a bowie bio frames the thing in the only possible way: he's 'important' even though he sucks.
It argues for Mr. Bowie less as an instinctive rocker than as a shape-shifting cabaret singer and composer writ large, a performer working in the tradition of Harold Arlen, Frank Sinatra, Hoagy Carmichael and Bertolt Brecht as well as the blues.
i think if you really tried to compare him, say, as a lyricist, to those figures, you'd begin to see the problem. it's so amazing that he was all dolled up and androgynous! yeah. astonishing. liberating. marketing. modeling. too bad about the music.
David Bowie had little talent but cool to burn.
He replaced more talented singers in bands because, well, that’s what cool kids do.
Mr. Trynka quotes the music writer Charles Shaar Murray, wonderfully, about Mr. Bowie’s puzzling career choices during the ’80s. “I suddenly thought, He’s turned into a rock-and-roll version of Prince Charles,” Mr. Murray said, noting the “old-fashioned haircut like a lemon meringue on his head.”
The singer Morrissey said about him: “He’s a business, you know. He’s not really a person.”
Mr. Bowie was not a natural singer or songwriter.
Mr. Trynka notes how closely Mr. Bowie’s song “Starman” resembles “Over the Rainbow.” Mr. Bowie’s hit “The Jean Genie” pilfered a riff from Muddy Waters’s “I’m a Man.” The song “Life on Mars” borrowed a chord sequence from a French song called “Comme d’Habitude,” later reworked into English by Paul Anka as “My Way.”
About “The Laughing Gnome,” a terrible early song of Mr. Bowie’s, the author says, “As long as one is happy to abandon all notions of taste, the song is brilliantly crafted.”
ok you throw that all out there, then finish with this: "David Bowie’s greatness, this book suggests, more than caught up with his coolness."
my advice is listen to yourself. you know he always sucked; in fact you said he always sucked. if you're going to do any sort of criticism, you're going to have to learn to believe your own actual assessments.
