Life Lessons from David Bowie

Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, we honor our favorite Capricorn— David Bowie — by revisiting his September ’95 cover story conversation with our former Editor in Chief, Ingrid Sischy. The interview, in which Bowie laments some of his more mainstream musical forays, took place a year before the enigmatic artist’s mind-bending appearance as Andy Warhol in the Julian Schnabel-helmed biopic Basquiat. So sit back and grab your spacesuit—you just might learn a thing or two.

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“I tried passionately hard in the first part of the ’80s to fit in, and I had my first overground success. I was suddenly no longer ‘the world’s biggest cult artist’ in popular music.”

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“I went mainstream in a major way with the song ‘Let’s Dance.’ I pandered to that in my next few albums, and what I found I had done was put a box around myself. It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did ‘Let’s Dance,’ and it was driving me mad—because it took all my passion for experimenting away.”

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“I had turned the tables on myself and found out that I was working for an audience instead of for myself.”

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“My nadir was Never Let Me Down. It was such an awful album. I really shouldn’t have even bothered going into the studio to record it.”

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“I’ve gotten to a place now where I’m not very judgmental about myself. I put out what I do, whether it’s in visual arts or in music, because I know that everything I do is really heartfelt.”

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“My story is really no different from that of anybody else who has been in a situation similar to mine. The proliferation of these particular stories in the press about the other side of a certain type of fame makes one become immune to them.”

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“I sincerely don’t have time to mess around with the past, because I’m not sure the past exists anymore.”

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“Maybe history is dead, and if it is, it quite likely means that the future is dead, because they are two sides of the same coin. We might be coming into a new era of nowness, which maybe is a very good thing.”

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“Perhaps if we didn’t dwell on absolutes and what we should be doing, we might be able to re-establish a whole new philosophical understanding of why we’re on the planet.”

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“I need friction. Also, I adore a sense of competition. I really like to see or hear somebody’s work and say, ‘I can top that.’ It makes me work in a far grittier, more muscular way.”

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“Impersonating Andy [Warhol] was something I could cope with, with a reasonable amount of ease. This was a man who had a real cutting look at life, and would talk in clichés and in a simplistic way, but in fact, there was a motor going on in there at a fantastic speed.”

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“Creating something is the one area where you mustn’t have caution or inhibition. If you make a startling, disastrous mess, it’s fine, because you can reach out and reevaluate and plunge off into another direction. But never be scared to do the plunging.”