On Tin Machine
Bowie's answer was indeed confrontational. Enjoyable to some, indulgent to others. Tin Machine was a noisy, back to basics band, in which Bowie played the part of one of the boys.
A 1989 interview
Bowie:It was a question of finding the right kind of music that really didn't have too much orchestration about it. And the easiest kind of music to become free on, cuz it only has 2 or 3 chords, is rock and roll. Otherwise if it started getting too chordy or arranged it wouldn't be anything like what we wanted to do. Because we wanted to put our own individual personalities into what we were playing, and it was very important that the structure was as loose as possible so that everyone could improvise to a certain extent on what we were doing.
End of 1989 interview
Bowie:Alot of what I do is in fact very simple. It's just that my choices are very diffeent to other people. If there's any continuity about what I do, it's that we live--and I have always felt--that we've lived in a philosophic area of fragmentation. That we don't...the absolutes never were convincing to me.
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