Telling lies: the interviews of David Bowie

ABSTRACT

Critical interpretations of David Bowie as the ever-changing ‘chameleon of rock’ and ‘the faker’ are nothing new. Such interpretations usually use a liberal sprinkling of quotes from his countless media interviews. Yet the self-contradiction, half-truths, fabrications, and lies to be found in these interviews have their own corresponding story to tell. The subject of this essay is David Bowie in interview. Ranging from mid-1960s interviews to the most recent interviews, Bowie’s comments and pronouncements do not elucidate the artist or his work in any satisfying manner. However, what they do is provide a fascinating perspective on Bowie’s life and art. If we interpret Bowie’s media interviews as a narrative-of-self as well as a form of artist’s statement, what they continually reveal is that, to use Paul Ricoeur’s concept, ‘narrative-identity’ is a slippery process that involves both an affirmation of a definite self and a total rejection of that self. They also reveal that this ‘self’ – together with others – is both the interpreter and the interpreted. In this sense, Bowie’s stardom (his fame) is continually under revision by both Bowie himself and those who attempt to interpret it. ‘Bowie’ becomes a collaborative project with no real beginning and no real end; not even in death. The celebrity interview is an important (yet often overlooked) stage for mediation.

KEYWORDS:

• Interviews
• narrative-identity
• lying
• inconsistency
• posing
• mediality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Formatting note: the quotes of lyrics, running alongside the points that are made by Bowie in interview, and that recur throughout the article, highlight how the artist’s theory and art coalesce and hence provide evidence to support core arguments of the article.

2. Interview material is gathered from the following sources: scans of original articles, available on The Ziggy Stardust Companion website (http://www.5years.com/radint.htm); transcripts of online appearances from Teenage Wildlife (http://www.teenagewildlife.com); TV and Radio interviews from YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo. Other interview material is sourced from the archives of online magazines and newspapers (referenced in bibliography) and the following: Pegg (2011), O’Leary (2015), Devereux et al. (2015), Morley (2016).

3. For an interesting interpretation of Bowie’s inconsistencies in the context of the undecidability of the outsider/monster see Sharpe (2017).

4. For academic perspectives on Bowie’s public persona in relation to the concept of performing identities see the following Waldrep (2015), Cinque et al. (2015), and Perrott (2017).

5. Interestingly, an alternative phrase for pathological lying is mythomania. Myth-making can, in itself, be closely associated with the concept of fame and celebrity. This connection between lying and self-mythologizing may, in turn, be linked to the notion of performing the self though dressing, embellishing, or decorating one’s own identity. As Healy and Healy (2004, p. 15) phrase it, the purpose of such liars is to ‘decorate their own person’.

6. For more on the intersection between Wilde and Bowie see Waldrep (2004).

7. In relation narratives of self and the unreliable narrator in autobiography, who is not merely ‘telling lies but telling their lives’ see Adams (1990).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth McCarthy

Elizabeth McCarthy is a Lecturer in English, Media, and Cultural Studies. Her research and teaching interests include genre studies; American noir fiction; youth culture and rebellion in the 1950s and 1960s; literature and the visual arts/media; and sexuality and criminality in the Long Eighteenth Century. She has published work on a wide variety of subjects, including Romantic aesthetics and the serial killer; propaganda and post-WW1 American advertising; female juvenile delinquency in 1950s America; ghost stories; Gothic visuality in the Nineteenth Century; black burlesque performance. She is the co-founder (2006) and co-editor (2006–2012) of the online academic journal The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, and is now a member of its editorial board (2012- present).