While the 70s stars were overtly sexual, it finally caught up with them in the 80s when we learned about AIDS -- sex and drugs could kill. People even one year older than me had very different experience than Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No."
I still remember my first non-Florence Eisman swimming suit, a shiny bronze leotard with a matching wrap skirt to dance by the pool when the practice of blaring music from outdoor speakers began. We never wondered that we were diverted to TV screens and video cameras, sporting jazz hands, modern art, indoor sunglasses, punk rock clothes, spiky hairdos and lip-sync. There were fewer garage bands in my age group. We didn't realize how much less sexy we looked. We were trying to be cool.
After a decade of impassioned 70s love songs, Bowie entered the scene with lyrics like "Don't believe in modern love"... "God and man"..."church on time"...We didn't really think about or understand what he was talking about, but it put issues of good and evil into our consciousness. In the Bible Belt, that would only have happened in Gospel music. This was something we could dance to, blare from convertibles.
It didn't occur to me that he was cross-dressing, promoting drug culture and gender confusion, as critics suggest. People my age who did drugs or had un-monogamous sex with people they didn't end up marrying had more serious problems than those engaging in that culture ten years older. We knew it was unhealthy, and it didn't end well for those who didn't quit. I don't really know what drugs people did because I didn't. Heard about ex and pot. No sign of heroin or cocaine that had come just before us.
Today, kids are snorting prescription drugs and cutting. I haven't heard any songs about that. Videos like Lady Gaga's certainly promote abuse, but it didn't take long for even the sexually liberated to be offended.
The music of the 80s was upbeat compared to the 70s and today's Adele, who wants to find someone like the guy who dumped her (Aim higher next time, Adele!), and call to say I'm sorry to a guy she dumped. Even Culture Club was less depressing than that.
Bowie was an "invasion" we didn't know happened for decades. We wouldn't have dropped Disco to go back to Mozart (though I once pretended I was buying classical music for my Opera-fan Father so I would have something to listen to when my friends weren't over, having listened to his favorites all our lives. If only he had told us that English rock stars had a classical musical education, we might not have thought Opera was uncool.) Heavy metal was the music of the drug culture. Disco was the music of the sexual revolution (no more cheek-to-cheek for fear of catching something). 80s music got us on our feet. It was the music of independence, and Bowie was at the center of it.
Some of it was just market forces: they had to sell music here because the dollar was strong, even if they were card-carrying commies, but what they gave us was the music of the counter-revolution.
David Bowie, RIP.
