Among the points the internet has in its favor is the way it organically remembers random artifacts of our pop culture. A few years ago, someone uploaded to YouTube a clip from Bing Crosby’s 1977 Christmas special for CBS. In the clip, Crosby sings a version of “The Little Drummer Boy” with, of all people, a normal-looking David Bowie.
Bowie, who died Sunday at his home in New York, was at the time a major rock star with several hit singles and 12 studio albums under his belt. He was at the height of his creative abilities, and as much of his career was ahead of Bowie as it was behind him. Crosby, on the other hand, was literally on his way out, the special taped just a month before the legendary crooner’s own death. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been the new anything,” Crosby jokes before he joins Bowie at the piano.
While Crosby sings the familiar lines of the song, Bowie sings in counterpoint a different melody and lyrics he co-wrote. The resulting track, “Peace on Earth/ The Little Drummer Boy,” became a Christmas hit five years later when Bowie released it, and their version has become a holiday staple in its own right. What’s striking in the video of their 1977 performance is how respectfully Bowie looks to Crosby as they sing. The face-painting androgynous glam rocker was clearly enjoying standing with an elder statesman of pop music.
In reality, the real Bowie wasn’t Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane or the Thin White Duke—he was David Bowie, consummate pop musician and songwriter closer to the Crosby mold than anyone might have realized.
Yes, Bowie was a musical experimenter, reinventing himself and his songs with every album. More than any other pop star, he developed and expanded on the idea of creating a persona to separate himself from the music, inspiring acts from KISS to Lady Gaga. And there is plenty from the Bowie catalogue that pushes the envelope in popular music, and plenty more that’s just plain weird.
But at the core of all of Bowie’s mainstream hits was an almost conservative devotion to familiar pop sensibility. It’s telling that his first notable single, 1969’s “Space Oddity,” is the most non-traditional Bowie hit, with its roller-coaster melody, circular structure, and stop-start elements. Over the next two decades, he would hew more closely to the pop form even as he appeared to be increasingly unconventional and unpredictable.
Bowie was a master at writing hooks, the kind that stay in your head forever (see “Under Pressure,” “China Girl,” “Rebel Rebel,” and “The Man Who Sold the World”). He had wide range that spanned the pop tradition, from loud rockers like “Suffragette City” to dance songs like “Let’s Dance” and pop ballads like “Starman”. He was also a remarkable lyricist, penning some of rock’s most infectious lines. “Time may change me, but you can’t trace time,” he sings in “Changes.” The first verse of “Young Americans” is a gem:
Like many of the British rock stars who came of age in the 1950’s, Bowie had a deep appreciation for music from America. “The Jean Genie” is Muddy Waters for the glam set, following the standard 12-bar-blues structure Bowie employed in several of his songs. His cover of Crosby-wannabe Johnny Mathis’s “Wild is the Wind” is sublime. Nearly all of his entire mid-1970’s output is a uniquely Bowie take on soul music, and he was even hip to funk music early (well, early for a white musician.)
So while tributes and remembrances of Bowie have rightly focused on the innovation he brought to popular music, it’s worth considering his radical approach was a ruse, accouterments to dress up what was essentially good, old-fashioned pop music.
