David Bowie’s Spirit and Symbolic Power: His Words on Creativity and Inspiration
David Bowie, photograph by Eric Stephen Jacobs, 1975.
In late 1990s, Bowie gave a long interview on the spirit of creative processes, his philosophies, and the symbolic power of his art, whether visual or sonic. It appeared alongside kindred interviews with six other artists in a 1997 film called Inspirations, directed by Michael Apted. One part of Bowie’s interview and related musical footage keeps playing through my mind, where Bowie sang in rhythmic repetition:
“Dead men don’t talk /
Dead men don’t talk /
Dead men don’t talk /
But they do /
Tell the truth.”
These lines, I found afterward, were recorded in a demo during the sessions for Bowie’s 1997 Earthling album, in Philip Glass’ The Looking Glass Studios in New York City.
These particular lines were assembled, in part, from The Verbasizer, a software program Bowie had cocreated with a friend in the ‘90s. Well before the era of AI text-generation, Bowie summoned this computer technology to auto-generate random assortments of words, which would give birth to new visions, understandings, and expressions from his spirit or subconscious. The Verbasizer machine would help to unlock parts of his knowing or bring to the surface of his consciousness that which he didn’t know he knew.
“It’s almost like a technological dream, in a way. It creates the images from a dreamscape without having to go through the boredom of going to sleep all night or get stoned out of your head,” Bowie explained. “And it will give me access to areas that I wouldn’t be thinking about otherwise during the day, because it will prompt feelings and ideas that, in the natural course of events, I probably would’ve skirted around or just not been involved in.”
In many ways, this Verbasizer machine seemed to function in a way that was analogous to his long-running “cut-up” practice for writing lyrics and other things, a technique of cutting words out of physical writings and randomly arranging them to see what appeared and what the assemblage may have revealed. Bowie shared a love for this verbal-visual bricolage tactic with the great beat-progenitor writer and artist William S. Burroughs, and the two briefly touched on it in a powerful conversation published in Rolling Stone in 1974. (The piece, “Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman: William Burroughs Interviews David Bowie,” by Craig Copetas, is available here.)
In this 1997 film, Bowie explained that The Verbisizer machine threw things together in a “kaleidoscopic way,” helping him to gain new phrasing, sequencing, and reflecting.
Later, he spoke to the essence of art for him:
“I guess, it’s all about communication in some ways. How do you communicate those deeper-most feelings that are probably fairly hard to articulate?”
At one point, the interviewer presumably asked Bowie about his greatest influence, as he replied:
“I honestly can’t say that there’s been one person, or one set of values, or one artistic movement. I’ve been so eclectic all my life. I’ve been admiring of so many different people and so many different things that they’ve done that,” Bowie said. “I feel that I owe so many people for the way that I think and do things. I guess anybody who has had the integrity to, kind of, always work outside of the system has always appealed to me.”
At this point in the ‘90s, Bowie had been sober for several years. He shared that one result was that he rose like clockwork each day at 6 a.m., no matter what time he fell to sleep the night before. These hours of light granted him a different state and sensibility than when he was mostly awake in the night.
“I think, I suppose, since I stopped doing drugs and drinking, I think, probably, I really prize getting up early in the morning, which is something that happens,” Bowie said, laughing. “I enjoy the fact of seeing the light come up with me, and then utilizing the daylight and what it brings and the kind of message that it brings. It’s a different message from when you’re living in twilight hours and things get very symbolic, representationally. If you live through the twilight hours and the early hours of the morning, there’s some kind of – there’s a shadow to your life, all of the time. Psychologically, you’re in the dark, as well as physically in the dark. There’s something that find very uplifting and optimistic and creative about working and being very much in the daylight.”
Bowie also noted how, if he felt stuck in his music, he would turn to paint to try to find the way forward.
“If I’ve found myself in a sort of cul-de-sac in the music, I break down the problem by actually painting it. I try and visualize what the problem was, a sense that these textures were grating against each other in a way that wasn’t admirable, and I try and visualize those textures and paint them, and then find out what was wrong. And then, when I solve that problem, I take it back into the studio. I’ve never really compartmentalized things. Everything for me is just this flux of doing stuff. Some of it’s music, and some of it’s visual. And the two have always been very entwined.”
As he engaged with these sensorial-representational conversions, he sought not to overcomplicate ideas. He said this was always a task, not to take something too far and go overboard, noting that Francis Bacon, the Irish-born British figurative painter, regularly struggled with this.
Bowie also shared advice about not playing for fashion with the masses or not performing artistic work for others.
“Never play to the gallery. I learned that much too late. Never work for other people in what you do,” Bowie said. “Always remember that the reason that you started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that, if you could manifest it in some way, then you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society. And I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations. I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that.”
Bowie stressed the importance of moving to the edge, beyond the comfort of working within boundaries that feel known and familiar.
“The other thing I would say is: if you feel safe in the area you’re working in, then you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t quite feel that your feet are touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
He shared his desire to feel that his art, especially his music, had helped to shift things in the broader tapestries of art.
“I would love to feel that what I did actually changed the fabric of music. I think that I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve actually seen it happen within my lifetime. I’ve seen modern music change so dramatically over the last 25 years, and I’ve got a fairly shrewd idea of how much, say, myself and Brian Eno had to do with changing aspects of it, and I’m sure many people from my generation,” Bowie said. “Because it’s such a fast event-horizon in popular music, many of us have been able to see the changes that we’ve made, from the [Rolling] Stones to — name anybody that you would want to, really. And so that’s pretty satisfying, you know, because we’ve seen it happen.”
This selection of Bowie clips from the film concludes a bit mysteriously, with two figures in black dancing on a spartan black floor. One is the dancer Louise Lecavalier, who is also featured in the film. She had performed on tour with Bowie and had appeared in his video for “Fame 90.” It is as though she were collaboratively dancing her conversation forth, beyond the realm of mere words.
At the end of the beautiful, expressive, wordless dance, a line from poet Allen Ginsburg appears over the dancers, alongside a sound of exhalation.
“I write poetry because the English word inspiration comes from Latin spiritus, breath, I want to breathe freely.” — Allen Ginsberg, “Improvisation in Beijing” (1990)
About the Author
Lauren Coyle Rosen is a cultural anthropologist, artist, and author who focuses on the roles of spirituality and creative inspiration in art, music, and culture. She is the author of The Spirit of Ani (with Ani DiFranco, forthcoming), Hannibal Lokumbe (with Hannibal Lokumbe, Columbia University Press, 2024), Law in Light (University of California Press, 2024), and Fires of Gold (University of California Press, 2020), as well as eight volumes of poetry. Coyle Rosen is currently a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. She was a cultural anthropology professor at Princeton University, where she received the President’s Award in Distinguished Teaching. She lives in Washington, DC, and in Philadelphia with her husband, Jeffrey Rosen. She has a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.
