Well if I'm going to move platforms, it might as well be today, with this. You can find the old blog at apolla.livejournal.com.
David Bowie Is...
My world tilted on its axis at 07:12 yesterday morning. It
was the Monday of the second week of the new year and I was awake enough to be
reading my phone. So I was paying attention and saw immediately as the BBC News
alert popped up.
David Bowie is dead…
Naturally I chose to disbelieve this and as I was on
Facebook anyway, posted the following articulate, thoughtful and considered
remark:
WHAT THE FUCK DID THAT BBC NEWS ALERT ACTUALLY SAY
Except that for about six hours, it read ‘SAU’ because it was 07:12 in the morning and I’d just found out David Bowie was dead so I cared less about SPaG than usual.
Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out what I would say,
knowing that bloggers with more experience (and readers) than I would say
almost everything because they already were.
The Bowie articles had been flowing thick since three days
before, on Bowie’s birthday. 69! Imagine Bowie being sixty-nine! And the new
album! Isn’t it good! Watch us churn out thousands of words about His Legacy
and What It All Means!
I work in the music industry, so I knew that at least a few
people around me would understand. As I walked to work with my iPod on shuffle,
I skipped past anything that might set me off. For someone who listens to about
80% dead musicians at any given time, this proved harder than expected. In the end,
I listened to Dylan’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” several times before giving up and
letting Bowie’s “Slip Away” play on.
Texts and Facebook private messages arrived through the day
from concerned parents and friends as I tried and failed to pretend the world wasn't tilted.
I didn’t cry. Of course I didn’t cry. Why would I cry about
someone I never met, who was not even aware that I existed, who I was never
even able to see live?
Why would I?
Because he’s woven into the fabric of my entire existence,
that’s why. Yet, I wouldn’t even call myself a diehard fan...
I just have Thin White Duke Hair. I just did his choons more
than once at gigs of my own. I just have a Bowie wish list on TiVo. I just
spent some of my formative years staring at Bowiestyle, wishing I could wear that stuff… I just… you get the
picture.
I’m a fan. But I’m not a completist, know-everything fan. I’ve
been consumed by him but never obsessed with him (of course there’s a
difference). I wrote about this just after The
Next Day came out in 2013, and I won’t re-tread that again. Read it here if you like.
I don’t know how to feel or think. I got angry watching the
news last night, with them treating it like it’s a special event. I got angry
with people who didn’t know much about him and I got angry with people who know
more than me. I got angry with the people who seemed to know him best as Jareth
from Labyrinth, and angry with the
people who think Labyrinth sucks.
I tried watching some videos, but mostly yesterday was about
avoidance. I posted his BBC performance of “Wild is the Wind” on
Facebook…
And then today, everyone else seemed to be back to normal.
There was stuff in the papers – sentimentalist regurgitations of everything
that’s ever been said before, and then the world kept turning.
I didn’t cry. Why would I cry? It’s not like the last
t-shirt I bought referenced him. It’s not like he’s a huge part of my iTunes
Library, or that his music has been both inspiration and comfort throughout my
life…
I got home, just feeling sad, tired and old. Because David
Bowie was 69 years old. When did that happen? He was only a few months younger
than my dad, but when did Bowie get
old?
And the question without satisfactory answer: How did cancer
get the fucking Thin White Duke?
Wasn’t Bowie supposed to go out on the back of a flaming comet,
flanked by Mick Ronson in his gold jumpsuit and Andy Warhol in his
wig-n-sneakers, heralded into the afterlife by choirs of very nattily dressed
angels, as God and the Devil argued over who got to keep him?
Yet, I won’t argue that he seems to have had the exactly
right death, possibly of his own art direction and with the success of Blackstar guaranteed. The things that
troll would do for free publicity.
*
I’m being flippant. Of course I’m being fucking flippant.
Bowie is dead and the world tilted. Or mine did, at least. Flippant is all I’ve
got.
I’ve read a lot about him over the years and the last 36ish
hours, spoken of him with many people, seen many GIFs and amusing internet
posts… My favourite post compares him and his many personae to the Doctor.
Would that he was a Timelord and he
could regenerate.
*
There is a David Bowie for everyone. We all have our own.
Many female humans of my age will always have Jareth the Goblin King burned
into their psyches, for instance, while the mid-teens now are rediscovering
Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, as is their destiny. Some folks will always see Bowie as Ziggy, and everything that came since just ‘what
Ziggy did next’. Some folks know him as radio-friendly scrambled-egg haired MTV
“Let’s Dance” fave because they don’t do avant-garde and spent the 70s managing
to avoid Zeppelin et al while listening to Boney M.
I actually don’t know who my Bowie is. He is simply a force
in my life that fluctuates as needed. I like Ziggy Stardust of course, I love
and adore Heathen and ‘hours…’ but I also listened to Low and “Heroes” when I took a solitary 10k walk along the Cornish coast
one February because nothing else would do… and I might love Diamond Dogs and Station to Station most of all.
I do know Tin Machine
Bowie is not really my Bowie. Glastonbury 2000 Bowie should have been my Bowie but I wasn’t allowed to go. Jareth is my
Bowie, and Thomas Jerome Newton is my Bowie. Even scrambled-egg 80s Let's Dance Bowie is my Bowie.
A Bowie for All Seasons…
I know this: desperate-for-fame and trying-to-find-his-place-in-a-world-not-fitted-for-him Bowie is my Bowie in a way I cannot adequately put into words. That kid that didn’t belong but wanted to make a splash…
David Bowie, you see, was (or gave a good impression of
being) a champion freak who took on the normals and triumphed. Whether gay or
straight or male or female, or anything on either spectrum, Bowie was one of
us, or at least, for us.
The great rock pioneers, if you can believe this, were all
freaks and outsiders. You don’t change the world by being normal. Bowie looked
like a fucking alien that crash
landed on the set of Top of the Pops!
They were freaks, lunatics, misfits, losers and dropouts who didn’t belong
anywhere else, just like us, and
viewed the world through a skewed, yet somehow often more honest, prism.
He didn’t give us permission to be weird because we never
needed it. But he did take his big, stack-heeled boot and give the door into
weird a massive kick so that it was easier for the rest of us to follow.
So, you probably know I’ve written a novel about a rock band in the 1970s. You’ve probably guessed that Bowie makes an appearance of sorts:
'Things got weird,' Rosalie tells me.
'We tried to set not follow fashions, but Bowie was a force of bloody nature. I
mean, you should've seen some of the people who went glam: big, stocky builder
types, the most gay-hating knuckle-draggers... and they were putting on
glittery make-up and wearing tights and big ol' stack-heeled shoes.'
He gets a number of other references of course, because writing about the
70s without mentioning him would be foolish at best, dishonest at worst.
I’m not going to talk about his enduring legacy because it’s already been
done. You don’t need to be told: it’s
there in front of you every damned day.
Lemmy died recently: a man who made his legend from doing the exact same thing for forty years.
Bowie was, in so many respects, the polar opposite of him, and in one important
way: he never stopped trying different stuff. As much as people mock the chameleon
thing, he didn’t just stop in 1973 and start a decades-long Greatest Hits tour
(hi mick…). It wasn’t always good and sometimes he didn’t even seem to give a
shit, but he didn’t take “getting old” as permission to just sit back and ride
the nostalgia gravy train.
He didn’t let us force him to stay the same, as we so often do to our
idols. We might’ve screamed for Heroes all the damn time (not even my favourite
on that album incidentally), but he gave us new music and let us decide whether we liked it or not.
There really aren’t many of his generation that kept innovating, or kept
discovering new things to do. I can only think of Robert Plant right now, and I
have to admit that he’s done so on a much, much normaler
scale. (If you can
think of any, let me know. My brain is understandably not really focusing right
now).
I really love The Next Day. “I’d
Rather Be High” is a high point for me, as is the title track and its beautiful,
provocative and Catholic-baiting video. I was saving Blackstar for a rainy day and now it'll always be coloured by the loss of him.
*
We only ever get fragments of our heroes. We have what they want us to
see, especially when one has controlled his image as much as Bowie did, and it
is never complete. Soon, I suspect the less-good stories will emerge now he’s
no longer protected by defamation law. Maybe that’s right, for we should have a
full picture of our heroes. We should not close our eyes to their
imperfections, I suppose, though painful it might be.
*
There’s a ‘last picture’ going round (see above), from Blackstar promo. There he is: sharp grey suit, black fedora, with that
beautiful, blinding Bowie smile that hasn’t ever changed – even after he got
his teeth fixed. He looks as cool as Frank
Sinatra wished he was. 69 year old, dying Bowie was not less powerful nor
less charismatic than his 19 or 27 or 38 year old selves.
Bowie was a freak like me, like us. He was also one of the greatest
creative minds we’ll ever see.
There was a tweet going round, misattributed to Simon Pegg, that we
should be grateful because the world is 4 billion years old and we got to exist
at the same time as Bowie.
I’m going to amend that: we should be grateful that we live in a world of
mechanical reproduction, which has captured Bowie in all his glories and
failings, his beauties and his ‘what the hell have you done to your eyebrows’
and ‘what is that long blond mullet about?’
We will always have the music. It cannot and will not die, not even if
all the electricity disappears or some totalitarian government tells us it’s
evil and outlaw it. He is beyond fashion, although his popularity will ebb and flow until one
day he truly is nothing but myth and legend.
Maybe one day stories will start ‘A
long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there lived an alien and he was
beautiful and brilliant…’
David Bowie might be dead, but my David Bowie is immortal. So is yours.
*
I’ll end with the line in my Acknowledgements for Walking in the Shadowlands:
To Bowie, for everything from the Laughing Gnome to the end, from this Thursday's Child.
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