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Celebrity Studies
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Re-collecting David Bowie: The Next

Day and late-career stardom
a
Landon Palmer
a
The Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana
University, Bloomington, IN, USA

To cite this article: Landon Palmer (2013) Re-collecting David Bowie: The Next Day and late-career
stardom, Celebrity Studies, 4:3, 384-386, DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2013.831628

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2013.831628

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 Celebrity Studies, 2013
Vol. 4, No. 3, 384–386, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2013.831628

Re-collecting David Bowie: The Next Day and late-career stardom

Landon Palmer*

The Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA
(Received 10 June 2013; accepted 18 July 2013)

At her dinner speech during the recent opening of the David Bowie is . . . exhibit at
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, David Bowie fan and emulator Tilda Swinton
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(2013) posed a question that borrowed from the title of the single that broke the years-
long silence of Bowie’s music career: ‘So, where are we now?’ The question functioned
doubly as an attempted summation of the star’s influence and an admission of the seem-
ing impossibility of such an effort. Swinton noted Bowie’s conspicuous absence from the
museum and cited evidence of his legacy through the compensatory presence of his fans:
‘Well, I know you aren’t here tonight, but somehow, no matter. We are . . .’ Swinton’s
speech points to two important characteristics of David Bowie’s late-career star image in
the context of the discourse surrounding The Next Day, his first album of original mate-
rial in a decade: first, uncertainty about the present meaning of a star image that formerly
assumed multiple identities; and second, the shared constitution of that star image between
Bowie and his fan base. In this article, I seek to explain how the reflective orientation of
David Bowie’s late-career star image – as evidenced by The Next Day’s promotion, recep-
tion and paratexts – came to be articulated as a heterogeneous ‘collection’ that surveys
various historical fragments of his prior personae and career episodes simultaneously.
Posthumous or late-career reflections on star images often involve formal acts of encap-
sulation, typically through imparting a preferred narrative or discrete career contributions
that obscure other potential ‘meanings and effects’ (Dyer 1979, p. 3). For instance, the
introduction of the Elvis stamp in 1992 prompted fans to vote on one of two Elvises to
be definitively commemorated by the US Postal Service: ‘Young Elvis’ or ‘Old Elvis’
(Rodman 1996, pp. 86–96). By contrast, the David Bowie of The Next Day demonstrates a
calculated avoidance of defining a complex star image as a diachronic, linear narrative.
One day prior to The Next Day’s US release, Grantland published a June 2012 corre-
spondence between culture columnists Chuck Klosterman and Alex Pappademas (2013),
who exchanged a series of e-mails about how to potentially eulogise Bowie in response to
a rumour about the star’s impending death. Instead of arriving at a collaborative agreement
about how to pay proper tribute, the authors ruminate on the essential difficulty of such
a task. Both agree that Bowie was definitively a ‘rock star’, but each struggle to deter-
mine precisely what that designation means outside of his seemingly omnipresent state of
renown. They perceive Bowie as always-already famous, a figure who traversed through
pop culture in a way that evokes timelessness. Pappademas suggests, ‘[Bowie] always

*Email: laapalm@umail.iu.edu

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Celebrity Studies 385

seemed old. [. . .] He never seemed real or unreal, which I unconsciously equate with
immortality.’ Klosterman responds, ‘I always took it for granted that Bowie didn’t have
a fixed identity,’ a statement that illustrates the paradox of memorialising an ‘individual’
defined by his multitude of performance personalities.
As if acknowledging this paradox, The Next Day offers an alternative to convention-
ally narrativised star histories: the album and its surrounding discourse demonstrate the
potential for illegibility entailed in the act of reflecting on an exceedingly multi-faceted star
image. The album’s cover (a source routinely used as evidence of Bowie’s transformations)
is a manipulated image of the 1979 album ‘Heroes’, with the title marked out and a white
box covering Bowie’s face featuring the album’s title. Jonathan Barnbrook (2013) said
of his cover design, ‘[N]o matter how hard we try, we cannot break free from the past.’
However, this focus on Bowie’s past is framed through seemingly calculated attempts at
obscuring Bowie’s present. Alternately, The Next Day’s musical and lyrical content exer-
cise a perpetual return of the past in the form of pastiche. Publishing their findings on
the web, music critics and fans spent weeks after the album’s release dissecting possible
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references to Bowie’s prior musical signatures, including the ‘lyrical evocation’ of 1969’s
Space Oddity in Ashes to ashes, the Berlin-era aura of Where are we now (Hawking 2013),
and the drumbeat from 1972’s Five years that concludes You feel so lonely you could die
(Frere-Jones 2013).
The Next Day’s music videos merge the work of obscuring the present and referencing
the past. The album’s first single, Where are we now?, features the faces of Bowie and the
unidentified Jacqueline Humphries placed on a pommel horse as conjoined puppets, while
images of Berlin are projected on to the background. The video distances the spectator from
accessing a cohesive image of contemporary Bowie by severing Bowie’s body (a reliable
source for interpreting his prior performances of identity) and juxtaposing his recognisable
visage next to an unrecognisable face, all in front of images that signify the musical period
evoked by the album’s remixed cover. The second single, the aptly titled The stars (are out
tonight), exhibits contemporary Bowie socialising with his similarly androgynous emulator
Tilda Swinton as he encounters prior iterations of himself, including model Iselin Steiro
performing as Bowie circa 1976, and a magazine cover featuring a contemporaneous Bowie
in alien make-up from The man who fell to earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976).
The Next Day and its associations present the cumulative, past-directed image of the
late-career star as a collection that, in a break from conventions of late-career star his-
toriography, resists linearity and narrativisation. As Amelie Hastie (2007, pp. 9, 13) has
argued in her investigation of the paratextual ephemera produced by early Hollywood
female stars, star histories can be approached through the logic of ‘an archive or collection,
not a narrative’, because star images, despite attempts by various institutions and discur-
sive industries to structure their histories, often ‘work against a chronology or linearity’.
Practices of investigating the assortment of potential references available in The Next Day
situate recollection as an action, a performance of historiography that contributes to the
construction of the star text through a laborious, interpretive and communal relationship to
the various meanings associated with that text. However, this process of publicly archiving
the late-career Bowie did not begin with The Next Day.
With the thirty-fifth-anniversary re-release of The man who fell to earth in 2011,
followed by Bowie’s sixty-fifth birthday and the fortieth-anniversary re-release of Ziggy
Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in 2012, cultural institutions and commentators
attempted to make sense of Bowie’s complex star image through organised retrospectives,
essays and digital slideshows. Rather than developing a distinct teleology, several outlets
interpreted Bowie’s role in popular discourse as always already plural. For instance, the
 386 L. Palmer

New York Museum of Art and Design exhibition, ‘David Bowie: artist’, recognised Bowie
not as a rock star, but as ‘an artist working primarily in performance’, the exhibition serv-
ing as evidence of Bowie’s ‘shifting body of work that has continually innovated practices
throughout a multitude of cultural spheres’ (Museum of Art and Design 2011). Internet
ephemera like ‘David Bowie doing normal stuff’ (Flavorwire’s slideshow of Bowie engag-
ing in supposedly quotidian activities like bowling, using a computer and grocery shopping
with varying degrees of non-normative flare) also presented Bowie’s career as a collision
of various historical moments, a simultaneous collage of past identities ranging from the
Thin White Duke to Ziggy Stardust to David Jones (Temple 2012).
Despite his multi-faceted star image, David Bowie has demonstrated efforts to con-
trol prior iterations of his public self, whether struggling to find a musical identity in
the wake of Ziggy Stardust as depicted in the 1974 BBC documentary Cracked Actor,
declaring himself ‘straight’ in a 1983 issue of Rolling Stone, or becoming the first rock
star to offer security bonds in 1997. The Next Day, by contrast, represents an institutional
relinquishing of discursive ownership over the star text, an act of cultural production that
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acknowledges and models itself after the active, essential roles that fans, artists, culture
columnists, and associated stars have had in making ‘David Bowie’. Further complicating
the consumer/producer dyad, these collective efforts read the polysemy of Bowie’s star
image to be fundamentally unstructured. Such practices exemplify an alternative approach
to the late-career retrospective that could become more common in a digital media land-
scape in which active star recollection produces accessible, immediate and concurrent
ephemera.

Notes on contributor
Landon Palmer is a PhD student studying Film and Media in the Department of Communication and
Culture at Indiana University. His research project surveys representations of popular musicians in
American and British cinema between 1955 and 1980.

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