How did Bowie address fascism in his lyrics? Part 3: To be insulted by these fascists…

I have been writing a series of posts inspired by reading Daniel Rachel’s excellent book, This Ain’t Rock ‘N’ Roll: Pop Music, The Swastika and the Third Reich, and then interviewing Rachel. This is the third and probably final installment focused on Bowie’s treatment of the topic in his lyrics.

In a sense, I feel like much of what I want to write was already written by Adam Steiner in his book, which is also excellent, Silhouettes and Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). I’m not going to attempt to recap Adam’s entire book, but I will say that I agree that Scary Monsters, my favorite album, seems almost like a direct response to critics who accused Bowie of being a Nazi sympathizer:

“From the beginning of Scary Monsters, Bowie seemed determined to unequivocally set the record straight and engage his critics head-on; with “It’s No Game (No. 1),” he screamed against the degradation of being insulted “by these fascists.” In his yells, Bowie put distance between himself and the far-right movement, when the real issue was actually the hard-left antifascists who attacked him as a racist class traitor. In this line, Bowie comes lashing out at dogma in all its forms…”

Steiner goes on to relay some of the same incidents addressed by Rachel, before deviating from a shared set of facts to make a different set of points. Steiner’s book has influenced how I think about Scary Monsters, but from here I will offer my own views unless otherwise noted.

To some extent, a visitor to Scary Monsters looking for a renunciation of Bowie’s own past statements will come up empty. Further, the album does nothing to place the Nazis in actual historic context. The word “Nazi” does not appear on the album, although the word “fascist” does two and a half times. Where the word appears is instructive — both in the opening and closing versions of “It’s No Game,” as previously indicated by the Steiner quote, in part in “Fashion.” Again to quote from Steiner:

Bowie teases “‘fascism’ with his stuttered ‘fa-fa-fa’ lines. In interviews, Bowie rejected the idea that “Fashion” was a direct commentary on the nature of political allegiances, but beyond “It’s No Game (No. 1),” it seems to offer a conscious rejection of the authoritarian politics pressed on the masses and implicitly the charges made against him.”

Scary Monsters is not a concept album, but the thread that links its songs suggests what about fa-fa-fa-fascism really bothers Bowie. In song after song, the protagonist is forced into either conformity or a kind of behavior or even thought against his will. In “Ashes to Ashes,” it’s drug addiction, in “Fashion,” it’s the fashion industry, in “Teenage Wildlife,” it’s the music industry, “Kingdom Come,” a cover, is actually about forced labor in a prison (or concentration camp). The most overt song about political oppression is “Scream Like a Baby,” in which “they came down on the faggots” and caused the narrator to hide because he “wouldn’t buy no merchandise” or “go to war” and he “mixed with other colors.” This sounds like a version of Bowie that Bowie was trying to project. In the end, the protagonist, forced into conformity, is “learning to be a part of societ…societ…”

Like the “fa-fa-fa” on “Fashion,” or the “brah-brah-brah” following the end of “Big Brother” on Diamond Dogs, Bowie uses the broken word in “Scream” to suggest a forced mental break, a zombification imposed on the individual from the group. To the extent that Bowie might have been trying to “show what could happen” with his own adoption of fascist techniques, it is this— getting a crowd to surrender its agency to the charismatic figure, and to get its individual members to surrender their agency to the crowd.

This had been Bowie’s larger project with his audience at least from “Cygnet Committee” (1969) through this point in 1980. His commentary on fascism had less to do with history and more to do what he was experiencing with his own fans. Bowie had covered some of this ground on Diamond Dogs, but muddied the waters with his foray as the Duke. Scary Monsters strips away the 1984 veneer and in many respects comes off as more personal. “Teenage Wildlife,” for instance, is one of two songs, along with the much earlier “Can’t Help Thinking About Me,” (three if you count his 2003 cover of “Cactus”) in which Bowie references himself:

“…you’ll take me aside and say
‘Well, David, what shall I do? They wait for me in the hallway’
I’ll say ‘don’t ask me, I don’t know any hallways’
But they move in numbers and they’ve got me in a corner
I feel like a group of one, no no they can’t do this to me
I’m not some piece of teenage wildlife…

This sequence, while funny in a way, also echoes the 1984 inspired “We Are The Dead”:

“…I hear them on the stairs
Because of all we’ve seen
Because of all we’ve said
we are the dead…”

The protagonist is cornered, aware of being descended upon on by a faceless, unnamed “them.” Though Bowie did not write the script for The Man Who Fell to Earth, he acted out this dark fantasy in that movie.

What Rachel might say is that all this is removed from the actual, historical record of atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. Bowie had gone beyond evoking dystopian fiction (which he primarily did) and spoke in interviews about Adolf Hitler. And even though he distanced himself from his own comments, he didn’t give a full and convincing accounting of what that was all about.

That said, he did attempt to explain himself on several occasions, at one point saying, “The idea that it was about putting Jews in concentration camps and the complete oppression of different races completely evaded my extraordinarily fucked up nature at that particular time.” I mention this particular explanation because it is inaccurate to suggest that Bowie was always vague about why the Nazis are appalling in the first place, or that, as apparently many in the Rock Against Racism movement as depicted by Rachel did, depicted Nazis simply as racists and not antisemites.

Another explanation worth quoting at length has to do with Scary Monsters (the quote below comes from Nicholas Pegg’s Complete David Bowie):

“As early as 1976, Bowie began disavowing his allegedly pro-fascist comments and said that he was misunderstood. In an interview that year in the Daily Express, he explained that while performing in his various characters, ‘I’m Pierrot. I’m Everyman. What I’m doing is theatre, and only theatre … What you see on stage isn’t sinister. It’s pure clown. I’m using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time on it. The white face, the baggy pants – they’re Pierrot, the eternal clown putting over the great sadness.’ In 1977 (after retiring the Duke), Bowie stated that ‘I have made my two or three glib, theatrical observations on English society and the only thing I can now counter with is to state that I am not a fascist’.

This Pierrot explanation frankly seemed to have more meaning to Bowie than it does to me, but if that’s how he thought of what he was doing, it would neither be the first or last time. Bowie appeared as a Pierrot-type as early as 1968 in Lindsay Kemp’s mime production Pierrot in Turquoise. That’s also how he presented himself on the cover and in promotional material for Scary Monsters, as well as in the video for its best-known single, “Ashes to Ashes.”

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David Bowie’s response to his own evocation of Hitler and Nazis might not have been the response that “we” might have wanted, but he responded on his own terms. He was as clear as could have been expected to both reject Nazism and specifically repudiate the extremist British political movement— the National Front— that attempted to claim him as one of their own. He did that with his subsequent public statements. His lyrics did something else. The songs on Scary Monsters do not function as an apology, but rather as a broadside against the mechanisms and effects associated with fascism. Bowie was not a politician and did not attempt to present programmatic solutions, but he artistically articulated a set of problems as he saw them.

He would continue to do so after Scary Monsters. The frequency with which Bowie’s subsequent songs addressed real-world social issues increased (actually starting with Bowie’s previous album, Lodger). None of his songs can be read to align with a right-wing, let alone fascist outlook, and some returned to the theme of attacking fascism. Bowie was often at his best as a songwriter when he was at his most impressionistic. Tin Machine’s “Under the God” (1989) leaves little room for interpretation. It is the most unambiguously anti-fascist song in Bowie’s entire catalogue, though in my personal opinion it is ham-fisted and not a great piece of music. On the other hand, “If You Can See Me” (2013) seems every bit as anti-fascist, but it leaves much room for interpretation (and I like it much more as a song).

Bowie’s tendency to write ambiguous songs makes it difficult to identify every one that addressed a social or political issue, but for the present purpose there is no need. At this point I feel comfortable that I’ve made the point, that Bowie’s lyrics do not advocate Nazism or fascism more broadly, and in fact do quite the opposite. Without the context of Bowie’s in-character public statements, and without stories about his interest in Nazism, there’s nothing in his songs that can reasonably be heard as supporting, glamorizing or even minimizing Nazis.

So, for the moment at least, I’m done with the lyrics…

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An earlier version of this post teased a post to follow that had to do with stories about Bowie’s interest in Nazism. Indeed, I drafted such a post but I’ve decided not to publish it, at least for now. As Bowie might have said, its time to move on…