David Bowie Embodies Shadows

Bowie explored Image versus Shadow with his various personas in his early career as a theatrical musician. This 1974 interview with the smug DIck Cavett is especially fascinating because Bowie is forced by television and context to be the the “real” David Bowie when it’s just as likely that this is just another post-Ziggy Stardust persona invented extemporaneously because of cocaine intoxication and imposed scheduling. Dick Cavett here is the one who assumes the mask of the “normal” and probes Bowie with questions that seem at times patronizing. Cavett seems to me almost hostile. Also, Bowie seems so very vulnerable, so much so that I feel a certain empathy for him and an impulse to protect him from the collective weight of Cavett’s socially approved mask of “normalcy”. I don’t know. The interview fascinates me. And fuck Dick Cavett and his cavalier treatment of the treasure of an artistic genius that was David Bowie.

Uploaded by RetroSoup on 2016-01-11.

Sanjay SahgalComment