To the very end, true to self, Bowie continued to reinvent himself
It was no accident that a David Bowie was the most recently played album on my personal music player when the British Broadcasting Corp. announced his passing at age 69 last Jan. 10. Bowie’s songs, which have been played to death on my FiiO X1 and my home stereo through the years, are no small matter because they have had to jockey for playtime on my eclectic playlist of about 20,000 tunes (on hard drives and vinyl) ranging from classical to jazz, to rock and pop and everything else in between.
For a moment, I was brought back to that sad moment in my elementary days when I heard on radio that John Lennon was shot dead by a fan in New York City after the release of his and Yoko Ono’s man-woman riposte album “Double Fantasy.” That album includes my favorites, the plaintive “I’m Losing You” and the funk-rock-ish “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss.”
Also fleetingly passing through my mind were Don McLean’s song “American Pie” with the reference to “the day the music died”; and Paul Simon being attacked onstage by a fan in Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Concert in Central Park,” also in New York, and also in the 1980s. Simon momentarily missed a beat as a deranged fan dashed toward him, before continuing to sing his tribute to another dearly departed singer, the “Late Great Johnny Ace.”
Being from the New Wave ’80s, I was first introduced to Bowie through his foot-stomper, made-for-MTV songs like “Let’s Dance,” “Blue Jean,” “China Girl,” “Under Pressure” (duet with Queen’s Freddie Mercury) and “Dancing on the Streets” (with Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones).
Surely, Jagger can belt out an old favorite, like the song “Time Is On My Side” sung by the demon in Denzel Washington’s “Fallen,” but for how long only time can tell.
Madonna? Well, Bowie, obviously is her blueprint for constantly reinventing and making herself relevant for decades; she says she was “devastated” by Bowie’s death.
At the very end, with his farewell album “Blackstar” released on his 69th birthday last Jan. 8, or two days before his death, Bowie stayed true to form—reinventing himself one last time (or, if you will, shedding off any and all masks) as an old man on death bed on avant-garde music videos—like “Blackstar” and “Lazarus,” with nary a trace of Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane or The Duke in him.
“Lazarus” shows a bedridden Bowie retreating into the dark recesses of a cabinet dresser symbolic of his leaving the world, a message which his producer confirmed after his death. “Blackstar” (a theoretical star built using semi-classical gravity as an alternative to a black hole—Wiki) is a parting gift by Bowie to his fans, said the producer. In a way, Bowie had become a “Blackstar” after shining so bright in our firmament.
My daughters, 19 and 14, have had their fill of Bowie’s dance tunes and his socially relevant pieces like “This Is Not America,” thus it came as no surprise that they easily identified Bowie’s “Starman” as an OST in a recent viewing of Matt Damon’s “The Martian.”
“Ground control to Major Tom… check ignition and may God’s love be with you… You’ve really made the grade… now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare.”—“Space Oddity”
Starmen do not die, they just return to space.
—JOHN HENRY A. DODSON, [email protected]
