The point is that during the 1970s, especially from 1974 onward, Bowie was able to mobilize an artistic discipline that is terrifying in its intensity, daring, and risk. It is the very opposite of rock-star complacency. It is as if Bowie, almost ascetically, almost eremitically, disciplined himself into becoming a nothing, a mobile and massively creative nothing that could assume new faces, generate new illusions, and create new forms. This is weird and rare. Perhaps it is unique in the history of popular music...
...Bowie’s truth is inauthentic, completely self-conscious and utterly constructed. But it is still right, es stimmt as one can say in German, or it has the quality of feeling right, of being stimmig. We hear it and say “yes.” Silently, or sometimes out loud. The sound of Bowie’s voice creates a resonance within us. It finds a corporeal echo. But resonance invites dissonance. A resonating body in one location—like glasses on a table—begins to make another body shake and suddenly the whole floor is covered with broken glass. Music resounds and calls us to dissent from the world, to experience a dissensus communis, a sociability at odds with common sense. Through the fakery and because of it, we feel a truth that leads us beyond ourselves, toward the imagination of some other way of being.
Bowie’s genius allows us to break the superficial link that seems to connect authenticity to truth. There is a truth to Bowie’s art, a moodful truth, a heard truth, a felt truth, an embodied truth. Something heard with and within the body. The tone of the singing voice and music is felt in the tonus or musculature of the body. Musical tension is muscular, rising or falling, in progressive wave-beats of pleasure.