Lyrics Series Update: Proposed Bowie and American Politics long-form project

The predecessor of this blog was a song-a-day Bowie tribute I posted for a year on Facebook. My original idea, as it occurred to me immediately after learning of Bowie’s death, was to simply post the name of one of his songs every day over the subsequent year. Someone else suggested that I write something about the songs, and I also discovered that YouTube has just about every song Bowie ever recorded in some format, which I could also post. Well, several months after I finished, my friend Bill Tuman offered to create this web page so I could keep going. I imported the original tributes and took it from there.

I’ve noticed that my entries over time have gotten longer and more in-depth. I’ve added regular series to the blog in part to help me organize and structure my writing. The lyrics series is an example of that— over the past several months I’ve used entires to the series to delve much deeper into some specific lyrics of songs than I did entire songs during that 2016 tribute. I think I’m ready to go even deeper and begin working on a long-form piece around the implications of Bowie’s songs for American politics.

My professional life has nothing to do with music. Broadly, my career has been in New York State government and politics. There are far more knowledgeable and insightful commentators on Bowie’s music, but I think I have something to say on Bowie and politics. Part of the idea is that Bowie himself encouraged fans to bring their own interpretations to his music.

That said, I see three ways Bowie’s music intersected with American politics: The first and most obvious is with his songs that specifically address social and political issues. The second is the way his characters intersected with politics. The third, and for me most interesting, is how political issues can be viewed through the lens of some of his songs, which may or may not have originally had any overt political implications whatsoever.

I’m expecting this project to bring a structural change to this blog in that I expect to draft chapters that I’ll revisit. Instead of writing a static post that will stay on the site in chronological order, I am expecting to revisit and revise the chapters until the larger project is complete. When I do that, I’ll revise the post’s date, not just the content. So, someone visiting the blog in the future and looking back will find some holes.

I’m not expecting this to be a daily project, but rather as a supplement to the slot currently occupies by the Lyrics Series (I’ll count the posts as parts of the Lyrics Series). So expect to see something once a week, which, if you haven’t noticed will usually come on Thursdays.