Time is out of joint: the transmedial hauntology of David Bowie

ABSTRACT

David Bowie’s transformational engagement with stardom was complexly entwined with his long and creative relationship with hauntology. While referring us back in time, Bowie’s songs and videos simultaneously haunt us about a lost future. Bowie engaged with hauntology initially by mimicking the sonic, visual and bodily gestures of many star performers. This developed into synthesised mimicry, which involved fusing the traits of several stars in order to create a coherent star persona. During the last decade of his life, Bowie perplexed his audience by calling up his own ‘ghost stars’, reconfiguring celebrity and expressing a persistent sense of ‘future nostalgia’. In his last enigmatic gasp before exiting Earth, Bowie invited his audience to undertake a celebratory autopsy of his star status. His parting gifts were prescient hauntings of the future, poignantly stitched together with nods of tributary reference to artists he had borrowed from. Drawing on the concept of hauntology, this article examines a selection of musical and audiovisual outputs across five decades of Bowie’s career, demonstrating how he stretched the possibilities of hauntology as a conceptual tool and an artistic strategy, and prepared the cultural bed for audience members and cultural participants to engage with hauntological media.

KEYWORDS:

• David Bowie
• hauntology
• gesture
• audiovisual aesthetics
• music video
• transmedia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. However some of the ideas and analytical material appearing in this article may be re-purposed by the author for a closely related forthcoming book publication due to be published by Bloomsbury.

Notes

1. W. Luke Windsor (2004, p. 182) argues that whilst cultural forms may be imbued with signs that ‘afford’ (evoke or suggest) a range of meanings, an individual listener or viewer’s interpretation of signs is relational, thus depending upon their particular environmental context, perceptive conditions and positioning in relation to cultural conventions.

2. A comprehensive overview of Bowie’s engagement with hauntology throughout his oeuvre is not possible within an article of this length, meaning that significant time periods and outputs are necessarily omitted from this study.

3. For further contextualisation of my cross-disciplinary use of ‘gesture’, see: Perrott (2015, 2017), Kardos (2015a, 2015b), Noland (2009) and Rotman (2008).

4. According to a Steve Hoffman music forum, Life On Mars has been voted as David Bowie’s number 1 signature song: http://www.forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/what-are-david-bowies-3-other-signature-songs.633824/page-6

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Perrott

Lisa Perrott is senior lecturer at the University of Waikato. Her research traverses diverse topics such as popular music, audiovisual aesthetics, animation, transmedia, cultural studies, celebrity studies, fandom, and participatory culture. Lisa is coeditor of the Bloomsbury book series ‘New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media’. Her publications include ‘Bowie the Cultural Alchemist: Performing Gender, Synthesizing Gesture and Liberating Identity’ in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (2017) and ‘Music Video’s Performing Bodies: Floria Sigismondi as Gestural Animator and Puppeteer’ in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2015). Her current research includes an edited volume on Transmedia Directors and a monograph on David Bowie's music videos, both due to be published by Bloomsbury in 2019.