Bowie’s 1979 SNL Performance

It’s probably a useless exercise to try to mark David Bowie’s artistic apotheosis within the limits of the Gregorian Calendar. But if we’re doing the exercise, pinpointing Bowie’s peak to a year, a good argument could be made for 1979. In May of that year, Lodger, the final album in Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, the album cycle which started his iconic collaborations with Brian Eno, was released. When describing Lodger to RAM in June 1979, Bowie classified the album as “definitely Bowie pop.” By this year, Bowie had become the singular artist we remember him for. His self-referential categorization was not audacious; he was, himself, piloting and producing an idiosyncratic interpretation of pop music.

On December 15th, 1979, Bowie was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. In typical Bowie fashion, he bid adieu to the 70s, welcoming in a new decade through a playfully somber surrealist performance. Klaus Nomi, a German countertenor known as the ‘singing alien,’ and performance artist Joey Arias, literally supported the performance; as the opening guitar plays for “The Man Who Sold the World,” they carry Bowie, seemingly immobilized by the confinements of his costume—a molded plastic body repainted to look like a Vaudeville suit— to the mic. Inspired by Tristan Tzara’s formative Dada-ist cabaret performances and the costumes in his 1923 play Le Cœur à gaz, sartorial changes delineate Bowie’s SNL performance.

For the last song, Bowie’s use of costume for performance art through self-transformation peaks; he is a humanized puppet, with a bare life-sized marionette’s body and an oversized head made possible through a green screen. If you are in need of a performance that embodies the true artistry of pop stars, one which historically reconfigured the limits of musical performance on television, this is necessary viewing.