>http://www.mtv.com/news/2727414/brother-from-another-planet/
>
>Brother from Another Planet
>Bowie and black music
>by mtv news staff 1/12/2016
>4k
>1
>by Greg Tate
>
>David Bowie ranks as high in our electric church’s
>Afrofuturist pantheon of demiurges as Jimi Hendrix, George
>Clinton, and Miles Davis. That’s for his outrageous
>aristocratic style, not-just-skin-deep soul, badass
>brinksmanship, and all-around Alter-Negrocity. Not to mention
>the Starman’s own sui generis take on The Funk. Bowie
>remains that rarity — a white rock artist whose
>appropriations of black kulcha never felt like a rip-off but
>more like a sharing of radical and bumptious ideations between
>like-minded freaks.
>
>It seems 1975 was the first year we saw a white man get busy
>on Soul Train, “The Hippest Trip in America.” Memory fails
>us as to whom Don Cornelius chose to lob over the color line
>before whom: Bowie with ”Fame” or Elton John, whose
>”Bennie and the Jets” had become a boom box staple on the
>back of the school bus that year at D.C.’s Coolidge High.
>That same year, Average White Band dropped ”Pick Up the
>Pieces” on Soul Train, too. Doesn’t really matter, because
>of the three, Bowie had the funkiest track and the more
>charismatically alien presence — simultaneously the most
>culturally familiar and the most outright bizarre. The
>unabashed Brit who fell to Mother Africa and kept on stepping
>in rhythm and rhyme to his own quasar.
>
>Bowie’s Soul Train appearance offers insight into his
>enigmatic ability to groove with The People and levitate above
>the fray, somewhere way beyond the pale. That visit to the
>Mecca of televised urban Terpsichore came two years after the
>two biggest pimp-thug cats at Coolidge High, Robert Parrish
>and his boy, came back from the Capital Center raving about
>seeing the Ziggy Stardust tour. This was before we knew about
>the deep and abiding relationship between louche hustlers and
>transgendered folks in the ’hood. Not long after Bowie
>dropped “Fame,” George Clinton begrudgingly tossed off
>this riposte on Mothership Connection’s ”P-Funk (Wants To
>Get Funked Up)”: ”I was down south, heard some main
>ingredients like Blue Magic, Doobie Brothers, David Bowie. It
>was cool — but can you imagine Doobie in your funk?”’
>Cite the absence of any snap on Bowie, Starchile Clinton was
>giving the Starman some major props. Not least because Bowie
>inspired all of rock and funk ’n’ roll to go more glam,
>glittery, and avant-haute in the ’70s.
>
>UNITED STATES - OCTOBER 01: RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL Photo of
>David BOWIE, performing live onstage on Philly Dogs Tour
>(Photo by Steve Morley/Redferns)
>Steve Morley/Redferns/Getty
>All roads to Glamgnocity in that era lead back to Bowie —
>himself inspired by Jimi Hendrix. But Hendrix never got to
>realize rock theatricality as extravagantly as Bowie did —
>nor did the Voodoo Chile have a costume-designing wizard like
>Japan’s Kansai Yamamoto knitting away in his stage-couture
>shed.
>
>Our ace boon Arthur Jafa likes to say that ”Andy Warhol was
>so white he was black.” Bowie (who played Warhol in
>Schnabel’s film Basquiat) was likewise so avant-garde he
>tipped over into the Avant-’Groid — that Afro-outré
>dimension where Little Richard and Sun Ra define how far out
>you can go and command love from the folk. Like Joni Mitchell
>— another unguilty pleasure of many boho blackfolk — Bowie
>double-crossed back over to black culture by being his own
>transcendently pan-everything creation. But not even Queen
>Mother Joni can say she provoked James Brown to copycat action
>twice in his career. JB was so blown away by Bowie’s
>”Fame,” he cut his own carbon-copy track, ”Hot (I Need
>to Be Loved, Loved, Loved),” and, years later, when Bowie
>optioned his publishing for stock points, the Godfather of
>Soul got the news about how lucrative the deal proved and
>quickly followed suit. Bowie once said, “The secret to my
>success was I was always the second guy to come up with the
>idea.” All hip-hop junkies can relate: How you flip
>secondhand wisdom to make the meta go mega-pop takes genius,
>too. (FYI, the ”Fame” story is further complicated by the
>fact that Brown remembered Bowie’s co-writer Carlos Alomar
>playing the main riff at the Apollo years before — but chase
>down the long version here.
>
>This reporter got to hang out with Bowie a few times in the
>aughts. Iman commissioned moi to write an essay for her
>cosmetics company’s catalogue. During our initial meeting,
>Iman leaned in with her cell phone and said, ”My husband
>wants to talk to you — he’s a big fan of your work.” Say
>WTF? It was truly the GTFOH gobsmack moment of a lifetime in
>music journalism. If only because, arrogant as we journos can
>be on the page, only an idiot thinks anyone of musical
>consequence actually reads our cantankerous sheet! Upshot is,
>because of that bizarre turnabout we got to get turnt out in
>person, as most were, by Bowie’s singular alchemy — utter
>nobility combined with an easygoing lack of pretension. Later
>came revelations about this highly irregular regular guy’s
>generosity of spirit.
>
>During our first convo, Bowie related how he’d recently met
>P. Diddy — a man so impressed by Bowie’s handshake he
>inquired as to who Bowie’s trainer was. Whereupon the Thin
>White Duke informed Mr. Bad Boy, ”That grip isn’t from
>training, Puff. That’s from 40 years of trying to hold on to
>your money in the music business.” Talk about pulling a
>tyro’s coat tail.
>
>Up close and personal, you also got to see how puppy-dog
>lovestruck Bowie’s goddess-worship of Iman was. Bowie’s
>curiosity also led him and Iman to truck down to CBGB one
>night to see this reporter’s then-wife, vocalist Tamar-Kali,
>rock out with her brand of Geechee Goddess Hardcore Warrior
>Soul. The couple also made their way to our good buddy Arthur
>Jafa’s very, very postmodern painting, sculpture, and
>performance opening in an off-the-beaten-path Soho gallery.
>There was nothing fake about Bowie’s passion for the people,
>art, and ideas that captured his imagination. If he was moved
>by your trip, he’d go the extra mile to show love as one of
>your fans, too. We also witnessed Bowie’s gangsta-husband
>come out at Tamar’s CBGB gig, when our 220-pound
>stage-diving homeboy Luqman Brown crash-landed in Iman’s
>lap. Bowie, sans security, turned Iceberg Slim–cold and
>snatched Luq off of his better half with the quickness while
>snapping ”Get off my wife” to our burly punk rock brother.
>Luq sheepishly slunk away, but we know that if it had been any
>other well-dressed white man courting a Somalian supermodel at
>CBGB back then, foul language and fisticuffs may have ensued.
>Even more impressive is that even after being rattled and
>smushed, Bowie and Iman stayed for the rest of Tamar’s set!
>Hardcore to the bone, yo.
>
>Like anybody in the lily-white rock world of yon who sang,
>danced, and played saxophone, Bowie was beyond indebted to
>black culture. But much akin to Miles Davis, assimilating
>influences for Bowie meant he’d granted himself license to
>warp and mutilate those sweet inspirations in pursuit of
>self-renovation. This trait is abundantly evident on 1975’s
>Young Americans album. Bowie’s rapprochement with Philly
>Soul in Philly International’s home base, Sigma Sound,
>remains a watershed moment for our still-racialized world of
>American music-making. YA marked Bowie’s maiden voyage with
>Puerto Rican–born Apollo pit band guitarist Carlos Alomar,
>who’d become a studio and touring mainstay for the next
>decade. The album also features songwriting collaborations
>with emergent soul star and then-backing vocalist Luther
>Vandross. Shape of things to come: Who else but Bowie would
>later divine a crossroads for Nile Rodgers and Stevie Ray
>Vaughan to crew up on one of the dopest ’80s dance-floor
>anthems? Who else but the same man would cede the spotlight to
>African American bassist/singer Gail Ann Dorsey during the
>concert versions of ”Under Pressure”? On Young Americans,
>you hear a white rock star who didn’t want to be read as a
>mere tourist in Blackonia but as a contributor, a
>collaborator, and ultimately a real comrade. This latter
>aspect was never more clear than when Bowie sat down with MTV
>host Mark Goodman in 1985 and forthrightly addressed the
>network’s then-glaring race problem:
>
>David Bowie: Why are there practically no blacks on the
>network?
>
>Mark Goodman: We seem to be doing music that fits into what we
>want to play on MTV. The company is thinking in terms of
>narrowcasting.
>
>David Bowie: There seem to be a lot of black artists making
>very good videos that I’m surprised aren’t being used on
>MTV.
>
>Mark Goodman: We have to try and do what we think not only New
>York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or
>the Midwest. Pick some town in the Midwest which would be
>scared to death by a string of other black faces, or black
>music. We have to play music we think an entire country is
>going to like, and certainly we’re a rock and roll station.
>
>David Bowie: Don’t you think it’s a frightening
>predicament to be in?
>
>Mark Goodman: Yeah, but no less so here than in radio.
>
>David Bowie: Don’t say, “Well, it’s not me, it’s
>them.” Is it not possible it should be a conviction of the
>station and of the radio stations to be fair, to make the
>media more integrated?’
>
>The Rolling Stones, Duran Duran, Bruce Springsteen, Talking
>Heads — no one, to that point, had so publicly challenged
>the segregated status quo at a network then offering rock
>artists free mass-market advertising. But from that unprompted
>interrogation of the race factor in MTV programming, we can
>infer that Bowie’s love for the most politically committed
>black artists — Nina Simone, James Brown, Stevie Wonder,
>Marvin Gaye, Gamble & Huff, Gil Scott-Heron, et al. — was
>more than lip service. Bowie got the memo that being a
>ride-or-die black-and-blue-eyed soul man meant putting your
>own career at risk in the name of cultural justice. That’s
>why we weren’t surprised to hear that his last album was
>majorly inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly:
>”I’m a black star / Not a rock star.'” Indubitably. And
>eternally. Down-by-law Bowie kept it 100 percent
>avant-’Groid until the wheels came off.