“My name is Nathan Adler”: David Bowie’s performances through his characters

Abstract

In over forty years David Bowie became one of the most remarkable artists in pop culture. A noteworthy characteristic in his construction as a pop artist is the creation of characters that sometimes seem to take the musician’s place, working almost as a mask. Seeing media as sites for “strategic intervention” and the importance of technological mediation in the construction of a performance, my goal in this article is to understand how the music album as a cultural form is embedded in these processes through the presentation and discussion of three of the characters Bowie created: Ziggy Stardust, from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the Thin White Duke, present in Station to Station and Nathan Adler, the main character in 1. Outside’s plot.

Keywords: performance, music album, David Bowie.