Dealing with the Problematic and Distasteful Histories of Revered Rock Stars

Let’s be clear: David Bowie did some awful, distasteful things in his career, especially back in the 1970s. How can we reconcile that with our admiration for his work. Here’s an excellent article when encountering the problematic histories of famous people like Bowie.

My feelings about the past week of grieving celebrities and bickering with fellow social-justice-warrior-y types about how to grieve over celebrities were summed up pretty well by a tweet from one of my Twitter friends: “A quick Google and a thorough check of Your Fave Is Problematic indicate that it’s safe to publicly mournAlan Rickman.”

But treating a legacy as something to be weighed on a binary scale–as though you have to add up all of a person’s sins and, if they surpass a certain threshold, they’reinstantly moved from the category of “hero” to “villain”–doesn’t help anybody.

Take David Bowie. Although I didn’t connect to his music the way many of my peers did, it’s impossible to listen to his music and not hear his genius. And it wasn’t just his talent people fell in love with, but what he stood for–that his public image and his music carved out a space for queer sexuality and unconventional performance of gender, that his bold, no-shits-given stage presence, his absolute unshakeable confidence and comfort in whatever bizarre identity he was wearing at the time gave other people the courage to feel comfortable in their own skin.

And then there’s the fact that one of those personae was a committed Nazi who collected Nazi paraphernalia and praised Hitler. And then there’s the fact that, whatever persona he was in, he fucked a lot of groupies when he was a younger man, including underage groupies, including a girl named Lori Mattix at the age of 15.

The thing that makes both of these stories uncomfortable is that they’re not really “sins” or “gaffes” or “peccadilloes” that stand at odds with the rest of the narrative of Bowie’s life. They’re entirely consonant with what people loved about him, or at least people at the time thought they were. The same caution-to-the-wind total commitment to becoming an outré boundary-crossing character–the same utter defiance of social convention–that created Ziggy Stardust created the Thin White Duke.

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