Heroes: Bowie. Losers.

From Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West by Agata Pyzik:

“The 1970s were the era of defeat. As the 60s were extremely intense in terms of political and social change, from the early 70s the FLUX WENT STEADY. David Bowie, who debuted in the late 60s, marked this change when he invented Ziggy Stardust in 1972: no more real heroes, from now on the most desirable thing was to be fabricated. What is genuine, authentic, is boring. The only hero that really matters, is pure artifice, cut out from the comic books, movies and dressed in everything that’s glamorous. Bowie more than anyone contributed to the cherishing of artifice in pop music, realizing the idea of a “hero for a day”, only following the course mass culture had been taking for decades. Was he conscious of that? Some of his lyrics of the era mark the mourning of the DEPOLITICIZATION OF HIS GENERATION: in the lyrics to the song ‘Star’, he mentions “Bevan (who) tried to change the nation”, AND POSING HIMSELF instead as someone who “could make a transformation as a rock & roll star”.

Facing the growing nihilism of his generation, he still believes that as a star of artifice, he can carry on their political task.

‘All the Young Dudes’, a song he wrote for Mott the Hoople in ’72, reeks of the youth’s disappointment and disillusionment, forming A KIND OF “SOLIDARITY OF THE LOSERS” ANTHEM.

Bowie, always too erratic to make any firm political commitment, was rather in love with various dubious figures, “cracked actors”, (the inspiration for Ziggy was a forgotten singer who was believed to be a combination of god and an alien), necromantics like Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Anger’s satanism, Fascist dictators.

He was, nevertheless, obsessed with certain elements of modernity.”

We all are.

“He was driven to German culture, especially the Weimar period, expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, theatre, Brecht. His first break-through hit concerned a man lost in space, after all, and the space age gets a strongly melancholic treatment from Bowie, as his character Major Tom is rather terrified by the silence of space.

Another obsession, as we will see, was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Bowie’s fixation with ‘totalitarianism’ applied to both sides. At one point he planned to stage an adaptation of the Soviet-Czech comic book Octobriana, about a socialist she-devil super-heroine – a samizdat publication, that was circulated between creators only through the post. Bowie could only have learned about it from its 1971 American edition. On the other side, his dalliance with the far right was something more than just the famous Sieg Heil he made to fans in 1976 at Victoria Station.

It’s not an accident pop bands are very rarely left-wing, and Bowie’s reaction to the economic crisis of the 70s was to imagine becoming a right wing politician who’ll “sort things out”.

‘I believe strongly in Fascism’, Bowie said; ‘the only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air is to speed up the progress of a right wing tyranny.

People have responded always more efficiently under a regimental leadership.’”

Hierarchy is the Natural Order.

“Bowie recognized, if only half-consciously, the appeal and meaning of the pop idol as a dictator.

[…] Bowie’s fascination with Germany and Berlin was only partly expressionism – much of it was also quite simply, fascism.

Bowie who might have started an “anti-communist” music tradition which we now see flourishing amidst the New Wave of futurist bands’.”

He did.

“It was the growing synthpop and New Romanticism that was emerging from the post-punk bands. Although we are used to seeing industrial/synthpop/postpunk as ruthless modernists, the bands were actually rarely openly left wing.”

Nothing is left wing during this period, I would say 'One of the few periods in the 20th century', really lucid of itself. Who will end up 'with this GENERATION X' the only one left in the West with a soul and a heart.

“The political message, if any, was rather vague.”

We were the political message, our lives were enough for this world. We didn't have Fathers, who had chosen 'modernism'. We have educated ourselves without fathers,we are the only last generation to have matured completely.

“Bands dwelling on the space age came often from dispossessed areas, which they then made topics for their music, but the result didn’t have to be politically sound.

If you take the whole fascination with the Germanic in post punk bands, like Siouxsie and the Banshees or, omen omen, Joy Division, the twisted outpourings of their leaders weren’t just simply teasing their parents.

They were flirting with the outrageous (Siouxsie), against the war generation, or they were openly right wing, like Ian Curtis.

In a context of pseudo-denazification, militancy reached its peak around 1968 and the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg. By 1976, when Bowie moved to Berlin, it had become the armed terrorism of RAF, the Red Army Faction.

Oh we can beat them, forever and ever.

If you look at any footage of the West Berlin in 70s, you see a murky city, gravitating around the Wall. Living next to a prison, even if theoretically you’re not the prisoner, you can develop symptoms of suffocation. Knowing people can be killed over an illegal crossing of the Wall, not being able to walk all of your city, imagining what there can be on the other side.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder felt shame for the post-war West Germans, for the way the West stuffed their mouths with consumerism and told them to shut up.

One of the reasons the punk generation reads dystopias like Nineteen-Eighty-Four and A Clockwork Orange as if they were their lives, and looks longingly towards the communist East in their aesthetics, is their depoliticization. The generation of their grandparents was the one who survived the war, believed in socialism, was changing the world, joined political parties. Earlier, to piss off your parents, you’d join a Communist Party.

By the 70s, those who wanted to change the world were discredited and all they had left was the aesthetics.

A generation or two before, people believed in the modernist ideal for living: built estates for collective life, in which neighbors were to meet in the patio and socialize.”

All this architecture 'has aged horribly', and shows 'that it was a false doctrine'; the freedom of the individual passes through 'the total individuation' of the individual: his liberation; 'mythologized' by the resurrection; Long, painful 'but only capable of realizing the detachment from the matter'.

“The 1960s and 70s also marked the crisis and decline of the nuclear family.”

Ending 'the bourgeois economical model'.

“In the regress […] with a growing number of divorces, this generation was paying for the necessary experiment of their parents […].

The counter culture as a resource/channel of political culture also began to decline.”

… And we have 'really “entered” the nihilistic modernity'.

“What was left were the drugs. Berlin since the 70s started having an enormous population of drug addicts.

The 70s were an era of abandoned children, with no more support in institutions.

Christiane hates Gropiusstadt, where she lives with her single, always-at-work mother, who is always absent, unless she is fucking her dodgy boyfriend.

The only company and community she finds is in the night clubs and friends, who are all into drugs.

She goes to the Sound, the famous disco club, labelled as “the most modern discotheque in Europe”. She starts lightly, takes speed and coke, but the whole thing is about “H”. H is her obsession, a gate to a different reality, where she can communicate with her idol, Bowie.”

ALL SOCIETIES 'NEED LEADERS'. No leaders Equals an abandoned society.

“In “Heroes”, Bowie makes a final declaration: there’s no more heroes, LONG LIVE THE HEROES!

And it is the easterners who shoot, who perpetrate the terror, it’s true: it was the choice of the DDR government to erect the Wall, as between the establishing of the republic in 1948 and 1961 their population was growingly defecting to the West. This was the ideological failure of the East, who had to lock their citizens to convince them they live in the best of the worlds.

They couldn’t, continuing to be trapped with their lives. For young people of the declining late 70s, Bowie – an endlessly enigmatic hero for one day, […] replaced their politicians, parents, institutions, their god.

Berlin is there a hard-edged, harsh city with no mercy, ruthless, easily claiming lives, once ascending city of modernity, where their dreams have died. We are in the realm of “joy division”: their passionless sex, their un-joy, resignation, their absolute nihilism.

Punk was dead.

Punk was dead. West Berlin was full of pale, lifeless, sleepwalking young people (Hitler called Germany a “nation of sleepwalkers”).

The real Christiane F (Felscherinow) was offered a career as “tell us our story”. She recorded hours of material that then became the famous book, and then the film. When her story broke, it caused a wave of outrage and self-accusations over the ‘health of the nation’ in the shadow of its Nazi guilt.”

There was no need for Hitler. Jesus Christ made the beginning.

“It seemed like the post-war optimism was finally over and the children of the hippie generation had been submerged by the nihilist punk wave.”

Christianism does not have a 'long life'.

“Christiane wasn’t abused, didn’t lack education, didn’t grow up in poverty or worse yet – she wasn’t an East German – [...] SHE WAS ALIENATED and she was from a broken home. She was raised in the personal freedoms promised by liberalism, that in the process became meaningless.”

Alienated like any good Christian.

“The weird aesthetic space that emerged between the neoliberal space opening in the late 70s, means that commodified subcultures become an ersatz of a political emancipation from the past which is no longer available. Subculture replaces political engagement which, for different reasons, can’t be expressed politically […].”

A dead Western society, ABANDONED, “building URBAN FURNITURE” rather than social bonds. 50 years later, the West has pushed this line “by legislating against the Rupture of the social bonding”. As if a State “could provide 'social bonding'”; but Westerners far too zombified “don't even understand what's going on.”

“The obsession this era has with the mechanical, controlled man evoked the fears of totalitarianism and the state control just as a deeper fantasy of human efficiency. The measurement of the body, of its possibilities, was at the start of the technological revolution, and organization. It was a dark echo of the Golem, puppets, Karel Capek’s robots, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the real source of post-punk imagery, although of deeply dubious politics. Punks, a lost generation betrayed by history, were obsessed with it, despite claiming a lack of any interest in the past. Their obsession was a fantasy within the late capitalist, increasingly post-Fordist society, where efficiency was already beginning to be replaced with dubious financial capital.

The mechanized organism was a Fordist obsession, and found its sickly, glam repetition in Klaus Nomi, a Bavarian former pastry maker, who discovered an operatic countertenor in himself. In the famous Saturday Nigh Live performance with Bowie in 1979, they channel the German avant-garde, dressed in Sonia Delaunay-inspired bombastic dada-suits, with exaggerated inflatable arms and legs, Bowie using also a puppet and a communist China blue suit with a Mao-Collar, but equipped with a skirt.

With the political crisis approaching, the post-boom generation, as if feeling that history was going to strike back again, took on the task of performing painful historical exorcisms on themselves. They lived as if it was the 20s, 30s, 50s or 60s, and yet they lived inevitably in the present.

It was Bowie who put the elements together. Bowie, a model postmodernist, someone who built his life and art out of the artificial, who went though pop art, comic books and Brecht, needed the necessary frisson of the real, which he found in Berlin, Warszawa and Moscow.

As we saw, he was the wall against which Christiane F. and her drugged, prostituting young friends were projecting their saccharine dreams that never came true. Berlin was, like any other big post war metropolis raised from ashes, a scene of “modernity’s failure”, with the decaying tower block estates, like Gropiusstadt, which for Christiane is in turn everything SHE FEARS AND HATES.

It was the conservative Catholic modernist Anthony Burgess whose terrifying vision of modish city oiks turned Soviet was the one which kept stirring generations of youth and became a foundational text for the glam and punk generation. A Clockwork Orange, of which we speak, had its roots in a trip Burgess took to Russia in the 50s, when he got beaten by Western-dressed smart looking young delinquents in Leningrad.”

And this is why We don't need the Christian in Europe.

““Everyone says Joy Division music is gloomy and heavy. For me it was because the whole neighbourhood I lived in was completely decimated in the mid-60s. At the end of our street there was a huge chemical factory” – says Bernie Sumner in a Jon Savage interview – “there was a huge sense of community where I lived. I remember the summer holidays when I was a kid. What happened in the 60s is that someone in council decided that it wasn’t very healthy and something had to go and it was my neighbourhood that went. We were moved to the tower block. At the time I thought it was fantastic: now of course I realise it was an absolute disaster.”

Joy Division were English boys for whom the end of the world as they knew it resulted in bleak fascination with the other side: people under totalitarianism, with whom they felt a secret affinity, making music as if their world was their own. But it also worked the other way round.

The morbidity of their music hit exactly the emotions disaffected […].”

It is funny to see that these barbarities that are the states had to create idols, materialized forms of the heroes.

This shows how low man has fallen into matter.

And they're all asking for 'free iPhones and universal income'.

Heroes: Bowie #Heroes #Bowie #DDR #Wall #West #Agata-Pyzik #Pyzik #Esotericism #Esoterism

https://bittube.tv/post/4931a0d8-361a-4383-8995-4c7b73027646 https://odysee.com/@periodic-reset-of-civilizations:c/Heroes--Bowie:9 https://tube.midov.pl/w/xvFUYnAVFF98JMcntS5XbD https://www.bitchute.com/video/JgOMgRPps574/

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