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Chapter III, Part I – The Return of the Thin White Duke
It's Not A Side Effect of the Cocaine
Somewhere in Los Angeles, 1976, the Thin White Duke leans over a table and snorts a line of cocaine. He wipes his nose and looks around the room in the…
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Chapter III, Part II – The Return of the Thin White Duke
Rock 'n' Roll Suicide
‘… that fucker would not leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to sour. And it soured so quickly you wouldn’t believe it… My whole personality…
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Chapter III, Part III – The Return of the Thin White Duke
Postculture (or, Steiner, Kubrick, Nietzsche)
David Bowie once insisted that one of his artistic and philosophical goals was ‘to be regarded as an individualist.’1 Ziggy Stardust, then, was Bowie’s self-conscious attempt to create the individualist…
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Chapter III, Part IV – The Return of the Thin White Duke
A Restless Nothing
Ruled by the logic of consumer capitalism, Bowie’s art is explained by a coeval economic theory—Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of ‘creative destruction.’ In 1942, five years before Bowie’s birth, three years…
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Chapter III, Part V – The Return of the Thin White Duke
The Young American
‘About two years ago, I realised I had become a total product of my concept character Ziggy Stardust. So I set out on a very successful crusade to re-establish my…
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Chapter III, Part VI – The Return of the Thin White Duke
"I Believe Very Strongly in Fascism"
‘There’s literally no economic confidence in any one nation in the world. There’s not one confident central source anywhere on this whole damn planet. It makes you want to shoot…
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Chapter III, Part VII – The Return of the Thin White Duke
"A future we knew would never come to pass"
The approach of death birthed Bowie’s fascism. Intense though it was, his fixation died sometime in 1976. Its end came in several stages. First, Bowie blew his nose one day…
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Chapter III, Part VIII – The Return of the Thin White Duke
Spirit of the Seventies
‘People look to me to see what the spirit of the Seventies is.’ ‘With our makeup and funny clothes… we’re only heralding something even darker than ourselves.’ —David Bowie.1 In…
