+++ David Bowie would have been 75 on January 8, 2022. He died on January 10, 2016. The following obituary was published on musikexpress.de and in the printed Musikexpress. +++
“Oh, I’ll be free / Just like a bluebird / Ain’t that just like me,” sings David Bowie in the closing lines of “Lazarus,” the third song on his new – and we now painfully realise- last album BLACKSTAR. Everything there is to say spontaneously about his death at the age of 69, announced on his official Facebook channel at 7:55 am Monday morning, is contained in this cycle of songs, which must have been written in the awareness of his approaching death. And which, in fact, was released just three days before the passing of the most important artist of the 1970s, on January 8th, Bowie’s 69th birthday.
How must it have felt to have been there during the recordings? Did the musicians know, did his genius producer Tony Visconti know how Bowie was doing? (Yes, he knew). Did he know it himself? What was the mood like when he sang lines like “Somebody happened on the day he died / Spirit rose a meter and stepped aside / Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried” or “I’m in heaven / I’ve got scars that can’t be seen”? Bowie was never closer to Scott Walker, the other great nonconformist in British pop music, who eventually withdrew from the public eye and celebrity to just make the music that’s inside him that needs to get out. It’s his legacy. BLACKSTAR is song by song, tone by tone, mood by mood, the album he wanted to make. The collection with which he bids farewell. Sometimes it sounds like he’s not really there anymore, like he’s already leaving us and waving and crying and becoming a black star. The man who fell to heaven. And that’s also kind of comforting and beautiful and wonderful.
David Bowie is dead.
At first, words fail you. Then you think of songs, pictures, records, stories that you associate with him. You think about what it means to a Bowie who has been with you all your life and who always seemed so close to you, although of course you didn’t know him and of course it wouldn’t be possible because Bowie didn’t want to be known : By the time you thought you could get hold of him, he was already somewhere else. One could rattle off the cornerstones of his career. Dandy in the sixties. Novelty star with “Space Oddity”. And then only superstar, innovator, chameleon, wearer of masks, inventor of identities. Untouchable. unreachable. Ziggy Stardust. Thin White Duke. Then we are heroes. Glam rock, black music, machine music, dance music. “Starman”, “Young Americans”, “Sound And Vision”, “China Girl”. An incomparable run that begins in 1971 with HUNKY DORY and lasts until LET’S DANCE. And then from the mid-eighties slowly something that you wouldn’t want to call a descent, but a withdrawal, an unwinding, a farewell in installments, repeatedly interrupted by bright musical moments, until Bowie at some point at the beginning of the new millennium, that’s not that his is, is no longer there. And sorely missed. Until he returned unannounced in 2013 with the wonderful album THE NEXT DAY, as if it had taken him ten years to be able to ride the wave and set the tone again.
David Bowie’s artistic life was marked by farewells
Anecdotes and trifles that are inevitably connected with Bowie shoot through your head. I have to think of the story of how Bowie went to the US in the mid-70s to play black music and was amazed to find that many of the studio musicians in Philadelphia were white. Or the production of RAW POWER by Iggy & The Stooges, when Bowie, completely dead on coke, thinks it’s a good idea to turn all the bass out of the wildly raging bass that at times sounds like wanton sabotage. Or the stupid grin that inevitably plays around your lips when you hear Kraftwerk sing in the “Trans-Europa Express” about meeting “Iggy Pop and David Bowie” at the train station in Düsseldorf City. Or such stupid little things as Bernardo Bertolucci’s latest film, “Io e tu”, a goddamn bland film, up to the moment when the two young main actors start dancing to the Italian version of “Space Oddity”, “Ragozzo Solo, Ragazza Sola,” and the film suddenly takes off the way things tend to take off when Bowie comes into play.
David Bowie’s artistic life was shaped by farewells, losing himself, dying in order to be able to reinvent himself. His Major Tom floats transfigured through space (and, as Bowie lets us know twelve years later, was just a junkie). Ziggy Stardust directed his Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide because Bowie knew that the only way to reinvent yourself is to leave behind what came before. It’s the ultimate message of pop: you can always start over, you have to reinvent yourself, nothing is real, everything is surface. Bowie is the man who sold the world and fell to earth. The alien who watched us in amusement and made all of our lives better. Who turned gender roles upside down. Who made West Berlin cool and casual at a time when there was really nothing cool and casual about the walled city. Who saved rock and made pop better and anticipated punk. And now he’s the Blackstar, the Lazarus, who will rise again for as long as we wish because we’re free to listen to his music whenever we want. However, he is always free. “Oh, I’ll be free / like a bluebird / ain’t that just like me.”