Opening the second half of David Bowie’s Lodger album, D.J. was the first in a run of five songs on the record to critique Western society – in this instance, changes in celebrity culture at the end of the 70s. “Time flies when you’re having fun,” Bowie sings on the song’s bridge, as if looking back over the decade he’d shaped in his own image. But while The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars had confirmed Bowie as the archetypal rock star in 1972, by 1979 a new kind of pop-culture icon had begun to emerge.
“You look at the DJ and wonder what he does, or why he became a DJ,” Bowie said of the song’s inspiration, in an interview with New York City radio station WNEW-FM. Imagining the nightclub disc-jockey as a recently unemployed figure both trapped by and seeking transcendence in his role as enabler of escapism, Bowie – who, born David Jones, shared his birth initials with his protagonist’s job title – took a look at fame through the DJ’s eyes. Arguably, it didn’t differ all that much from his own experience…
Listen to the best of David Bowie here.
The inspiration: “It was a kind of pastiche thing that one thinks up in a disco”
“This is somewhat cynical, but it’s my natural response to disco,” Bowie said of D.J. while talking to Melody Maker magazine ahead of Lodger’s release. After groups such as Bee Gees and Chic helped make disco music a global phenomenon with the Saturday Night Fever movie and dancefloor-filling songs such as Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah) and Good Times, the genre had begun to experience a backlash: Chicago DJ Steve Dahl had launched the “Disco Sucks” campaign, culminating in Disco Demolition Night, during which an estimated 50,000 people gathered at Comiskey Park baseball stadium on 12 July 1979, to burn disco records as part of a promotional stunt between games.
Bowie, who had embraced soul and funk music just a few years earlier with his Young Americans album, and would soon enlist disco architect Nile Rodgers to co-produce 1983’s Let’s Dance, wasn’t about to dismiss an entire style out of hand. Having recently laid the blueprint for the rising new-wave scene, however, his “natural response” to disco was to create a warped dance track that shared more with Talking Heads than KC And The Sunshine Band, and which scratched at the surface of the nightclub’s central figure: the disc jockey.
“It was just a sort of a kind of pastiche thing that one thinks up in a disco, really,” he told WNEW-FM.
