Plumbing the Surface of Sound and Vision: David Bowie, Andy Warhol, and the Art of Posing

Two figures posed in the foreground, wearing nearly identical makeup—lipstick, eyeliner, base, rouge, and a thin penciled outline of the face. Their bare shoulders appear equally slight and sinewy; only the eyes, hair, and skin complexion mark their difference.

Fig. 1.

Front-cover photo for David Bowie’s Pin Ups (RCA). Photograph by Justin de Villeneuve/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

David Bowie’s 1973 album Pin Ups consists entirely of covers—his versions of songs originally recorded by other British bands between 1964 and 1967. Pin Ups is the last of Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” albums—three in all, which feature Bowie in the guise of an androgynous space-alien rock star along with a band called The Spiders from Mars.¹ The female model shown on the front album cover of Pin Ups is none other than Twiggy, the number-one pin-up girl of 1960s “swinging London” (see fig. 1). But Twiggy is made to look nearly like Ziggy (the rhyme of these names is not coincidental).² Or is it Bowie/Ziggy who is made to look nearly like Twiggy? Who is covering whom? Or as Judith Butler might ask rhetorically, which is the original and which the copy?³ This Butlerian question, which refers to heterosexual gender norms set over and against drag, is an appropriate one for the album cover, but less so for the album’s content. Although we may wish to trouble the concepts of “original” and “copy” in the realm of gender theory, in the realm of music and the history of the cover song these terms carry indisputable and sometimes material significance, such that probing the relationship between “original” and “copy” results in sharp distinctions rather than ambiguities.⁴ Cover songs were prevalent in the early years of rock and roll when recording practices colluded with the segregationist practices of format radio stations catering to regional white audiences. Songs recorded first by African American musicians were frequently re-recorded by white artists who bleached out the threatening blackness from the vocals and sanitized the lyrics while appropriating the rhythmic vigor, melodic inventiveness, and potential market share of the originals.⁵ As radio audiences and the music industry became more integrated, cover songs came to signify both individual interpretation and homage to a past or peer musician. Some covers, such as Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” have reached canonical status. The Hendrix “Watchtower” brought together two of rock’s most vaunted and archetypal figures—an African American guitar virtuoso and a white rebellious iconoclast—in a monumental blues ballad that neatly redressed the early, more pernicious history of cover songs.⁶

None of the cover songs on Bowie’s Pin Ups achieved canonical status; in fact, the album has been mostly dismissed as a pointless filler released while Bowie was shifting to a new persona and a new backup band.⁷ Yet we can also read this album as the apogee of his Ziggy Stardust period—indeed, his statement on the image-making of rock stardom. With the title Pin Ups and his pose with Twiggy, David Bowie invites the listener to think of these songs not just as covers but also as visual objects, as images designed for idolization. He places himself in the role of consumer and fan as much as creator or interpreter.

Two cans of Campbell’s Soup, one depicted in a tight close-up, the other in a long shot, both floating in the same blank background, isolated only by the thin vertical line formed by the physical separation of the two painted panels. Flatness in one frame combines with an illusion of space, a bid for a depth of field, in the other.

Fig. 2.

Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans (Chicken with Rice, Bean with Bacon), 1962. Casein and pencil on linen, 19 3/4 × 16 in. each. Copyright © 2012 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual...