David Bowie’s urban landscapes and nightscapes: A reading of the Bowiean text

Abstract

David Bowie’s songs are peppered with images of urban landscapes and nightscapes. When discussing Aladdin Sane (1973) in 1976, Bowie explained: “I want[ed] to write about the cities Ziggy [came] from”. Bowie’s urban landscapes and nightscapes mirror a rather sombre vision of the world—notably through what David Buckley terms a “bleak soundscape”—while giving the listener an insight into the artist’s own inner turmoil, thus emphasising the self-reflective aspect of his music. The visual quality of Bowie’s lyrics and music convey simultaneously a sense of the real and unreal, which clearly anchor the Bowiean cityscapes and nightscapes in the postmodern world. The present paper will explore the way in which Bowie depicts our “contemporary post-cities”, before trying to unveil the significance of the images and metaphors of the metropolis and its nocturnal shades in his songs. My study will consider Bowie’s works from the late sixties (David Bowie, Space Oddity) through the seventies and the nineties (Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs…) to the early noughties (Heathen). My approach will assess what Richard Middleton terms the “textual moment” of the musician’s cleverly crafted songs. My methodological approach, which rests on a textual analysis of Bowie’s songs, will also consider the intratextual and intertextual features of his lyrical texts. The latter should help me shed light on his technique as collagist, while a series of close readings of his lyrics will provide me with a detailed insight into the subtle intricacy of his œuvre, helping me uncover the threads which are woven throughout the vast body of the Bowiean texts.

Keywords

• collage
• intertextuality
• intratextuality
• lyrics
• postmodern
• urban landscape