different

Bowie sounds old and vampirish, though he was only twenty-seven (just as Neil Young was only twenty-six when he sang “and I’m gettin’ old” in his lone Number 1 hit

Young Americans” is his testimony about the wages of being a poseur and the dangers of solipsism

Iggy Pop was his personal ambassador to Detoilet, the city of noise, even if the Stooges were secretly from Ann Arbor

Lennon was in the midst of his drunken “lost weekend” phase, after Yoko had thrown him out

Carlos Alomar, who went on to become his longest-running musical wingman

Actors can duck and dive a bit—they constantly re-create themselves. All they can do is play the role of a monster. But nobody does monster like a rock star.”

I ate little, but ingested a critically unfair amount of chemicals.”