Roxy Fascism

David Bowie survived his period of sieg hailing on stage more or less unscatched, I'm sure Bryan Ferry will be forgiven these twittish remarks:

"The Nazis knew how to put themselves in the limelight and present themselves. I'm talking about the films of Leni Riefenstahl and the buildings of Albert Speer and the mass marches and the flags – just fantastic. Really beautiful."

Spoken to Welt Am Sonntag in praise of the Nazi aesthetic. Ferry also admitted to that gazette that he's named his London recording studio (which might be located on the site where Luftwaffe bombs once fell) the Fuhrerbunker.

Well, it took Marks & Spencer, the posh clothing line whose duds Ferry hawks, no time at all to consider bidding Auf wiedersehen to the former Roxy Music frontman, even as England's Jewish leaders swiftly and commendably accepted his apology, which came with the explanation that he in no way was endorsing the ethos of National Socialism. (Say what you will about the architectural cohesiveness of nihilism, Dude.)

Now I happen to dig Ferry's music and even more his style, and I'm a firm believer in the odd case of verbal diarrhea not unmaking a lifetime of pleasant accomplishment. (Imus was different: his case wasn't odd and there was clear malice in what he said.) Furthermore, I understand Ferry's point while still appreciating how idiotic it was to air in an interview with the German press, which I'm surprised even printed the quotation.

In the underrated 2002 film Max, the Jewish Weimar-era art dealer Max Rothman, played by John Cusack, comments on the allure of the deranged young painter Adolf Hitler's kitsch daubings. Hitler regurgitates the military uniformity of imperial Rome for the age of anxiety. On canvas, his work seems more like a modernist cartoon: undifferentiated Aryan soldiers parading around a gleaming industrial metropole. This kind of artwork was the inverted image of socialist realism, and would have gone the same way as that unsmiling genre — into ridicule and then postmodern celebration — if the Third Reich hadn't turned its parody-ready symbolism into practicable ideology. Ferry was 70 years too late to make a judgment of "taste" with respect to Nazi iconography; taste has been overwhelmed by the moral indecency of what the icons stood for.

Ferry's type is pretty well recognizable. He's a glam-rocker channeling the leisure class wastrel. His stage presence has always been about rumpled evening wear and a carefully mussed forelock (where the hell do you summer, Robert Palmer?). He appreciates the finer things in life, like Bollinger and a well-tailored suit and the novels of P.G. Wodehouse. In keeping with those almost self-perpetuating characteristics, Ferry can be expected to have feathers in his head when it comes to grasping the horrors of history, or grasping how to talk about them, anyway. Wodehouse, remember, paid a high price for his notorious broadcasts on German radio as an involuntary guest of the Gestapo. The creator of Bertie Wooster knew evils of fascism not at all; it was the old feudal spirit that got him going in the morning.

Ferry was once rejected from the recherché Courtauld Institute of Art, a biographical fact that puts me instantly in mind of his intellectual better in pop music: David Byrne, graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, haunter of Arts & Letters Daily, and PowerPoint virtuoso. Byrne would have known better.

So for the singer of "Avalon" and the bedder of Jerry Hall, I think it can be firmly stated that his frivolous ways got the better of him. He was in the birthplace of Bauhaus and philosophical idealism and wanted to sound profound. He ended up sounding pretentious and sinister instead.