Ten reasons to like David Bowie even if you hate his music!

So why wouldn’t you like David Bowie his music!?! I have no fucking clue! Still some people do and I will give them 10 reasons why they should at least like him for some other amazing things that he did next to music! I hope to post all these damn good reasons on this blog in the coming months. Some of them will be quite straight forward, others not. Today I will start with the reason #1!

Bowie and Burroughs

David Bowie wrote some of his lyrics using the cut up technique, which was invented by Dadaism and made popular by William S. Burroughs. The American novelist of the Beat generation would cut up normal texts, take out words, then rearrange the remaining words in random order. Burroughs thought the texts he wrote using these methods had subliminal meaning. Another way was to cut up two pieces of texts along the middle in half and then line two halves along the edge to get a new text. You can see Burroughs using this technique in the below video:

Bowie met Burroughs in 1974 in London, a journalist of Rolling Stone magazine set up an interview between the two. In the fascinating interview, they openly talk with each other about a lot of cool topics like psychic phenomena, Ziggy Stardust and Andy Warhol who is according to Burroughs  “a real science fiction character”. Burroughs also talks about dreams and how they influence him. He says that 70% of his ideas come from his dreams. David Bowie even keeps a tape recorder next to his bed to record his ideas. That both of them get a lot of creativity from the unconscious also is known through their interest in psychedelic drugs. Bowie once said that the time after Ziggy Stardust came out was one long trip of heavy drugs use. William Burroughs was also an advocate of drugs like LSD and regularly addicted to heroin. It is also really worthwhile to check out the hallucinatory hippie movie Chappaqua with an appearance of Burroughs and also of Allen Ginsberg.

Bowie and Burroughs

David Bowie also used the cut-up technique to make songs. The track “Warszawa” written with Brian Eno from “Low” album is made by using the cut-up technique. They cut up a instrumental songs in pieces based on finger-clicks and then rearranged it with chord changes based on certain numbers.  The melancholic and haunting song is one of the highlights of the first  album of the Berlin Trilogy, a series of amazing Bowie records in collaboration with Brian Eno. Ian Curtis who was a big Bowie fan first named his band  Warsaw after this song, to change it later to Joy Division.

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