Bowie and Politics Chapter 2: The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long Haired Men

David Bowie, then named David Jones, first appeared on British television at the age of 17 in 1964, playing the role of an ambiguously-gendered leader of a fictional group. But it wasn’t a musical group, rather it was a political advocacy group — the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long Haired Men.

Bowie (I’ll call him Bowie), made a (brief) series of media appearances beginning with a TV interview conducted by the short-haired, conservatively dressed, middle aged and incredulous Cliff Michelmore. Seemingly in earnest, Bowie explained the threat that inspired his organizing of the group: “we’ve had comments like ‘darling’ and ‘can I carry your handbag’ thrown at us and I think it just had to stop now.” When pressed as to what actions the Society would take if one of its members were fired due to their long hair or denied entry to a bar, Bowie proposed the time-honored tactic of circulating a petition to civil authorities, while one of the other boys suggested organizing protest marches, like the “ban the bomb” movement; to which Bowie added the one-word rallying cry, “Aldermaston!” (Aldermaston is a British town involved in the development of nuclear weapons, and had become the locus of anti-nuke activism). The appearance led to a newspaper interview for Bowie before the self-promotional idea faded and was replaced by other gimmicks leading up to what, on its own might have been considered a novelty song five years later— “Space Oddity.”

It’s easy to read too much into what the teenage Bowie was doing with his television appearance, but the episode foreshadowed several of Bowie’s future strategies, and also the political trends of false outrage, astroturfing advocacy campaigns, and candidates acting like they are playing a part written for television.

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Years later, Bowie explained to radio host Terry Gross on a 2002 episode of her American National Public Radio Show, Fresh Air, that he never bought into “that whole thing about the artistic integrity” projected by singers wearing jeans and a tee-shirt on stage. To that, Gross asked, “see if I got this straight…wearing a T-shirt and jeans seemed phony to you, but wearing mascara and eye makeup seemed right?” Bowie clarified, “I didn’t say that wearing – a glamorization of the rock artist was any truer than the other thing… They’re both – it’s all artifice.”

Bowie telegraphed this stance all the way back on the first television appearance. Then, the artifice was not artistic, but political. Bowie was trying to be shocking to get attention, but he hadn’t figured out what he wanted to do with his life yet. It’s not unimaginable to think that he could have been buoyed (pun intended) by his media exposure and translated the Long-Haired Men Society into some sort of candidacy. In subsequent years, more than one political candidate would do exactly that.

Think, for instance, of Donald Trump’s leading role in the so-called “birtherism” movement questioning the citizenship of President Barack Obama. Much like Bowie’s safety concerns on behalf of long-haired men, Trump’s expressed concerns about the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate were manufactured. Unstated were a host of deeper societal insecurities. In the case of birtherism, Trump’s ostensible musing about whether America’s first black president met the Constitutional requirement of being born in the country in order to hold the office thinly disguised his appeal to racial prejudice.

It is far from clear to me that the 17-year-old Bowie knew exactly what he was doing, but even if he had stumbled upon it, Bowie broached a formula that would make him a star and cultural influence. As signaled by his stated offense associated with wearing long hair, Bowie recognized that hair length was a stand-in for homosexuality. Being called “darling” was enough of an offense to require organized resistance, as if the threat was on equal footing with nuclear annihilation. Later in the interview, Michelmore had an exchange with one of Bowie’s confederates that might have stuck in the future star’s mind. The interviewer asked by way of statement, “A lot of people can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman can they, if you’ve got your hair that long?” One of the long-haired men in the group responded, “Well, that’s ridiculous. If the stages got to the point where you can’t tell either sex because of a few inches of hair, I think that’s a rather poor showing.”

Bowie might not have thought it was ridiculous. A decade later he’d write, “Rebel Rebel,” containing the memorable lines, “You’ve got your mother in a whirl; she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.” Twenty years after that, Bowie would be even more overt in the song, “Hallo Spaceboy,” in asking, “Do you like girls or boys? It’s confusing these days.”

But in 1964, Bowie merely evoked the specter of homosexuality, years before directly embracing the threat. Trump would do much the same as his racist appeals would become more overt over time.

Unconsciously or not, Bowie was making up an issue to appeal to grievance politics. In making common cause with “thousands” of long-haired men who felt under threat, he was also himself threatening the established social order. Michelmore was the perfect, if unwitting foil. A stodgy older man who clearly didn’t take Bowie seriously, stood in for his entire generation against whom the long-haired teenagers were rebelling against. The Who more successfully, but also more seriously made the same appeal with their song, “My Generation,” released a year later, which opens with the line, “people try to put us down” articled a few lines before the conclusion, “hope I die before I get old” (thankfully, Roger Daltrey did not get his wish).

Much as Trump would perpetuate the cycle of threat and counter threat, Bowie was provoking the Michelmores of his world while claiming to be under siege, without acknowledging the irony that he was wearing long hair in the first place to distance himself from the older generation.

Bowie was engaged in tribalism. Not coincidently, the band of hippies that were the focus of the musical Hair, the origins of which began the same year as Bowie’s television appearance, were called the tribe. Hair was loosely about the social order and more specifically about the older generation’s imposition of the Vietnam War on the younger generation. Far from being about peace and love, Hair was about us versus them.

I am not suggesting that there is a direct line between David Bowie’s obscure media appearances on behalf of his fictional advocacy group and Donald Trump, Hair or even the Who. He did not create political artifice. What I am pointing to is that Bowie had struck on a political tactic that he would adapt for artistic purposes. But the reason the tactic worked at all is because it allowed for the political actor, or later, the artist, to address issues without explicitly labeling them. Bowie was speaking in a kind of code, that in the broadest terms was a rallying cry for solidarity to the in-group, but was a threatening red-flag for the out-group.

There’s obvious commercial utility in this tactic. Outrage by the older generation only served to unify Bowie’s audience all the more. The same is true when Trump shows his base that he “owns the libs,” while provoking those selfsame “libs” to react, thus reinforcing his message. At stake is power—societal power. The power to determine who gets jobs or goes into bars. Even the power of potential physical and sexual violence. Am I talking about the stakes Trump is addressing, or that Bowie was addressing in 1964? The answer is both. In the end, Bowie abandoned his political movement before seriously attempting to turn it into anything, but he did not abandon the use of role playing in a fictional scenario in order to address the types of fundamental issues of how people relate to one another that usually reside in the world of politics. Indeed, even in Bowie’s artistic hands, they still resided in the world of politics. As he perhaps most clearly expressed in his 1980 song, “Fashion” for Bowie, politics and art, or even more broadly, politics and personal expression were inseparable. “Fashion, turn to the left! Fashion, turn to the right!”

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Bowie’s approach was different than that of the Who or creators of Hair, much as Trump’s is different than, say, Ronald Regan’s. Say, hypothetically that Roger Daltrey’s and Pete Townsend’s public personas were, to some extent, characters. Let’s say that at home, they are quite different people than they are on stage. Perhaps we all play a role in different circumstances. Bowie, however, not only would cycle through roles like members of the Who cycle through costumes (while the basic public version of that band’s members has pretty much been the same for 60+ years), but for Bowie, the artifice of it all is part of the point. Inspired in part by artistic movements like Dada and Pop Art, Bowie by pretending to be something he isn’t, but demanding the suspension of disbelief, he is exposing societal hypocrisy. Much as Marcel Duchamp declared that a urinal was a piece of art, which he titled, “Fountain,” Bowie was inviting his audience to wear their own hair long (later, wear their own makeup) and join the crowd, while at the same time making fun of them for being followers. By often burying political messages in catchy, seemingly lighthearted pop songs, or in obscure lyrics open to multiple interpretations, Bowie invited his most dedicated audience to consider their subconscious and deeply ingrained assumptions about relating to the rest of the world. The Who proclaims, “won’t get fooled again,” while Bowie leaves breadcrumbs for us to arrive at that conclusion on our own. Or not.

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Bowie was also up to something different than acting within the context of a play or movie. Actors invite their audience to suspend disbelief for at most a few hours. After the play is over, not even the most dedicated method actor expects the audience not to distinguish between actor and character. The audience might have something to think about, but the interactive experience ends when the credits roll. That’s not the case with Bowie’s type of acting. Just as his interview didn’t end with Bowie whipping off a wig and taking a bow (though he’d essentially do that in his 1979 music video for “Boys Keep Swinging”), Bowie would often stay in character for years. He would blur the line between what we, the audience, were supposed to think was real and what wasn’t. Are we listening to Ziggy playing guitar, or Bowie, or actually, is that Mick Ronson? Bowie would even have his fans believe that he struggled with making the distinction himself, and perhaps he did.

Bowie would compare rock stardom with political leadership and divine worship. “We are the gods,” Bowie said of himself and his fellow rock stars to photographer Mick Rock. He was talking about the relationship between rock star and worshipful fan. For Bowie, it was an immersive experience.

The comparison to Trump’s approach to politics is that Trump does the same thing. He acts as if he’s acting, but all the time. He demands a continued, uninterrupted suspension of disbelief. Just as Bowie as a fictional character made real music, the character of Donald Trump makes policies and takes actions that have real-world consequences. Bowie based his album, Diamond Dogs, in part on Orwell’s 1984, in which the rebellious Winston Smith would not be truly broken, not truly accepted back into the mainstream of society under the watchful gaze of Big Brother, until he truly believed that 1+1=3. Trump demands the same.

So did Bowie, but here Bowie and Trump diverge. Much as with Warhol, who Bowie admired (and later portrayed in the movie Basquiat), Bowie had an appreciation for irony. He was at once giving his audience what they want and shaming them for wanting it. But Bowie operated on a deeper level, because that’s not all he gave his audience. Exploring Bowie’s meaning was not so much like unpeeling an onion as taking a circular journey. Instead of layers getting to a core meaning, the process of contemplating Bowie inevitably leads to the starting point—what was this about, again?

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Bowie, like Trump, asked his audience to reside in his fictious world. This is the main difference between Bowie and most other rock stars. In an essay published in The New Yorker shortly after Bowie’s death, Simon Critchley wrote, “The ironic self-awareness of the artist and their audience can only be that of their inauthenticity, repeated at increasingly conscious levels…Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in which we live and confront us with the reality of illusion.”

In this respect, Critchley was describing Bowie less like an actor, politician or even conventional rock star, but more like a professional wrestler.

French theorist Roland Barthes wrote, in his 1957 essay, “The World of Wrestling,” that a professional wrestling match is like a kind of pantomime in which archetypical characters project meanings through their appearance, reactions to one another, behaviors and “grandiloquence.” Barthes writes, “wrestling is a sum of
spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result” and that “the different strata of meaning throw light on each other,” and elsewhere, “It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.”

Barthe’s fuller description of wrestling, which serves, in his view as a more intelligible drama about justice than exists in the “real world,” seems on the surface a much better explanation for what Trump is doing than Bowie— in wrestling, as in MAGA world, the “crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken for the sake of [inflicting] a deserved punishment.” Trump, after all, is a genuine inductee in the WWE Hall of Fame. Wrestlers perform a precisely expected choreography in order to reassure the audience that the world operates as it should.

But this comes closer to Bowie’s approach than he might have conceded in life. Much as wrestlers frequently change their personae, so too did Bowie. In so doing, he’d tap into, or create a new architype and behave accordingly. Although he prided himself on unpredictability, this too became an expectation about Bowie. And the unpredictability came between character shifts, not while Bowie was in character. Ziggy always acted like Ziggy. The avuncular, accessible friendly venison of Bowie of the early 2000s did not make common cause with fascists as did the Thin White Duke, nor did his super-cool marrying man of the early 90s appear stoned on talk shows as did his “plastic soul” gouster character of 1975.

Bowie’s characters were based on something that was already out there. Bowie picked up on societal trends and used his characters and music to comment on those trends. Though with hundreds of songs to his credit, Bowie wrote and sang about all manner of topics, most of his work was not about romantic love or other features of typical pop songs.
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While Bowie’s attachment to artifice did not inspire Donald Trump, much as Bowie’s presentation was different than that of most other rock stars, Trump shared with Bowie an immersive embrace of a prescribed alternate reality unlike any other major politician. Trump was not simply acting like a pollical architype. That’s pretty standard. Nor was he transferring his skills as an entertainer to political reality, as did Ronald Reagan or, for that matter, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump calls on his followers not simply to accept his character, but to live in the fictious world in which his character reigns supreme.

Much like professional wrestlers, Trump plays according to type and invites his supporters to see everything with which he interacts as playing their expected roles, too. He not only acts according to a script he writes in his own head, but he plays on stereotypes to signal what’s supposed to happen next. Trump’s overall purpose is to simplify a complex world and assure members of his tribe that (their version of) good will triumph over bad, just like it’s supposed to go. Trump cares not for the specifics of policy or the details of laws, but rather that the world works according to a set of rules along the lines of a pro wrestling storyline. Here again, Bowie and Trump diverge.

Bowie also created his own characters based on his reading of societal trends. His characters would act with a degree of predictability, but his message, as expressed in his music, would challenge conventional expectations. Rather than reassure his audience that the universe functioned according to a predictable order, Bowie acknowledged the chaos of reality. Many of Bowie’s recurring themes returned to the role of the individual amidst an often-oppressive society, but unlike Trump, Bowie did not offer himself as a messiah to lead the way. Even his most messianic character, specifically Ziggy Stardust, was ultimately killed by his own fans, as the somewhat nonlinear story went. Rather than putting the idea of a strong man on a pedestal, Bowie warned against them. Whole albums seemed to predict a Trump-like figure and warn against his ascendence. But far from providing easy answers, Bowie’s vision for the social order left it to his audience to work out solutions.

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There’s one more thing worth mentioning about the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Against Long Haired Men.” At one point, the stodgy interviewer asked if the boys were simply wearing their hair long because of… the Rolling Stones. They responded in unison, with feigned indignation’’ “no, no!” That said, I stick by my assessment that Allen Bloom saw Mick Jagger as a threat only after Jagger was influenced by Bowie. If long hair on its own raised the subtle threat of homosexuality, it took Bowie’s far more overt expressions in the early 1970s for Jagger to hint that the suspicions of the Cliff Michelmores and Allen Blooms of the world might have been based on something after all. But in 1964, Jagger, Bowie and all the other long-haired men were simply sending a visual signal that they were similar to one another but different than Michelmore and his ilk. It didn’t quite work for Bowie. He wasn’t going to be an ersatz movement leader. But he had a seed of an idea, and figured he could take on a different type of role and make it all worthwhile as a rock ‘n roll star…

Stay tuned for chapter 3 next week. Bowie and Politics is intended to be a long-form piece under the umbrella of the Lyrics Series.