Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

pop culture. Bowie was coming up with ideas to
save the music industry ten years ago, while Edgar
Bronfman and other major-label execs were doing
the twist. If they’d clicked on his website a decade
ago, maybe the music industry wouldn’t be so
screwed.”
In 2007 at the eleventh annual Webby Awards,
which honor excellence in Internet innovations,
Bowie was granted a lifetime achievement award.
Bowie attended the ceremony and made fun of the
award show’s traditional rule of limiting recipients’
speeches to five words. He took to the podium and
quipped into the mic, “I only get five words?”
And then he was off again.
I
never interviewed David Bowie for Spin magazine,
where I was on staff between the winter of 1997,
when I was twenty-eight, and the spring of 2006. My
behavior at that magazine and my identity as a
music writer was mostly derived from my Bowie-ist
nature. I wore sunglasses wherever I went, inside
and outside. They were ridiculous aviator-style
frames with red lenses. I dangled a lit cigarette from
my lips, inside and outside as well, before and after
the New York City smoking ban. My look was not
modeled on Bowie; as I said before, I’d determined
the futility of that back in 1983. It was modeled on
Nick Kent, or footage I’d seen of Nick Kent, with his
scrawny frame and leather jacket and drawled,