“We are at the beginning of something exhilarating and terrifying.”
In 1999, David Bowie, with his shaggy hair and cool glasses, predicted the future: the internet.
In this short but fascinating interview with the BBC’s faithful and scathing questioner and interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, Bowie offers up some predictions for the coming decades and gets most, if not all, of them right. Paxman is sadly playing devil’s advocate, but I think he really sees the Internet as a “tool”, simply a repackaging of existing media.
“That’s an alien life form that’s just landed,” Bowie counters.
Bowie, who had launched his own private ISP, bowie.net, the previous year, began by saying that if he had started his career in 1999, he would have been a “record-collecting fan” rather than a musician.
It sounded provocative at the time, but Bowie is making an argument that has gained more credence in recent years: that rock’s revolutionary status in the ’60s and ’70s was tied to its scarcity, and that the inability to easily listen to music gave it power and value. Rock is now, he says, a “career opportunity,” and the Internet now has the allure that rock once had.
What Bowie didn’t anticipate was how quickly its appeal would fade. The internet was no longer a mystery, but more like a public utility — a point Bowie would later make when talking about the invention of the telephone, oddly enough.
Bowie also acknowledged that the internet could remove the mystique between artist and audience, but he sought anonymity and privacy in the final decade of his life — releasing his final two albums suddenly and without fanfare, refusing to give interviews altogether — and he certainly didn’t foresee the trolling that would drive celebrities and artists off social media.
While Paxman sees internet fragmentation as a problem, Bowie sees it as a positive.
“The potential for the Internet to have a positive or negative impact on society is unimaginable.”
There’s a lot more to explore in this section, so let us know your perspectives in the comments – that’s what Bowie would have wanted.
Related content:
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David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art, and Why We Do It Anyway (1998)
Watch David Bowie perform “Starman” Top of the Pops: Voted BBC’s greatest musical performance of all time (1972)
How David Bowie used William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique to write his unforgettable lyrics
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts, currently writing an artist-interview-based Funk Zone PodcastYou can also follow us on Twitter. Ted MillsAs for his other artworks, tedmills.com Watch his movies here.
