I’m in a bit of a rut here, aren’t I? Well, when you’ve got a meme that works, you stick with it. I must admit that I’m more than tardy in paying my respects to Mr. Bowie, but I had more important things to do, like making fun of David Brooks, who just never seems to get enough ridicule.
Anyway, getting back to Bowie, I confess that I rarely cared for his act. Perhaps his most famous turn was his “Dancing in the Streets” video with Mick Jagger, which only showed that, with enough video magic, slo-mo, and a very floppy coat, you can turn out a nice singing and dancing video without actually being able to sing or dance.1
Bowie reminded me very much of Andy Warhol, who surely must have been a major influence. Andy approached the New York art scene as a master diamond-cutter approaches an uncut diamond, calculating every fracture point to a hair, and, with a single blow, releasing the jewel within—though, in Andy’s case, the jewel was not the stone itself but rather the self-induced dazzle that stunned and enchanted its beholders’ eyes, inducing them to spend millions on the finely calculated hipness that he cranked out by the carload at his “Factory”. “You don’t get it! It’s supposed to be crap!2
Bowie, working a mass audience stretching across continents rather than an Uptown elite, couldn’t afford to be so elegant, or so effective, but, considering his serious lack of performing talent, he played the cards he had—notably, his striking appearance—very well. To compare him to another New Yorker, Woody Allen, Dave knew that 90% of life is showing up. Dave couldn’t sing or dance, but he always showed up, and he always had something that looked different, or pretty different, something that no one else would do, or at least something that no one had done recently. He was still active right up to the time of his death at 69, fighting cancer and striving to do as he wanted to do and live as he wanted to live. Which isn’t a bad epitaph, is it?
How does Hoppy fit into this, other than as an in-joke? Well, Hoppy, aka William Boyd, didn’t quit either. Boyd was an A list Hollywood star in the twenties, until a totally undeserved burst of bad publicity blew up his career, consigning him to the B list until the forties, when, pushing fifty, Boyd found himself out of a job. But Bill was hearing about this new thing, television. TVs in those days cost more than a car, but Boyd took a gamble that the tube would replace the radio, that it would have an enormous demand for content, and that if he hocked everything he had to buy the rights to the 66 Hopalong Cassidy oat-burners he’d cranked out on the B-list, he could make a killing. In fact, not only did he make a killing, but through the power of repetition he made himself one of the most recognizable men in America. Kind of like an innocent Andy Warhol!
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- Dave was upfront about his lack of singing ability, saying that he started performing his own songs only because no one else would sing them, which explains why he spent most of his time either chanting or simply speaking his lyrics. Looking at the video, one wonders if Dave wouldn’t have been a bigger star if he had had a bigger mouth. Mick’s dentist must have loved him. ↩︎
- I’ve riffed previously on Andy’s remarkable ability to convince people that it was cool to pay stratospheric prices for “irony” because it bore his signature (or a reasonable facsimile thereof). ↩︎