Lady Gaga dazzles at Grammys with glam David Bowie tribute

LOS ANGELES | Pop diva Lady Gaga stole the show at the Grammy Awards on Monday with an extravagant, multimedia David Bowie tribute that befitted the flamboyant rock legend, who died last month.

She blazed through the singer’s era-defining hits including “Space Oddity,” “Changes,” and “Ziggy Stardust,” accompanied on guitar by Nile Rodgers, who co-produced Bowie’s biggest selling album, “Let’s Dance.”

Gaga set the chaotic tone from the start, appearing in a bright orange wig with the trademark “Aladdin Sane” flash on her face, and affected an odd English accent as a huge spider was projected onto her face.

The singer, known for her brash outfits and sexual candor, is among the contemporary artists most obviously inspired by Bowie, the pioneer of glam rock.

She performed “Suffragette City,” “Rebel Rebel,” “Fashion,” “Fame,” “Under Pressure,” and “Let’s Dance” in front of a large LED wall, sporting pink eye shadow and a sparkly jumpsuit.

Gaga, born as Stefani Germanotta, won the longest ovation of the night at the Staples Center in Los Angeles as she finished the medley with “Heroes,” one of Bowie’s best-known songs.

The performance featured special effects provided by chip-maker Intel, including “digital make-up” projected onto her face that enabled her to take on a number of Bowie’s iconic looks without leaving the stage.

The company also provided a hologram of Bowie and a gold-colored piano with three robot arms that danced along to Gaga’s playing.

The music industry’s biggest night took place barely a month after the shocking death of Bowie, who over his half-century career became one of the most influential figures in pop culture.

The musician died on January 10 from a publicly undisclosed battle with cancer, two days after he released his final album, “Blackstar,” on his 69th birthday.

The headline-grabbing performance marked another tour de force for Lady Gaga who, since her rise to stardom nearly a decade ago, has delighted in provocative gestures and outfits, most notoriously a dress made of meat she wore to the MTV Video Music Awards in 2010.

At last year’s Oscars, she sang a medley of memorable tunes from “The Sound of Music” to mark the film’s 50th anniversary.

In December, she belted out an impressive rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” — in a tux and hat — at a concert in Las Vegas to mark what would have been the singing legend’s 100th birthday.

source: interaksyon.com

As bisexual alien, David Bowie broke barriers

NEW YORK | When David Bowie sang on British television in 1972, the newly famous rock star stretched out his arm and wrapped it around guitarist Mick Ronson.

Yet this was not a macho display of male bonding of the sort seen among sports teams. Bowie, his hair dyed deep orange and wearing a bright multicolor Lycra jumpsuit, gazed into Ronson’s eyes and for a brief moment oozed sensuality.

Bowie, who died Sunday at age 69 after a secret battle with cancer, had said he was gay. Then he said he was in fact bisexual. In the end, he offered his era’s equivalent of checking “none of the above.”

Bowie’s refusal to conform to neat boxes made Bowie an inspiration for successive generations of LGBTQ people, many of whom only recently have seen society accept more fluid concepts of gender and sexuality.

Bowie was able to chart a new identity because his persona was, literally, alien.

Fascinated by space, Bowie took on the alter ego of Ziggy Stardust, the androgynous rock-and-roll messenger for extraterrestrials.

Bowie was in character as Ziggy Stardust, performing “Starman,” during the 1972 appearance on Britain’s “Top of the Pops.”

Bowie’s death reminded many LGBTQ people of “that moment when we were all younger and alone without a sense of what other worlds were possible out there,” said Karen Tongson, an associate professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California.

“It was David Bowie and his chameleonic persona, his shifting identities, who allowed us to imagine being an alien between genders, being a goblin king, or whatever else.”

Bowie contributed to “the sense of being queer — of inhabiting, and moving fluidly, through a range of identities that aren’t necessarily solidified, or even a strict set of desires,” she said.

BOY OR GIRL?

Bowie, a trailblazer in music, film and fashion, also embraced androgyny in his lyricism.

On one of his most famous songs, 1974′s “Rebel, Rebel” which closed his glam rock phase, Bowie sang: “You’ve got your mother in a whirl / ’cause she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.”

Bowie kept up the gender ambiguity later in his career. In the hard-driving “Hallo Spaceboy,” off the 1995 album “Outside,” Bowie sings, “Don’t you want to be free? / Do you girls or boys? / It’s confusing these days.”

On his final album “Blackstar,” released on his 69th birthday on Friday as he was quietly dying, Bowie sings one song in Polari, the slang of the gay underground in late Victorian England.

Yet despite his iconic status for many in the LGBTQ community, Bowie was rarely overtly political in advocating for rights in the fashion of some of the artists he heavily influenced such as Madonna and Lady Gaga.

He was married twice, both times to women, with his relationship with Somali-born supermodel Iman lasting until his death.

While pop stars such as Elton John and George Michael played down their sexuality as they built their careers, Bowie hailed from a very different cultural space.

Bowie enjoyed massive success and influence but was always proudly a figure of the avant-garde rather than a mainstream entertainer.

He launched his career just as the gay liberation movement was picking up steam, with sex between men decriminalized in Britain in 1967.

DEFINED BY IMAGE

Yet for many people who idolized Bowie, his significance lay not in his statements but his aesthetic.

“David Bowie’s importance — at least in my life, and probably in the lives of most people — is, in a way, more important than the entire gay rights movement,” said songwriter Stephin Merritt, who is best known as the frontman of genre-spanning indie rockers The Magnetic Fields.

“Bowie is about the freedom to have any identity you want, not just gendered,” Merritt, who is gay, wrote in Out magazine.

“I didn’t grow up with a father at all; I didn’t have a father figure telling me how to approach gender, so I thought David Bowie was a perfectly good model of how to approach gender. And I still think so.”

Yet Bowie’s androgyny also influenced generations of straight male singers from synthpop to metal who aspired to a less rigid form of masculinity.

Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan, who is straight, has described a dreary working-class home until he saw Bowie on television.

“Bowie gave me a hope that there was something else,” Gahan later told a biographer. “I just thought he wasn’t of this earth.”

source: interaksyon.com