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When I heard the tragic news that David Bowie had died on Monday morning, I obviously tearfully thought of all classic albums, and his famous film performances, and his contributions to worlds or art, fashion and technology. But my mind also turned to my very favourite Bowie moment, and in a way one of the weirdest things he ever did: his cameo in the 2009 Vanessa Hudgens vehicle Bandslam.
Bowie’s screen career is almost on par with his musical one. He worked with the likes of Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, David Lynch Nicolas Roeg, and Jim Henson—some of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Already being a megastar in another field meant that he could choose to only do things worthy of David Bowie. Not everything film did is a masterpiece, but even his lesser works are fascinating. Extended cameos as larger than life characters like Andy Warhol or Nikola Tesla. Style over substance German art dramas, and strange rock & roll musicals. Doing a voice on Spongebob Squarepants back when it was still subversive. Hell, even the Zoolander cameo shows good taste.
So what the hell is he doing in a Vanessa Hudgens teen musical? I have no fucking clue why. But I’m so glad he did. Let’s be clear here, I’m not hating on Bandslam. I actually quite like it, it’s enjoyable piece of teen movie crap. It dropped a year after High School Musical 3, and was basically just another teen musical intended to keep Hudgen’s tween brand rolling on a while longer. It’s a standard ‘battle of the bands’ movie, with Hudgens and her friends entering in a local music contest, and it plays out totally as it you’d expect it to. It goes for the Rocky 1 ending, where they don’t win the competition, but they learn something about themselves, and isn’t that the true victory? So far, so standard, right?
But then camera phone footage of the band goes viral, and in the last couple of minutes of the movie we cut to David Bowie, sitting in a coffee shop, checking his MySpace. Yes, it’s 2009, and Bowie still has a MySpace account. Somehow, whilst flicking through his Top 8, he comes across Vanessa Hudgen’s bland pop-punk songs, and he’s so moved by them that he emails them saying: “I really like your band. You know, I’m starting an indie label.” Yup, the surprise happy ending is that the Thin White Duke is picking this random-ass high school band out of nowhere to give them a co-sign.
It’s so weird. Bowie is meant to be playing himself, but this isn’t Bowie. Bowie was a freak, an innovator, a genius, he was larger than life. He gave MTV shit in the 80s for not playing black music, and he was raving about the internet in 1998. He never stopped evolving. Yet here, he’s a cuddly old guy in a coffee shop, that’s still on MySpace five years after everyone stopped using it. He’s thinking of “starting an indie label”. You know how sometimes celebrities play really over-the-top, horrible versions of themselves, like in Seth Rogen and James Franco in This Is The End, or Neil Patrick Harris in the Harold & Kumar films? I’d like to think it’s like that, but instead of going over the top, the ultimate parody of David Bowie is to make him a naïve dad-rock guy. He’s impressed by the most average of high school bands. If it’s intentional, it’s utterly genius.
Bowie choosing to appear in the most anodyne piece of mainstream fluff possible is actually one of the strangest things he ever did. It’s not even like it was a massive film or anything. Like if he’d been in an Adam Sandler movie or something, you could say he was just doing it for the money. But no, Bandslam was flop and is already totally forgotten, only five years later. It’s like he’d gone on an Andy Warhol-like quest to find the most disposable, most ephemeral, blandest thing possible. I like to think it was intentional. It's the sort thing the artist in Bowie might have done. Maybe, had he lived, his next reinvention would have been as a Disney Channel Original Movie star. Bowie, ever the chameleon. Always two steps ahead.
Somehow, Bowie made it work. Rest in peace, and I hope they have MySpace in Heaven.