A decade without David Bowie
A decade without David Bowie
David Bowie personally appears on the cover of 24 of his solo albums, depicting himself as a bowl-cut heartthrob, an androgynous blond, a space alien in human disguise, a cigarette-smoking lounge creature, a sideways pair of legs, and an oddly undersized boxer. On the front of his 25th album, released two days before his death at the age of 69 a decade ago this week, the English musician appeared by negation, represented as a five-pointed black star against a white background above an asymmetric row of glyphs that seem like pieces of the star but that don’t clearly combine into anything. Bowie learned his liver cancer was terminal right around the time he was filming the music video for “Lazarus,” the final statement of his four decades as a pop visionary. “Look up here — I’m in heaven,” he croons from a hospital bed, clutching a blanket to his face. His eyes are wrapped in gauze, and his hair is the grey of a sunless afternoon.
Dead David Bowie, debuted and retired on 2016’s Blackstar, was the last of Bowie’s great personas, a lineage that included Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and the Thin White Duke, a few of whom had notable deaths themselves. As a younger man, Bowie had explored the end with unusual wisdom, albeit from the safe remove of a fictional proxy. “The clock waits so patiently on your song/You walk past the cafe/But you don’t eat when you’ve lived too long,” he sang on “Rock N’ Roll Suicide,” closing number on 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. Bowie has eyes shut behind pink shadow and corpse-like marble skin on the cover of Aladdin Sane, from 1973. “He’s waiting in the wings … he speaks of you and me, boy” Bowie-as-Aladdin warns over the music hall piano jangle of album standout “Time.” On Blackstar, already a 21st-century classic, self-creation merges with the immutable substance of selfhood right at the moment of death, the terminal point of each and every earthly self and one of the few real commonalities linking an almost inexplicable creative freak like Bowie to the rank and file of the human race.
Though Bowie produced a dozen of the greatest albums ever made, the music was a vehicle for a deeper sensibility, and the substance of Bowie’s selfhood was so particular and recognizable that it was possible to make a compelling biopic about him without including a single David Bowie song. Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine, from 1998 — a film notable for many reasons other than Haynes’s failure to secure the rights to Bowie’s music — treats Bowie as a reincarnated Oscar Wilde, a puckish spirit who craved fame and attention and who could be comfortable nowhere, least of all within the loneliness of his own mind and skin.
Bowie’s genius was a driver and a result of an unquenchable inner restlessness. But as with Wilde, there were times when you could hear the unmistakable call of his truest, least-concealed being. Bowie reached his apogee of self-exposure during a stint in West Berlin in the late 70s, producing a trilogy of still-unmatched album-length pop experiments while in a state very close to drug-fueled psychosis. “I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision,” he bellowed during his moment of maximal clarity on 1977’s “Sound and Vision,” over the funky cosmic perfection and almost childlike simplicity of a somehow tight-yet-wandering sing-song of bass, snare, and synth. There’s an entire aesthetic theory proposed in this song: Art results when discipline and a confidence in the mysterious higher powers of creativity meet the basic stuff of sense perception. “Pale blinds, drawn all day/Nothing to do, nothing to say,” he sings. But then the gift would come, a gift that would take Bowie further away from himself and even deeper into some previously unknown world that only he could hear and see.
There is a similar songwriting process described in a 2017 song from one of the very few Bowians we have left. Like Bowie, Tyler Okonma, more generally known as Tyler, the Creator, frequently creates and embodies new characters. He has a Bowie-like conviction that popularity doesn’t entail trashiness, and that cutting-edge pop music can become stranger and more challenging the bigger it is and the more ears and minds it can reach and inflame. “My eyeballs are turning to drywall,” Tyler raps on “Boredom.” “Bored and getting desperate,” he reports in the next verse. By the end of this eerily melodic, strangely beautiful song about doing nothing, Tyler dreams wistfully of loitering in a parking lot. Almost alone among rappers, Okonma writes all of his own music and produces all of his own songs, and with such exacting standards, it’s little wonder he’d welcome any form of relief from having to wait indoors for inspiration to strike.
As with Bowie, Tyler’s answer to the dilemma of being himself, which is, of course, a dilemma that only death can fully resolve, is usually to be someone else. He’s been the teenage delinquent Wolf Haley and the lovesick, globe-trotting Tyler Baudelaire. On Chromakopia, from last year, Tyler is a spawn of Frankenstein, a monster who dreams of destroying the human being behind his awesome, inhumanly scaled pop persona: “Your natural state is threatening to the point that I point at myself,” he raps on “I Killed You.”
Bowie and Tyler show that it isn’t merely egomania for an artist to want to move beyond a “natural” human state of pettiness, vulnerability, and smallness. The constant re-creation of the self can be a method of exposing the confining limits of music and conceivable reality while testing how far it’s possible to stretch them: Within the worldview of a Bowie or a Tyler, our smallness isn’t a flaw or a fate, but a starting point for something more. There are, of course, latter-day Bowians who doomed themselves by thinking too big: “I am a God,” Kanye West declared on a track of that title in 2013, perhaps meaning it literally. But it is a flaw in current rock music that it has so few extravagant self-creators left, and no real inheritors of the Bowian spirit of limitless exploration through music.
The current leading lights in rock are largely admired for their raw earnestness. There are no speakers in the songs of MJ Lenderman other than MJ Lenderman, whose diffidence and exhaustion are in all-too-perfect lockstep with the psychic frustrations of his listeners. Cameron Winter’s lyrics have an air of inscrutable mysticism, but there is little doubt he’s supposed to be the one singing them. If Winter, now all of 23, possesses otherworldly talent, it is not of the Bowian variety: However knotty and difficult his songs are, decoding them doesn’t yet involve any detours into outer space, and the thought world of Winter’s music has yet to stray all that far beyond his native Park Slope.
Bowie set his sights on the ends of the observable universe, and on places even darker. He was a creative maximalist who could imagine himself as anyone and anything, and he used his own approaching death as occasion to inhabit the last, most difficult, most personal, and most real of his alter egos. As oblivion approached, with all its attendant possibilities of panic or bitterness, Bowie summoned the generosity to evoke the ordeal of one prematurely dying man while also thinking and creating at the no less vast scale of life itself. Over the past decade, almost no one has dared to follow him. It’s possible no one can.
Armin Rosen is a Brooklyn-based reporter-at-large for Tablet Magazine.
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