David Bowie RIP

Stevie Wonder.

Looks like Bowie even had a hit in Gelderland.



(One of my favorite films, no apologies)

That movie is fucking great. An underrated gem.

___________________________________________________________

Has anyone liked Stephanie's post?

As I was trying to figure out why it is that Bowie never appealed to me I stumbled upon Owen Pallett's post on FB the other day. Owen is a great musician, composer and an interesting Canadian musical figure who shares my love of bullet hell shooters and Nintendo games and was even in a band called Final Fantasy. He has serious geek influences and has written string quartets inspired by and named after the schools of magic in D&D. Most of his fans aren't that geek savvy because his appeal goes beyond that. In any case he often says some pretty interesting and unique things about music and his post on Bowie really struck me. I am probably going to pick up some Bowie albums over the next couple of months and try to figure out if I can find a way to appreciate his contributions. I am a music borrower, I will take suggestions from anybody and that includes people I've never met who simply wrote a youtube comment (that's how I discovered John Murry's excellent "The Graceless Age") and Owen, even though I hardly know him, has recommended some great music for me from time to time.

Here's his post in full...

It’s difficult for me to articulate my love of Bowie’s music without coming off as a hater. My engagement with his music began very young, and through my teens I purchased everyone of his albums, read every book on him, including the song-by-song commentaries, the problematic Angie Bowie autobiographies, and more recently, every single post on the Bowie Songs blog.
What I want to say about Bowie is that he was, essentially, a non-musician. He couldn’t play guitar, couldn’t play piano. He was a fair sax player, but I don’t think anybody learned to play the sax because of Diamond Dogs. He was a grating, irritating singer. In the 80s and 90s, when he mellowed out his voice, he became, essentially, a Scott Walker impersonator. He had no talent for writing couplets, his songs were inconsistent and never really fit on the radio. He didn’t write hooks, he wrote only a handful of highly memorable melodies.
So why is he, along with Ornette Coleman, John Cage, and Missy Elliott, my favourite musician of the 20th century? Is he even a musician? His talent was his charisma, his curatorial skills. He was an extremely talented actor and mime. His greatest ever achievement was convincing the world that his work was worthwhile through sheer force of will and panache.
People often debate “what is the best Bowie song”… objectively speaking, Bowie has lots of great songs. “Heroes”, “Rebel Rebel”, “Fame”, “Let’s Dance”. These "good" songs are, in fact, his worst songs. These are the songs that are functional and that you might hear on the radio.
Bowie at his best is when he’s at his most flawed, his most paranoid, his most messed up. The hippie campfire guitar interlude on “Space Oddity”. The opening track on “The Man Who Sold The World”, which was an investigation into Bowie’s own queerness, and its title, “The Width Of A Circle”, referred to the diametrical differences between a vagina and an anus. The ten-minute title track of “Station To Station”, with its paranoid, xenophobic yelps, and his most messed-up lyric ever: “It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine / I’m thinking that it must be love”. Or his second most messed-up lyric, from “Breaking Glass”: “Don’t look at the carpet / I drew something awful on it.” It’s his most incandescent vocal performance, on “It’s No Game”, where he screams his way through a duet with a Japanese woman doing spoken word. His best moments are challenging, and confound you.
Bowie was the fly in the ointment. All his greatest musical achievements belong to his collaborators, Mick Ronson, Tony Visconti, Mike Garson, Brian Eno, Nile Rodgers, Erdal Kizilcay, Gail Ann Dorsey, Reeves Gabrels, Zach Alford. Bowie was the charisma, the icon, the ego that took their contributions and destroyed them. He turned a lack of musical ability into an asset, he made “musical talent” a liability, he made a stab in the dark beautiful. He was not a creator, he was a destroyer. And he was the best destroyer that ever lived.

Bowie on Conan.

I think I must have gone through some stage of denial last night...I managed to convince myself for about two hours that Bowie had faked his death. It would make sense. He's been sort of haunting the peripheral since he had that heart trouble back in 2004, but then he turned up in 2013 to do "The Next Day" and another record last year. I imagined that maybe he didn't want anyone to see him as a fading, elderly rock star and know that he had become very private over the past two decades, it made sense to me that he would stage a kind of vanishing act, willfully ending the character of David Bowie. And then I imagined that somewhere like Cologne or Prague or Nice that there is a man at an outdoor café in a wide-brimmed hat, just like Thomas Newton at the end of The Man Who Fell to Earth, with a vulpine grin over a glass of wine...an earthbound alien living the remainder of his days as David Jones in private, but another alias in public.

But it's just not true, I guess.

I couldn't listen to anything yesterday, but I saw the tributes in Brixton, his hometown. Thousands of people went out in the streets and sang his songs. I thought that was especially moving. I've read all of the tweets and celebrity tributes- Eno's was particularly affecting, he talks about the last email he got from Bowie just last week in which he cryptically says goodbye.

I've been listening to Blackstar today, and although last week I loved it this week I realize what a profound piece of work it is. Now all of the surrealism and absurdity makes sense. But more than that, it is Bowie coming to terms with his own death and basically telling us what he is experiencing. There are lines that sounded great last week that have a new meaning, the work is transformed. "I've got scars no one can see".

Thinking about it, how wonderful is it that we never saw Bowie decline. We never had to look at him and say "he's not doing well". There were no "sad final days" as the tabloids like to report. His imminent death was a call to create, to work. Not to lay down and quit. I think that is monumentally inspiring and it is something I will take with me every day from here on it. It's especially impactful because I just turned 40, and all of those realizations about getting older sooner rather than later are hitting me.

Another thing that I keep coming back to, something that the editor of Pitchfork touched on quite well, is how Bowie was such nexus of culture- almost a kind of curator or patron of great art himself, and he imparted that to his audience. More than that, he was a focal point of GOOD TASTE. You learn about Bowie, you learn about Andy Warhol, the Stooges, Nietzsche, Scott Walker, Brian Eno, Stanley Kubrick...great films, great books, great art, great music. He brought all of that forward.

I've been thinking too about how important Bowie is to so many aspects of my life and I realized something that I had not ever really put into words. Before I really got into Bowie, I knew who he was but mostly through MTV, like most kids in the 80s. I had seen the older videos (particularly "Ashes to Ashes") and I had a general awareness that he was an older rock star. I knew about "Space Oddity" and Major Tom. "Under Pressure" was familiar. I remember very plainly the first time I heard "Ziggy Stardust"- I was with a friend when I was maybe 9 or 10 and his dad played it on the radio in the car from a cassette tape. I thought it was weird but that guitar riff- one of the greatest ever recorded, and the one that aurally defines the character- stuck with me for years as did some of the lyrics that I didn't quite understand. I recall watching the Glass Spider tour TV special with my mom in 1987 (the same year Labryinth came out) and thinking it was OK but at the time I was just discovering thrash and and punk so I wasn't really interested. In 1990, I remember the Sound and Vision tour making big news, the whole "he's retiring his old songs" business. But it still wasn't really my time.

But 1991 was. I had gotten into goth and post-punk, and of course those simply do not exist without Bowie. Bauhaus had that cover of "Ziggy Stardust", and that led me to pick up some Bowie records at a used book and record shop. I remember being in my girlfriend's basement and putting "Ziggy Stardust" on for the first time. It seemed strange. I didn't like it at first. It wasn't hard enough, wasn't goth enough, wasn't punk enough. But it hooked me in. The other records I bought that day were "ChangesOneBowie" and "Space Oddity".

The key to it all was that as I listened to this record, this was the point at which I realized that music- rock music- can be artful. It could be science fiction. It could express a complete, codified system of aesthetics and philosophies. Bowie was where and when I transitioned from being a teenage kid into immature (not a pejorative) music to being a teenage kid and young adult interested in exploring the medium. It is because of Bowie that I went back and listened to the Stooges and Jacques Brel. It is because of Bowie that I am so intensely in love with music- and rock music in particular- today. I needed that critical juncture to connect everything together, to help me identify who I am.

Bowie is also the reason that when I was 18 or 19, I wore a dress and put on make up to go out to shows or to clubs. I wore it badly, but I tried. I've had the same haircut for at least 15 years, and it's always been some variation of the hair he had during the Low/Man Who Fell to Earth period. Every time I get a haircut, I take a picture of Bowie to show them. Again, I wear it badly but I keep trying.

A huge, totally unexpected loss. My interest in Bowie kind of waned when he blew up with "Let's Dance" and that whole album. Fine pop songs, sure, and I wouldn't begrudge him that success. But I was a druggie rock guy, so I was more into the earlier psychadelic rock stuff. Though when I think about it now, a lot of my all-time favorite songs of his were in the late disco, early 80's era ("Ashes to Ashes," "Heroes," "Golden Years," "Under Pressure," and a huge guilty pleasure - "Fashion"). To me, that era was his best combination of interesting and unique but also accessible music, whereas some of the earlier Ziggy stuff is great, but doesn't hold up as well, or seems more tied to its era.

I tried to get into Tin Machine in the 90's but it didn't really grab me compared to things like Garbage and NIN. I listened to Blackstar yesterday and liked it. Took me about two minutes to wrap my head around that opening drum pattern on the title track, but I love that.

RIP to the other Davey Jones. Planet Earth is blue.

Finally listened to his last album. Its fantastic and leaves little doubt in my mind that he knew it would be his last.

He had apparently demoed some songs for a possible follow up album just a couple of weeks ago, according to Tony Visconti...he had recently started on some kind of highly experimental treatment and was showing some positive signs, but in November took a turn for the worse. But I think if you read the lyrics and watch the videos, you can see that he knew he was at the end of his life.

"Something happened on the day he died
spirit rose a meter then stepped aside
Somebody else took his place and bravely cried
I'm a blackstar, I'm a blackstar"

"Look up here, I'm heaven
I've got scars that can't be seen
I've got drama, can't be stolen
Everybody knows me now
Look up here, man I'm in danger
I've got nothing left to lose"

Very clearly he was coping with mortality...the part of it all that gets me is in the "Lazarus" video, where he's at the table writing. It's really an incredible piece of mime work (which takes us all the way back to the very beginning of his career, training with Lindsay Kemp) where he is vacillating between these moods- afraid, frustrated, terrified, contemplative...and then pen to paper. It's a wonderful piece of acting, and it speaks volumes to what he was dealing with and how he was dealing with it- by creating and working.

I wasn't quite prepared for "Blackstar" to be so great. I think it is definitely his strongest, most compelling record since the 70s. There are so many brilliant touches, like that KILLER, not-at-all-dated-sounding drum and bass break toward the end of "Sue". The yearning, plaintive horns and nagging synths of "I Can't Give You Everything" echo the kinds of things he was doing with Eno. The Nadsat lyrics on "Girl Loves Me". This is a GREAT record, and not just because of the contextual underpinnings...its sounds like Bowie is really going for it and the band is just killing it, every beat.

I kind of hope those demos are never released, so that we will be left to wonder what could have been next.

Bowie was great, though I have a hard time buying into all this sentimental stuff from random everyday people, and of course all the celebs who just cant wait to get on social media to earn some brownie points by getting in on the grieving.

David Bowie dying at 70 is not sad. His music still lives, just like it did before. The world goes on, he lived a life doing what he loved, with success, and lived it to excess, sex, drugs, rock and roll. Good on you David, you were literally the man. Great that you affected so many people with your music (and to those who actually *knew* him and met him, surely in many other ways). Everyone else can go on listening to his music just like before, he wasnt changing the world any more with his music or his personality or presence.

David Bowie dying is not sad.

Sitting at a desk and making a radiation treatment plan for a 2 year old girl is sad. Looking down at her card and seeing the cross marked in the box "2" is sad. Thats 2 as in palliation. Thats palliation as "will not be getting cured by this just getting to live a bit longer". Sad is watching her roll into the treatment room on a bed, and looking into the eyes of her parents who know their baby doesnt have long left to live but clinging to every minute and fighting for every extra hour they can. Sad is seeing her put to sleep and locked down to the couch in a tight fitting head mask and seeing her move into the bore of the treatment machine.

So no, its not "sad" that a 70 year old rock and roll star died, living a life of luxury few of us could imagine, and spending his every day doing something creative he loved and being incredibly well rewarded in every possible way.

I'll pop some of his albums on just like I did before, I won't sit and pine for all the long lost albums he might have made, or for another year or decade of him living and making more music. He was certainly the dude. And maybe there was no one else like him and maybe never will be, but you know, lets get some perspective. His CDs are not spontaneously combusting here. His wife and kids will certainly be sad, and I guess they'll do it on their own in private without resorting to social media or getting in on the weird shared grieving over people who you didnt know, who lived amazing lives and whose effect on your lives is something that still exists and always will. I guess you'll all be sitting at home terribly nervous about all the other famous old people who made millions of pounds fannying around creating stuff you liked. Because they are all also going to die. Just like we are.

Thats just me, but I'm sure that opinion will be well received. Its good that so many of you have the time and energy to spend worrying about it I guess. It's hard to feel anything when on a daily basis you see real people dying, including children who have the whole world ahead of them and will never see it.

This is bullshit. Sadness is relative and it depends on the influence this person had on your life. You have no idea, none, what influence this person had on my life. You have absolutely no right to dictate MY emotions.

There is no hierarchy of sadness, it is personal, that's the point.

It matters nothing whether he was rich or a celebrity. The point is, he touched some lives. I appreciate he didn't touch yours but that is no reason to degrade other peoples experiences. If you don't understand public grief then you don't understand the nature of British society.

Culture changed and he was contributory to that. So, stop being a hipster and let people deal with it in their own way.

Thankfully, I am able to feel sad for more than one person at a time.