Analysis Of David Bowie's Salutation To Glitter Rock '

The song I have chosen for this project is David Bowie’s salutation to Glitter Rock (Glam Rock), “Rebel Rebel”, released on the 1974 album “Diamond Dogs”. This essay aims to give some observations into the phonic elements of the song and how these are pertinent to the social, economic and technological context in which it was produced and released, underlining the its connection with its musical genre.
David Bowie is a British rock personality, well renowned for his chameleon-like artistic transformations. Born in London on the 8th of January 1947 as David Jones, he subsequently changed his name to Bowie (inspired from the infamous Bowie knife) to avoid confusion with his namesake Davy Jones of the group The Monkees.
Bowie has always been
“Diamond Dogs” was originally intended to be a theatre version of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty Four” but apparently his widow did not allow this to become a reality, therefore Bowie ended up assimilating it into his larger distorted version of a post apocalyptic world (Hogan, 2012). The album was recorded in the United Kingdom and Holland in 1973/74 and it was fundamentally produced by David Bowie himself and by Tony Visconti, whom Bowie reunited to work with from this moment onwards for the next decade, for the 1974 release on RCA (Trynka,
The up-tempo 4/4 stomping drum beat only variation happens at the very moment when it is briefly withdrawn to leave space for the main hook. The guitar riff is one of the kinds that sticks right into the listener’s mind never to leave again and consolidates the track as a swaggering and razor-sharp rock classic. According to guitarist Alan Parker, who was credited with the last three descending notes of the guitar loop (Ab, D and E), Bowie apparently came up with the catchy Rolling Stones-style riff to upset Mick Jagger, whom he had an obsession with. Although Bowie is renowned for grabbing ideas from other artists, it seems somewhat implausible that the Stones came up with the original and held it for themselves, instead of unleashing it onto the world’s audience. (Pegg, 2011). In the UK version of “Rebel Rebel”, fairly longer than its US counterpart, the guitar riff loops itself well over four minutes and it is dropped only in the two bridges, and at the end of every chorus. Bowie recounts a curious anecdote about the famous riff in a hotel where he was staying. He says that someone in a nearby room was ‘slaughtering’ the “Rebel Rebel” riff in a very amateurish style so much so that he felt compelled to knock on his neighbours’ door to teach him how to play it properly, only to discover that it was the famous tennis player John McEnroe