David Bowie

[lovemydog]

19. Bowie recorded the album Young Americans in Philadelphia

and helped spread the beauty of Philly soul music. All those amazing artists like The Delfonics, Hall & Oates, Patti LaBelle, Phyllis Hyman, The O'Jays, The Spinners, The Stylistics, The Trammps, The Three Degrees. We've talked a lot in this group about the beauty of sharing music. He really did that and helped open up a lot of people's hearts. Thankfully, all this music lives on forever.

From Hilton Als in The New Yorker:

"Rock stars are not generally known for their generosity to other artists; it takes a lot to get up there and be such a huge presence. Early on, Bowie realized he was more himself—had more of himself—when he built bridges between different worlds. I wonder how much of that he owed to what he saw in Brixton. Two years before he worked with Pop, Bowie made his first masterpiece—1975’s “Young Americans.” Bowie called it “plastic soul,” which was an honest thought. Bowie was not a soul man; he was borrowing from soul artists—the guys who made the sound of Philadelphia just that—in order to make his new self, backed by incredible black artists like Ava Cherry and Luther Vandross. Dressed in high-waisted pants and carrying a cane, Bowie’s elegance and showmanship on “The Dick Cavett Show,” in 1974, while he was getting his plastic-soul thing together, didn’t so much diminish the rather square-looking Cavett as inject a powerful social formula: what blackness looked like on a white artist.

Bowie was a miscegenationist at a time when it wasn’t necessarily cool, or tolerated. Bowie was “queer” in that way, and things only got queerer on the Cavett show when Bowie introduced Cherry, his lover at the time, to the audience. There, again, he was framing a performer he liked by conferring some of his star power on her. (Bowie worked on Cherry’s album “People from Bad Homes.” Check it out. Her sound is not as big as Betty Davis’s, but there are loads of wonderful moments on it, including the lead track, written by Bowie.) Halfway through “Foot Stompin’,” on the Cavett show, Bowie points to Cherry, the blond-haired black woman to his left, and says, “Cherry!” She dances a bit, and the moment is gone, but not the memory of Bowie watching his friend perform in the aura of his generosity.

Indeed, Bowie’s rendition of “Foot Stompin’ ” was the artist’s tribute to the Flares, a doo-wop group that recorded in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties. Back then, a young David Robert Jones thrilled to the records his father brought home, including those made by that outrageous, vulnerable showman Little Richard. When he heard “Tutti Frutti,” Bowie said once, he knew he’d heard God. Little Richard’s uncommon look and feeling were part of what he meant to project in this common world. Bowie, too. He was an Englishman who was sometimes afraid of Americans and fame but, on his final record, could sing “Look at me / I’m in heaven” as a way of describing where he wanted to end up, maybe, but definitely where Bowie—that outsider who made different kids feel like dancing in that difference, and who had a genius for friendship, too—had lived since we knew him."

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/postscript-david-bowie-1947-2016?intcid=mod-most-popular