The fruits of their creativity couldn’t be streamed to a mobile device, but nor were they simply commodified for a global marketplace.
If they fell to earth, the welfare state safety net was there to catch them. Their talents were nurtured by expanded opportunities to learn and study.
#The promise of another tomorrow quotes full#
Full employment allowed young men and women to travel up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to new forms of self-expression. The flowering of social liberalism in the 1960s and 1970s was the product of the success of post-war Keynesianism.
But like most artists, his talents were nurtured in collaboration with others and born of particular historical circumstances. Most of the commentary on Bowie’s life has been romantic in nature that is, it has attributed his remarkable oeuvre to a singular, creative genius. He was helping catalyse the liberation in the politics of sexual identity that would unfold in the 1970s. When he famously threw his arms round Mick Ronson’s shoulders on Top of the Pops, he was doing more than advertising his bisexuality. But more often it was his artistry in self-reinvention that opened up new modes of cultural expression or brought shooting up to the surface deeper social trends. Sometimes he would simply grasp the importance of a trend, as when he understood that the arrival of the internet would transform the economics of the music industry and the relationship between artists and audiences. It neatly captures one of his most important talents: to intuit the future and draw it forward into the popular culture of the present. “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming”, was the slogan David Bowie coined to promote Heroes, the second instalment of his great Berlin album trilogy.
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