Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
This is how weird the Internet is. Life is pretty weird too, come to think of it.
In my capacity as publisher of Blogcritics and Technorati I get a boatload of press releases every day, which I process and send on to our many and various writers. It’s fun and interesting, if also quite time consuming.
Today I got a press release about a rock ‘n’ roll awards show in Las Vegas put on by Vegas Rocks! magazine. Given that the only rock band I can immediately think of from Vegas is The Killers, this is a somewhat marginal endeavor. “Stars” lending wattage to the show include Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead, James Kottak from The Scorpions, Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple, Flavor Flav, and Dee Snider. As far as I know, none of these personages are from Vegas, and as bitchin as this superannuated retinue of rockers might be, they are no longer cutting edge.
So I’m casually reading this press release and I see that Zowie Bowie is going to be there. “Zowie Bowie,” I thought. You mean David and Angie Bowie’s son who was celebrated in Bowie’s classic song “Kooks,” attended Oberlin University, west of Cleveland, where in the early ’90s I met father and son in the school field house where they were attending a Pixies/Pere Ubu concert?
The Zowie Bowie who was called “Joey” once his father came out of his ’70s drug dementia, who later changed his name to Duncan Jones, and is now a celebrated filmmaker, whose ’09 sci-fi film Moon expresses allegorical alienation from his estranged mother, the bizarre Angie?
Well no, actually. Zowie Bowie is in fact a Vegas pop act/band fronted by the glittery duo of Chris Phillips (who looks a bit like Let’s Dance-era Bowie) and Marley Taylor (who looks nothing at all like Angie).
The effrontery! It’s like a polka band calling themselves “Moon Zappa.” Okay, back to my press releases.
