Accelerationism: David Bowie & Looking for a Better Future

(In)Famously, David Bowie described Adolf Hitler as "the first rockstar". The comment came in the mid-70s, when Bowie - as the 'The Thin White Duke' - had a flirtation with fascism and its aesthetics. This fascination, arguably, culminated in the seminal album Station to Station, which adopts a brutalist approach both visually and sonically. There's an industrial grittiness, a gaunt austerity to the project. Yet, there are flashes of intimacy and self-reflection amid the stark and the bleak. Word on a Wing, other than being one of Bowie's favourite vocal performances (and mine), is achingly earnest. A ray of light poking out of a monochromatic album. This thematic thread is followed up a few years later, following Bowie's move to Berlin, in the production of Heroes. The eponymous track off that record is one of the Top 5 greatest songs ever made. I've been to Hansa Studios, where it was recorded -- it's nestled on a backstreet in an industrial area that is now fastly being gentrified. Back in the 70s, Berlin was the perfect context for Bowie to create in. It was post-fascist, modest, fragmented --vivid in artistic experimentation and expression. The vibrant Berlin art scene was, in effect, a response to Nazism -- in the same way that Weimar Germany had a cultural renaissance following the abdication of the Kaiser after World War I. Not to mention, the city was stratified along geopolitical borderlines as part of the postwar reconstruction of Germany initiative. The Wall, and what it represented, is directly referenced in the song Heroes.

The blossoming of connection under oppression was at the forefront of Bowie's mind in this period, including his dalliance with fascist aesthetics. Around this time, Bowie stated that he believed a new, radical form of fascism had to take over in order to usher in a kind of utopian liberalism. This idea is very Hegelian, dialectical, and is arguably a prototypical form of political accelerationism that would become popularised by figures like Nick Land decades later. I think it also elucidates, to some degree, why David Bowie's Thin White Duke emerged in the mid-70s. Bowie himself was self-reflexively working through the thesis-antithesis dialectic of fascism vs liberalism as an act of real-time performance art. While contentious, and debatably problematic from the standpoint of the mid-2020s, it is admittedly such a ballsy attempt at genuine political-artistic discourse that I have to implicitly respect it.

On the flipside of that, though, we have Mister Kanye West. Full disclosure -- there's a few Kanye albums that I absolutely love, but I am horrified at how his inner circle of sycophants has failed to look after him in recent years. I am of course talking about West's "I am a Nazi" thing. Now, I do think this is ultimately an awful and (very) public manifestation of Kanye's untreated bipolar disorder, and the support system around him is incapable of reigning him in when he's manic. I do not think Kanye is a fascist, not in any real sense, but neither do I think this was a form of performance art akin to Bowie's Thin White Duke.

However, it is interesting that famous artists equate themselves with fascism and fascist leaders. Especially rockstars. We've already discussed Bowie, but there was another attempt at what he was trying to accomplish in the mid-70s -- Pink Floyd's The Wall. By a mile, my least favourite of the Floyd's discography -- as I don't think it's really a Pink Floyd album, it's a Roger Waters solo project that the band were essentially session players on (but, we did get David Gilmour's solo on Comfortably Numb, so...). However, the movie version of the project is -- in my view, the best form of it. Set to the album as a continuous soundtrack, and uses a blend of live-action and animation to create a socio-political rock opera about postwar Britain, and its lurch to fascism. In the film, Pink -- the protagonist, a drug-addicted mentally ill rockstar -- envisions himself as a fascist leader. False idolatry was rife in this period of rock -- presciently called by Lennon in the 60s when he controversially claimed that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus (but, he was actually just pointing out how absurd Beatlemania was getting). Therefore, it's not a leap to suggest that the more self-aware artists wanted to comment on how much cultural power they were (wrongfully) being ascribed at the time of the mid-70s. Both the Floyd and Bowie seemed to view fascism as almost an innate part of the human condition, rousing in times of strife -- times in which we usually regress into tribalism. Bowie, for his part, seemed to view fascism as an organic part of the historical materialist process -- though, I don't think he was politically a Marxist.

I want to draw back to what Bowie said about fascism being capable of ushering in higher forms of liberalism. I disagree with this idea, but it is interesting that we are getting to test this hypothesis RIGHT NOW. A radical left-wing political movement is shaping up in the West, embodied by Mamdani's mayoral win in NYC and the Greens gaining traction here in the UK -- especially following their win this week in Gorton and Denton with the election of Hannah Spencer to Parliament.

This left-wing movement is a counter to the techno-neofascists that have compromised the Trump administration and have spread like a cancer in the geopolitical West. It's taking shape and gaining definition -- people like Yanis Varoufakis are helping to frame the intellectual and political conversations that are pertinent right now, and grassroots enthusiasm for left-wing alternatives are teeming with enthusiasm in Europe.

Here we have a dialectic. Thesis -- Trump, and neofascism -- and antithesis -- left-wing populism. The reconcilliation (the synthesis), in a Hegelian sense, between these polar opposites will coalesce into the 21st century's new status quo, and may completely redefine our politics for generations to come. Maybe, just maybe, Bowie was right. If we step on the pedal toward a fascist brick wall, maybe we'll crash the car bad enough that we wake up to Zack Polanski performing CPR on us.

Kidding aside, all things must pass. While it may seem that the fascists have won as of right now, it's important to remember that the sun shines on the just and unjust. This will end -- and I think it's best to work and look for a better future, rather than dwell on the growing pains of today.