A Quote by Rob Sheffield

Just as Bowie, Zeppelin, etc., became rock stars by remaking themselves in the image of the California girls, the Go-Gos became rock stars by pretending to be the Buzzcocks and the Sex Pistols. Jane Wiedlin always said her biggest influence was growing up in L.A. as a Bowie girl.
There's this misconception that comedy and music go together. They don't. Comedians can't compete with rock stars; they're just not on the same level. Rock stars will always be cooler. They will always get more girls.
Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie and The Sex Pistols may come and go, but rebellion remains a key part of the rock n' roll experience. However, that rebellion - the outgrowth of a youthful search for independence and identity - doesn't always take the same form.
I have absolutely no interest in rock and roll. I'm just being David Bowie. Mick Jagger is rock and roll. I mean, I go out and my music is roughly the format of rock and roll, I use the chord changes of rock and roll, but I don't feel I'm a rock and roll artist. I'd be a terrible rock artist, absolutely ghastly.
You tend to put your rock stars on pedestals - they seem like they've been there for time immemorial. But you realize that the rock stars have their own rock stars. They were fans and kids once, too.
Rock and roll's relatively new, in the sense of the Fifties, Sixties, right? They invented the first sort of rock stars, and they took it to excess, and then the excess became bitter, tormented. Then it became okay to succeed.
I don't think we ever sat down in the early days and said "hey lets be a band that wears make up". I think it was just natural for us. We grew up loving stuff like Alice Cooper, Kiss, The Misfits, and the more theatrical stuff. I always loved rock stars. I loved David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and these people that were larger than life and iconic. I think that is what we always wanted to do.
That was exactly why people didn't want to give us any kind of life, because we were threatening their status quo, and they just didn't want to have room for girls playing rock 'n' roll. It bothered them. First, people just tried to get around it by saying, "Oh, wow, isn't that cute? Girls playing rock 'n' roll!," and when we said, "Yeah, right, this isn't a phase; it's what we want to do with our lives," it became, "Oh! You must be a bunch of sluts. You dykes, you whores." That's what it became. Then it became a name-calling contest.
My aunt made stuff; my mom was creative, so I was surrounded by that. When I moved to England, it was '75, and everything was happening. My whole teenage life is England, glam rock and David Bowie and Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop, all that stuff.
I have two sons, and at 16, they were into Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and a lot of British rock.
I didn't love David Bowie. Sure, I loved a lot of his songs, like everybody else, and, like everybody else, I had an incarnation of Bowie that I loved best - in my case, the solemn 'art-rock' Bowie of the late Seventies.
Rap is the new rock 'n' roll. We the real rock stars, and I'm the biggest of all of them. I'm the No. 1 rock star on the planet.
Rick Nielsen, Angus Young. Huge Eddie Van Halen fan when I was younger. Jimmy Page is an enormous one who impacts me. When you grow up with classic rock like that and then you get into punk rock, you defy your roots and where you came from. I never really went through that. Even when I started listening to the Clash or the Sex Pistols, I still always listened to Led Zeppelin or Kiss.
It's fun to look at people that are so good at acting that aren't actors, like David Bowie creating a mystique about rock n' roll. I've listened to 'Ziggy Stardust' as much as any rock n' roll fan - I don't really know what it's about, but it sure is fun to think about David Bowie as this mad creation.
The music became secondary to being rock stars.
In my creative life, David Bowie is definitely an enormous influence on me, being one of rock's greatest shapeshifters.
David Bowie emerged as a rock star in the late '60s. And as Ken Tucker wrote, "In the face of the hippy era's sincerity, intimacy and generosity, Bowie presented irony, distance and self-absorption. His song 'Changes' announced the arrival of a new counterculture," unquote.
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