Find in Library

Because of its cross-media resourcefulness, the artistic universe of David Bowie offers a first-rate basis to explore the link between sonority and symbolism. Even if this link is to be found everywhere all along the artist’s career, this article will focus on the so called Berliner period. Because the years 1976 to 1979 make up an aesthetic break in Bowie’s artistic evolution, and more generally in the history of rock music with the emergence of cold wave music; because those years could be compared with a kind of neo-romantic phase focused on the experimental universe of German electronic music – Bowie’s ‘turn-of-the-century Vienna’ –; what more because this period is fraught with musical and artistic influences, in the pass as well as in the present. Under the impulse given by Brian Eno, the ‘Low-‘Heroes’-Lodger’ trilogy always has a favorite place in the creator’s universe. A geographic and historical exoticism, a static perception of time, a dreamlike strangeness, a sexual bivalence, the torn gap between the interior being and its social counterpart, an anesthetized formalism and the recourse to organicism make up, as much to Bowie as to the incoming city, so many anthropological figures induced by the historical and social context of individual and collective lives.