Who is popular today?

David Bowie has been canonised, and his cultural enthusiams are obsessed over. John O’Connell and Will Brooker appreciate his pick’n’mix habits, but have they forgotten the music?
In 1973, Sonia Orwell broke David Bowie’s heart by refusing him permission to adapt her late husband’s final novel into a rock musical. She had rebuffed every request since the hamfisted 1956 movie version starring Edmond O’Brien, and was never likely to make an exception for a glam-rock dandy, but he was sorely aggrieved. “The whole thing was originally Nineteen-bloody-Eighty-Four,” he said of Diamond Dogs, the feverish post-glam dystopia into which he rerouted his Orwellian dreams. In truth, she probably did him a favour, because the brilliant mess of Diamond Dogs, which cut-and-pasted fragments of Orwell’s novel with William Burroughs’s The Wild Boys and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, was more his style. Bowie never settled for one idea when he could have three. “I get bored very quickly,” he told Burroughs when they met that year.
Bowie was a famously insatiable reader. As a teenager in Bromley he was schooled in the Beats by his older brother Terry. Cocaine-crazed in 1970s America, he would stay up all night inhaling books about the occult from his 1,500-volume portable library. In 1998, somewhat more well adjusted, he wrote reviews for Barnes & Noble. Feeling from an early age formless and incomplete, he rebuilt himself from pieces of the things he loved: not just literature and music but cinema, art, people, places. While the similarly well-read Bob Dylan preferred to veil his sources, Bowie made an exhibition of them – literally so at his touring museum show David Bowie Is, where some of his favourite books dangled from the ceiling like mobiles. He was the star-as-fan and his fandom was promiscuous. When LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy admitted that he had pillaged his hero’s back catalogue, Bowie replied graciously: “You can’t steal from a thief, darling.” In an interview in 1972, however, he was less cavalier. “Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all,” he lamented. “I’m just a collection of other people’s voices.” Continue reading...