Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox Talks About His Lifelong Love of "Beautiful," "Christ-Like" David Bowie
Photo by Matt Lief Anderson
Late in the day yesterday, we spoke with Deerhunter and Atlas Sound’s Bradford Cox about the death of David Bowie. Bowie has been an enormous influence on Cox’s life. He expounded on the legacy the man left him personally and to the world at large.
First of all, who cares what I have to say about David Bowie? I’ve been reading all of these amazing tributes written by people who actually knew him and I feel kind of weird talking about it, but I’m very honored to be asked. Honestly, I got more texts and phone calls about Bowie’s death than I did back when I got hit by a car, which is oddly flattering because it just means that people that know me also know how much I loved him.
There’s no question. There’s nobody that’s had a bigger influence on my entire life—not just on the way I make music, but also the way I think and feel about things—than David Bowie. I literally wouldn’t do what I do if it weren’t for him…and looking back, there’s honestly not a part of my life that can’t be somehow defined by whatever David Bowie record I was listening to at the time. I can’t really say that about any other artist. I mean, if I want to relive my childhood and young adulthood I can basically just listen to the Sound + Vision box set.
Bowie is kind of Christ-like in that his influence and his charisma doesn’t diminish over the years, it only strengthens and becomes more powerful—more important—with the passing of time. Even though his death is pretty unbearable, I can’t help but think and hope that seeing his life become front page news all over the world will inspire young kids that might not know much about his work to start digging back into his discography and find all of the stuff in his art that they can apply to their own lives…and then go out and make some amazing art of their own.
We need Bowie. Our culture needs him now more than ever. As a musician, he is a kind of perpetual beacon. I’ll often ask myself when I’m working on a record, What would David Bowie do? He had this ability to explore his influences and things that fascinated him and somehow photograph them through his special Bowie lens and create something totally startling and new.
It’s funny, last year when we were making Fading Frontier I started to revisit Young Americans, which previously had never really been one of my favorites. I always preferred the records where he was sort of channeling something alien and darker and more strange—and that record just never felt that way to me. Maybe I just wasn’t the right age or it wasn’t the right time yet for me to really understand it, but now when I hear that record it just blows my mind. He can’t just simply interpret soul music the way most people might try to, he turns it into something angular and modernist and Bowie-like. It really speaks to me now in a way it didn’t before, which is also kind of the story of the way all of his records have functioned in my life. In the past 12 months I’ve listened to the song “Win” more than any other song in the world—the melancholy, the drama, the noir-ishness of the whole thing. That song is like a glove for my brain.
No other artist has made music that has revealed itself to me over time the way that his music has. He is the master painter…and I’m like the student over in the corner trying to learn something from him and paint my own tiny little canvas.
Also, I love that Bowie sort of vacillated between being totally glamorous or often projecting this very vulnerable—and not always attractive—sense of fragility. He had that crazy alabaster, milk, and cocaine white skin, he was thin and could look really bony and frail, but he knew how to make all of that look good. He was beautiful. I would look at pictures of him and feel like maybe I also had something I could work with, you know? He made a lot of people feel better about themselves.
I keep hearing a lot of people say things like “David Bowie made it OK to just be yourself”…and while I think that’s a great sentiment, it feels a little off to me. David Bowie was the guy that made it OK for you to be your ideal self—your imagined self, your self in space, your self as a superman. I love him for that.
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