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Music
Jul 01, 2016, 06:59AM

Why They Suck: David Bowie

“Space Oddity” is the worst pop song ever.

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The New York Times obit said David Bowie “transcended music, art, and fashion.” He certainly transcended music. You can see this because people really love his music, in spite of how it sounds.

"Space Oddity," I'll admit, is a startling achievement. It doesn't have a single redeeming feature. It's tuneless: really, try humming or whistling it and you'll see what I mean. The words are surreal and portentous, yet non-signifying. As every rational person is constrained to agree, it’s the worst song in the history of pop music by a good long way.

That sets the tone for the whole oeuvre. For Bowie, the music was an afterthought, an accessory, or just some more make-up. The lyrics, like the values, were empty. The tunes were boring or derivative. The effect of his soulless anti-rock on pop music was baleful. The fashion statements were usually just ridiculous. But he somehow exuded cultural something-or-other, which was enough. So celebrate him as a liberating cultural figure if you absolutely must, but don't play the records.

One important lesson we can draw from Bowie, and from the 1970s in general: cocaine and promiscuity—as wonderful as they are—won't save you or make you an artist. The man would be a vague yet hilarious generational memory today if he didn't look like that and fill het women with desire.

It's as though straight guys greeted Marilyn Monroe singing "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" as the greatest pop song ever. Now just think how great the music would’ve been if Marilyn started making out with Jane Russell right there! It gives me the courage to be myself. Your sheer erotic response is not a reliable aesthetic guide, sweetie, or else Justin Bieber is a genius. Well, he's better than Bowie, anyway.

Bowie was supposedly a great gender liberator, but many people were doing gender and personae in the 70s: Alice Cooper, for example, who actually rocked, or the Village People, who were so much more fun on gender and had so many better songs, or Sylvester, who was actually gay and could really sing. The only thing Bowie had that they didn't was that he looked like a model.

If you thought that this was the direction that rock music should take at that moment—if you wanted this kind of rococo pseudo-opera to be what was coming out of the radio, you were on the wrong side. Bowie was trying to kill rock 'n’ roll entirely. He's connected to Jagger on one end and punk on the other, but when you get down to it, his aesthetic is the opposite of the Rolling Stones' or the Ramones'.  The man was no Iggy Pop.

Through an interminable career, David Bowie built a magnificent palace of suck in which every single detail sucks royally, but in which the whole sucks exponentially more than any of the constituent parts.

Discussion
  • 7-1-2016: The day I found out, in Splice Today, that the Village People have so many better songs than David Bowie.

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  • "Why They Suck: Bowie, Hawking, Dylan." Do you like anything?

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  • Dumbest piece of click-bait I've ever wasted my time on. This piece should have been saved for April 1

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  • We live in a media world of click-bait. In fact, I know Crispin, who wrote for Baltimore CP and NYPress, and not only is he a very good guy, but I concur with a lot of his taste in music. Don't agree with his slam of Bowie, and of course he's being provocative, but genuinely doesn't like him. I can't stand Led Zeppelin, for example, which would infuriate fans, and can't even listen to Pavement.

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  • I'm humming Space Oddity right now and the thing has like 8 hooks. Dunno what you're smoking, Crispin. Good piece, though. Perhaps Prince next?

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  • Gandhi, I hope.

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  • It is fine to not like a band, (personally, I think Led Zep is one of the greats), but to suggest or state that Bowie has no redeeming feature is just plain absurd and negates any other thought expressed in this particular piece. P.S. I wasn't attacking Crispin, just this intellectually lazy article that he wrote.

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  • Crispin must have been floating in a tin can and obviously has missed all the times that Bowie music has been made a part of culturally relevant movie soundtracks, tv and radio commercials etc. He ignores the artists who pay homage to Bowie as a key influence and any number of other reasons why Bowie was ahead of his times and the curve when it came to performance art. His influence on the MTV world, concert themes etc continues to manifest itself to this day. Apparently Crispin he thinks must be smarter and better informed to decide what is good bad, outstanding or transcendent about music than just about everyone else. I have decided that Crispin must be have achieved the ripe age of 12 or 13 or so and along with a few big boy words thought he would write something that would be shocking and ... well frankly, I just don't know how to categorize this lunacy. Bieber better than Bowie????? This Crispin is no Lester Bangs.

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  • The author is a 50-something career failure who is using his newfound unemployment to publicly express his jealous resentment of those who have enjoyed great success in life. That's all these rants are, and I think it's kind of pathetic that the editors here are indulging his hyperbolic nonsense and desperate attempts to validate himself.

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  • It speaks volumes about the present state of things that I can troll the Chosen People and get no comments and this moron sets the house on fire trolling vintage music fans. The Jews must be losing their grip.

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  • Why is it good?

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  • If this keeps up, somebody's gonna write, "Why Crispin Sartwell Sucks." I can feel it.

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  • You've obviously got an axe to grind with Crispin Sartwell, which you ought to disclose. He's a fine writer.

  • No Russ, I have no axe to grind with Crispin nor anything to disclose.You've misunderstood my intent. Everyone's free to express an opinion. My comment was just a reaction to all these negative reactions, not a declaration of my opinion that Crispin sucks or that he's not a good writer. Just seems that it would be inevitable that when a guy shoots everyone's sacred cows over and over that someone will want to do it to him. That's the normal human reaction, and that's what I was trying to say.

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  • Alan, on the other hand, called Crispin a moron,but you didn't react to that at all for some reason.

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  • That wasn't directed at you. It was for Lacey.

  • As Rick Perry would say, oops.Well don't I feel like an idiot now! Really couldn't understand why you were giving it to me like that, and now it's clear.

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  • Consider myself a huge Bowie fan and can appreciate the article. I think the Starman would have gotten a kick out of it. If you're looking for bad Bowie songs, there are plenty to choose from, especially post 1983. Entire albums, actually- even David admits that. Of course condemning those artistic pieces wouldn't have nearly the same impact as eviscerating a venerable classic. While I give kudos for Crispin's perspective on DB, I don't really believe he or anyone else really thinks Space Oddity is worse than some of Bowie's late 80s crap. That's where Crispin loses credibility. I mean Never Let Me Down, or Loving The Alien? Egads! The great thing about sentient beings is that we grow and change. I like stuff now I didn't used to. So there is always hope people may come to admire what they previously disliked. Either way DB is somewhere smiling and laughing about the whole thing.

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  • Anyway, I'll take Space Oddity over 98% of the overproduced, formulaic, boring "hit" music on the radio today.

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  • I agree that Lacey's comment is totally unfair, not to mention cowardly, given that it was done anonymously.I think Crispin has a lot of accomplishments in life, for what it's worth.

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  • Sorry, Russ, I have no axe to grind. I don't even know him, but it's not that hard to figure him out just by Googling his name. He splattered his life story all over the internet and his blog, and there is obvious bitterness in it. And...really? Writing a column for which the premise is "pick some super-famous people and just say they suck as many times as you can in 500 words" is fine writing? OK.

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  • LOL, you're not anonymous?

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  • Easy pardner, you're hitting that button too hard. No, I'm not anonymous.

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  • that's really true about my career failure, bitterness, etc. i do love as big as i hate, though.

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  • Me too.

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  • I'm a huge Bowie fan, and I'm not particularly fond of Space Oddity. As Amy says above, there are entire Bowie albums that are not even worth a listen (i.e. Never Let Me Down -- he literally had to bring Peter Frampton on the tour to make the material less shit). However some of the inferences in the article seem to be focused solely on a small aspect of his career. I don't really consider any of the stuff off of Lodger to be boring or tuneless, or any of his 90's stuff. Not really sure how much of Bowie Crispin has listened to, but I can definitely understand the frustration of not liking someone or something that everyone else seems to love, and that's coming through to me more than everything else, so I commend the writing for that. The only thing that sits poorly with me for this article is that it still seems a little too soon to shit all over the recently deceased, however, I think David Bowie would find this article highly amusing, to be honest.

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  • The music does not have anything to do with David Bowie you idiot. The music is a representation of the character that it came from. No one really knew much about David Bowie, because he was never himself. He was always a character and the characters were not just for show. He was always in that character. He became it. It became him. The music your talking about is not written by Bowie so much as the personality that he had taken on at that point in life. Like space oddity. You mention how it's tuneless and surreal. Although not at all a cohesive explanation of why a song is bad, but the song is written that way because of the character/personality who wrote it. That's what was so good about his music. It all varied based on the character it came from and the stage that character was in at that point in his life. You should really understand at least a small bit about a topic if you want to come across as intelligent on it.

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  • Crispin is piece of crap. Bowie's music is fun and make people feel good, of course you don't feel that way because you are talking without thinking of what fans love about his music.

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