USA Today October 4, 1999 TURNING TO FACE THE CHANGE- Rock's original space oddity leads a revolution in cyberspace by- Edna Gunderson, USA Today NEW YORK- Nearly 30 years ago, David Bowie was provoking pop culture as The Man Who Sold the World. Today, he's gaining a reputation as the man who sold the World Wide Web. A fabled chameleon and rock visionary, Bowie is also pioneering music's role in the internet revolution. "Hours...," in stores today, has been available for download since Sept. 21 on Bowie's elaborate Web site (www.davidbowie.com), the gateway to BowieNet, his Internet service provider. One Track, "What's Really Happening?," sprang from an on-line songwriting contest and was recorded during a live cybercast. Anyone who has tracked Bowie's cosmic career from 1969's Space Oddity to 1997's Earthling won't be suprised to find rock's otherworldly icon hurtling down the information super highway at warp speed. It's lonley in the fast lane, where success is measured in hundreds of downloads vs. millions of retail transactions, but Bowie foresees a colossal traffic jam. "It's impractical at the moment because so few people have he necessary bandwidth and programs necessary to download an album," Bowie says. "But, mark my words, this is where the consumer industry is going. We are not going back to record companies and through shops. Within five years, it will have morphed so spectaculary that no one will recognize the music business." Skeptics will be trampled in the stampede, he says. Luddites, tighten your buggy harness and hang on. "The Internet, and all it represents, is growing exponentially," he says. "There is no way this tide can be halted, and naybody who feels this is a fad is living on another planet." Ziggy Stardust ought to know. Never one to shrink from ch-ch-changes, Bowie hails the approcahing year 2000 as a trigger from progress. "We'll see as dramatic a change as the turnover from 1899 to 1900," says Bowie, 52, looking simulatneously modern and retro in a lush gray sweater and slicked-back long hair. "We're going to have an extraordinary time the next few years. Something about the impetus of going into a new age makes people think faster and want to move along. A psychological engine is set into motion. It's so cool to see the seeds of the next 100 years being planted right now. We have no idea what will grow. It could be something from Little Shop of Horrors." Not everyone shares Bowie's enthusiasm, and some have thwarted his attempts to lay down the blueprint for pop's cyber-rebellion. Virgin records initially green-lighted a proposed Internet-only live album, then balked as the '99 release date neared. Bowie agreed to a delay. A rebel's rebel, Bowie is leading the charge into cyberspace as technophobes, including many of his colleagues, recoil, fearing such fallout as rampant piracy. He points to the upside: The Internet's global reach and limitless capacity liberate prolific artists "If I write 50 songs in a year, I know I'll get backlogged and frusterated," says Bowie, noting that major labels, reluctant to flood the market, restrict output and dictate timetables. "If I have to wait another year, I'll lose intrest." His solution? Albums a la carte. Bowie envisions offering 45 second samples of dozens of songs on line and inviting users to download a customized CD. Such a move would allow artists to upload a vast output and ignore such parameters as the CD's 75-minute cutoff and a label's demand for radio-friendly singles. Though Bowie tends to lurk in his own chat rooms ("You have to get your ego in place, because it's all there, from absolute adoring fandom to bitter vitriol"), he's no cybergeek. Who has time? He's chatting at 9 ET/6 PT tonight at Yahoo! On Saturday, he'll join the NetAid lineup at London's Wembley Stadium, one of three overlapping concerts to promote a Net-driven campaign against global poverty. He's the artist of the month on VH1, which premires Bowie's Storytellers episode at 10 pm ET/PT Oct. 18 preceded by a Legends encore at 9. Though Bowie has taken on extra-cirricular activities- he's producing the Los Angeles run of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and stars in the urban-warfare film Everybody Loves Sunshine, opening Dec. 3- music ranks first. Today the focus is his 23rd solo album, a throwback to Hundy Dory days. More real then surreal, "Hours..." departs from the avant-garde sonic collage of 1995's Outside and drum-and-bass exercises on 1997's Earthling. Written and recorded in Bermuda with longtime guitarist Reeves Gabrels, "Hours..." fulfilled parallel missions: It's a musical catalog of life's losses and regrets and a soundtrack for an upcoming computer game, The Nomad's Soul. Abandoning improvisation, Bowie penned songs the old fashioned way. "Simple things said plainly was the idea," he says. "I wanted the feeling of somebody my age looking back to his youth. It's an inventory of one's life." Not necessarly Bowie's. Though his past informs some passages, the experiences of friends and contempories inspired the latter-day musings. That's because Bowie's recent life has been too, well, hunky-dory. "I am an extremely lucky and happy man," he says. "I have a wonderful relationship. I'm fulfilled in my work. I feel very comfertable with my exsistance now. And I didn't want the album's character to be like that. There is nothing worse than hearing, 'Hey, my life is cool!' I tend to buy, not necessarly dark albums, but ones with loose ends." Formally pop's gender-bending outcast, Bowie derives his present nonconformist status from his fairytale romance, a space oddity in today's galaxy of divorce, dysfunctional marriage and no-strings sex. Deliriously in love with Somalian-born model Iman, his wife since 1992, Bowie feels estranged from a generation schooled in free love. An iron commitment is necessary "before a relationsip becomes anything of worth," Bowie says. "If that foundation isn't there from the word go, there is nothing to reference throughout the relationship. I think my generation was told in the '60s that commitment isn't needed, and that's worn away a moral dicipline. Commitment isn't a Victorian concept. It's not a '50s thing. If you want to share your lives, that kind of real promise to each other has to be kept. So what can I say? It works." Rock's quick-change artist, famed for stretching boundaries and confounding expectations, lives by remarkably simple principles, gelaned partly from Buddhism and drug- and alcohol-recovery programs. "I try to make every day matter," he says. "I found that if you accumulate enough of those days, you feel fulfilled. You to to bed at night and say, 'I worked to the best of my abilities, I did my best to mend bridges I didn't hurt anybody, and I tried to be open and responisve to my family, friends and colleauges.' It's not such a huge goal. It's attainable." Such serenity eluded Bowie during the mid-'70s period of drug addiction he calls "extremly bad, negative, dark nasty days." He got clean in Berlin "after one too many close calls" and considers recovery "the best thing I ever did for my physical self and my sanity." Yet he's reluctant to extol the virtues of soberity because "there's an element of voyeurism when one discusses how awful it was. And no amount of me pontificating in the press will help people in denial. They have to reach their own bottom." Besides, Bowie loathes dwelling on the past. And though he long has been music's futuristic maverick, he doesn't relish looking ahead, either. "It's about this moment," he says. "you can't live with ridiculous expectations of the future. And you can't continually look back and say 'What if?' It has to be a question of how you live today. I don't get terrible excited about the future. I'm quite happy to paddle my canoe around in the nooks and crannies of now."