Salon.com > glam rock

WATCH: New David Bowie video “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:56:00 +0000

They may look alike and perhaps you've never seen the two in the same place at the same time until now, but androgynous doppelgängers David Bowie and actress Tilda Swinton appear together in the glam-rock icon's latest video, "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)," the second track to be released in advance of his long-anticipated album, "The Next Day," which comes out on March 12. (This joint appearance of Bowie and Swinton, reports The Guardian, is bad news for the bloggers at Tilda Stardust, exploding their theory that the two are in fact the same person. Alas.) Early reviews, which so far have only appeared in the U.K., are resoundingly positive, praising Bowie's brave introspection and reflection on his past — musical and lyrical allusions to his Ziggy Stardust and Berlin years — and his dystopic view of the future.

David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s golden years are set for the big screen

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 11:55:00 +0000

Todd Haynes fantasized about the unlikely friendship and collaboration between David Bowie and Iggy Pop through his fictional "Velvet Goldmine." But now the filmmaker Gabriel Range is directing a biopic about the glam rock duo's time together in the mid- to late 1970s in West Berlin, according to the Guardian. Range, best-known for his movie about an imaginary assassination of George W Bush, is working from a screenplay by Robin French, reports the Hollywood Reporter. French, a TV writer for the BBC3's sitcom"Cuckoo," has tentatively titled the film "Lust for Life," basing the screenplay largely on Paul Trynka's Bowie and Pop biographies, "Starman" and "Open Up and Bleed."

Time has changed David Bowie: He can trace time

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 00:30:00 +0000

"Time may change me/ But I can't trace time," sang David Bowie in the closing lines of one of his most famous songs, "Changes." But more than 40 years later, tracing time is exactly what he's doing. Earlier this week on his 66th birthday, the man born David Robert Jones released his first new single in nearly 10 years – the elegiac ballad "Where Are We Now?" – and in so doing, confounded expectations with his most surprising stunt in years: He finally looked back.

Bowie being Bowie, it isn't just the (very good) song itself that has people talking. Along with the new track, he also unveiled cover art that was immediately received with skepticism, bemusement and confusion by fans. No, the image was nothing like the emaciated, sexually ambiguous "Diamond Dogs" gatefold, or a return to his neo-fascistic mid-'70s period. It wasn't even akin to the dapper, tweed-zombie from 2002's underrated, "Heathen." Instead, the cover in question shows a repurposed image from "Heroes" with the iconic photo obscured by a blank square with the album title printed in stark sans-serif font:

My AIDS memoir soundtrack

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 18:00:00 +0000

In the spring of 1972, the sexual culture was cracking open. David Bowie released "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust" and Lou Reed released "Transformer." Openly bisexual, the two musicians infused pop culture with a kaleidoscope of strange beauty. Along with Iggy Pop, they were an androgynous space-age force in silver lamé and black nail polish. Listening to "Ziggy Stardust" and later "Transformer" — on which Reed sang, “We’re coming out … out of our closets” — Dad was energized by the possibilities of post-Stonewall homosexuality. He didn’t see his wife and small baby girl as an impediment to sexual liberation. As the student government president at Emory University in Atlanta, he wrote a column for the student paper in which he publicly came out and urged his straight brothers and sisters to join the cause for gay rights as they had joined to fight the war. My mother supported him. Both took lovers on the side. They were living the revolution.