Following the success of Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey and the launch of NASA’s Apollo mission, a young David Bowie would craft his first character of many: ‘Major Tom‘. This would consequently lead him to create a music video to accompany the 1969 song Space Oddity, which accounts the fictional astronaut being stranded in space. Bowie’s biggest artistic success to date, the link between expressing his art both musically and visually became an essential one, a full decade before the launch of MTV.

In Music/ Video Histories, Aesthetics, Media, Julie Lobalzo Wright says of Bowie: “his music videos were not just a vital part of his own artistic output, but also important in showing the world new uses for the medium as part of the star making machinery.” (2017, p.18) This is especially true when concerning the success of the character ‘Ziggy Stardust‘, who the musician debuted and performed as during 1972. The thin, androgynous, half-alien shocked viewers with his blood orange hair and painted face, the music videos that depicted him adding a visual spectacle that was not being done elsewhere in music.

Bowie continued emphasising the importance of the audiovisual medium into the 1980s, particularly with ‘Ashes to Ashes’, the most expensive music video at the time. The video forgoes depicting any explicit narrative, instead repeatedly showing scenes containing four characters, again portrayed by Bowie. “It incorporates relatively easy-to-read signifiers, such as the harlequin, a priest, a dentist chair, and a modern kitchen, yet in their combination and the fog of the solarized colour they become uncertain, even unsettling.” (Manghani, 2017, p.34) Carol Vernallis links the image solarization here to the pixelation in Kanye West’s ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’ (2013, p.5), thereby highlighting the lasting influence Bowie has had on the art-form. Bowie would continue depicting themes of gender, queerness, otherness, addiction, life and death through the audiovisual until he died of liver cancer in 2016, 3 days prior leaving us with the final image of him shuffling back into a closet for the music video ‘Lazarus’.

By Lily Thetford (33659272)

References:

Arnold, G. et al. (2017) Music/video histories, aesthetics, media. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Vernallis, C. (2013) Music Video’s Second Aesthetic?. The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Oxford Handbooks