Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

Nobody thought of this. Then they said it would never
work. Never pay off. David is someone who grasped
it instantly.”
In 2005, a full decade after their touring fiasco,
Morrissey still fuming perhaps from the Outside tour
debacle, told British GQ, “[He is] not the person he
was. He is no longer David Bowie at all. Now he
gives people what he thinks will make them happy,
and they’re yawning their heads off. And by doing
that, he is not relevant. He was only relevant by
accident.” By this time, however, relevance was no
longer the point. Trying to hold whatever percentage
of Trent Reznor’s audience he could manage night
after night seemed to be David Bowie’s final bid for
reaching a younger audience. He never stuck his
neck out there to that end in the same way again, as
the Rolling Stones and U2 continue to do, always in
pursuit of a hit single or an acknowledgment of pop
supremacy and competition-worthiness. Bowie
would bury himself once again in his fifties, as he
had in Thomas Jerome Newton and Berlin in his
thirties and Tin Machine in his fifties, but this time
he’d retreat inside the World Wide Web, a new
technology that he would turn into a sort of command
center before anyone else. The Web helped Bowie
the Buddhist sustain a sort of post-ambition state of
bliss, where he could remain constantly amused,
entertained and engaged. If anything, pop stardom
was limiting. From the close of the Outside tour, he
pursued whims and entertained offers such as
Bowie Bonds with his grace, taste and an organic