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    Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s
    Unavailable
    Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s
    Unavailable
    Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s
    Ebook844 pages10 hours

    Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s

    By Peter Doggett

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The Man Who Sold the World by Peter Doggett—author of the critically acclaimed Beatles biography, You Never Give Me Your Money—is a song-by-song chronicle of the evolution of David Bowie.

    Focusing on the work and the life of one of the most groundbreaking figures in music and popular culture during the turbulent seventies, Bowie’s most productive and innovative period, The Man Who Sold the World is the book that serious rock music lovers have been waiting for.

    By exploring David Bowie’s individual achievements and breakthroughs one-by-one, Doggett paints a fascinating portrait of the performer who paved the way for a host of fearless contemporary artists, from Radiohead to Lady Gaga.

    Editor's Note

    The stars look very different today…

    This analysis of David Bowie’s most provocative and influential period is an insightful examination of an ever-changing icon, as glamorous and complex as he was inspiring and affecting.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 31, 2012
    ISBN9780062097149
    Unavailable
    Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s
    Author

    Peter Doggett

    Peter Doggett has been writing about rock music and interviewing rock stars for more than thirty years. He is the author of several books, including CSNY, You Never Give Me Your Money, and Electric Shock. He lives in London. Find out more at PeterDoggett.org.

    Read more from Peter Doggett

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    Reviews for Man Who Sold the World

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    • 4/5
      This book is custom made for people like me. I'm a decade too young to have copped David Bowie first time round (still in nappies when Ziggy played his farewell gig at Hammersmith) but discovered the whole back catalog, in one fell swoop, in about 1984 courtesy of K-Tel's The Best Of Bowie cassette, which I still maintain is the best Bowie compilation there is.Thereafter, painstakingly, I acquired every Long Player that Bowie ever released. I learned every word and every chord. Convention wisdom, and I, will tell you the most fertile period in David Bowie's career was the "RCA" period from Space Oddity in 1969 to Scary Monsters in 1980. And that period is what this new book is mostly about.Peter Doggett has done us aficionados the service of biographing that period through the lens of every song Bowie wrote and recorded in it. Lyrics and song composition are analysed and contextualised. It's a smart way to ensure Doggett's subject's history is integrated with its creative output: an important job many biographies fail manifestly to do.That said, it's a fraught one: we all have our own Bowies, and it isn't edifying to encounter a radically different interpretation. Nor is lyrical over-analysis in vogue these days and nor, specifically in Bowie's case, did it ever pay dividends anyway (Not The Nine o'Clock News once lampooned his approach with its "Sing along with David Bowie" feature, whose method was: "rearrange the following words in any order and sing them to any tune in a silly voice and you'll have your very own Bowie classic").And, lastly, the job was comprehensively done anyway in 1986 in the form of Peter and Leni Gillman's masterly "Alias David Bowie", which gently deconstructed and then rethreaded Bowie's material through the lens of a family history of insanity and alienation.Doggett's book is less gentle in its deconstruction and (whether he intends it or not) markedly less flattering: the Bowie that emerges from close analysis is a superficial, opportunist whose great talent is that of reinvention. On Doggett's reading there's no great personal insight to be derived from Bowie's material, his value as a social commentator is limited (much is made of a couple of ill-judged remarks hinting at pseudo fascism dating from the Station to Station era) and much of his material is ill-judged or hastily conceived. Young Americans is given a bath, as is conventional, but so to are Hunky Dory, Diamond Dogs, Station to Station, and poor old Lodger gets an absolute pasting.I was mostly persuaded that Bowie's persona had more substance than form, and I suppose that is really the point: in the final analysis Bowie's legacy hasn't been the material itself so much as the doors it opened: the medium - the form, if you like - being the message - and I imagine this book will appeal to diehard fans and even those relative new-comers fancying immersion therapy as a way to get into the World of David Bowie - which is a world like few others out there.Still, for me Alias David Bowie remains the definitive biography.