The one artist David Bowie said went beyond Bob Dylan

But what Bowie did was about more than being one of the biggest rockstars in the world. Say what you will about how much of a musical god he was in the glam-rock period, but he was sincerely trying to push the envelope whenever he started making music slightly against the grain. Let’s Dance may have been him making pop music on his own terms, but was anyone expecting something that mainstream from the same person who had been making records like Station to Station only a few years earlier?

Even if Bowie had the potential to be a pinup star, he wanted to disturb the traditional system of rock and roll stars. His heroes had all been from the avant-garde world, but there isn’t a single songwriter on the face of the Earth who wouldn’t have been knocked out when Bob Dylan first started making music. He was speaking for an entire generation whenever he sang, but Bowie seemed to fall a little bit between the generational gap in a way.

He had been fascinated with the records that Dylan made in his folk-rock prime, but there were also so many different places he could go. The Beatles had shaken things up and had even begun making their own experimental music, but whereas they were making everything sound slightly saccharine on a few of their songs, there was absolutely nothing sweet when it came to The Velvet Underground.

Compared to the rest of the Love generation, Lou Reed sounded like he had crawled out of the gutter when he first started making music. He was as interested in telling the stories of junkies as he was in quoting his favourite poets, and while that did lead to a few of their albums being difficult to listen to, Bowie was willing to do anything to get close to what Reed could do with his band.

In fact, Bowie felt that what Reed did pushed rock in a direction that Dylan wasn’t able to do, saying, “Dylan had certainly brought a new kind of intelligence to pop songwriting, but then Lou had taken it even further into the avant garde and had it had its roots in Baudelaire and Rimbaud and that side, that other thread of history which isn’t talked about very much, which it is now, of course, now it is history.”

While Reed would have readily admitted to being a fan of Dylan’s, it’s not like Mr Zimmerman was willing to go to the lengths that he did most of the time. Dylan was already looking to make more downtempo music ever since the late 1960s, and while hearing him switch to electric halfway through the decade was a definite culture shock, that was nothing compared to what an album like White Light/White Heat could do.

Reed was looking to deconstruct what rock and roll could be and pave the way for something different, and Bowie wasn’t all that different when making his masterpieces. It was one thing to acknowledge the music that you love, but the lesson was always about getting inspired to go in your own direction rather than become a carbon copy of what came before.

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