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peelmeoffthisvelcroseat · 9 years

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I never thought I’d need so many people

News broke in the quiet waking hours of monday morning of David Bowie’s death and I witnessed and participated in one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.

So this probably seems incredibly delayed, now that the working week has passed and I guess a lot of you will have sobered and collected yourselves, raised your bowed heads or taken your watchful gazes for the skies in hopes of spotting some sign of a spaceship disappearing into the stars.

*Screeching-Terry Jones-in-drag-voice* “What are you doing stirring up the kettle now, you bugger, you’ve ad your chance to speak and us good folks have cried enough we’re not giving any tears to you! What’re you, a tear merchant? Profiting off our tears? Get out’ve here before I give you something to cry about!

Hold on a minute, please. I know if you think about it the world is always in mourning, I’m sure people in the last few days have suffered losses that overshadowed Bowie’s, and now Alan Rickman has gone - and all we can do is shake our fists at cancer for proving itself the most loathsome of enemies and waging such an unfair war as it strikes us unaware. But I still can’t get Bowie out of my head, anything I turn my thoughts to is a distraction. In....grief(?) the mind is an elastic band and thinking about something different is pulling it, pulling it, thinking of anything else is stretching it..and with sudden lightning retribution you’re pulled back to your starting place. So, Bowie.

[Edit to include the original purpose of this eulogy And now I goddamn realise that this was supposed to be a brief eulogy about my personal experience in the aftermath of his death, not just distilling everybody’s opinions into one piece of writing. Anyone who is reading this I’m sure has already read what I’ve written here in one form or another. But that’s the thing with Bowie: you want to say another thing, and another, because you want to try and encapsulate him, but he can’t be contained in one breath or one eulogy. I learned this on Twitter on Monday morning, but the moment your fingers are on a keyboard you think you can do some justice to him.]

At this point you may think the fact I’ve had to jump all the way back here to the beginning of this writing to actually begin my original intention means this is a chaotic and unfathomable mess. It kinda is, but that’s maybe how you know (or I think I know) that this is right. You can’t possibly be concise or brief talking about Bowie, or you can and you let his lifetime, his music his words speak for themselves. But it’s hard to sit back when you've never felt like this before. I’ve never lost anyone close, and so really, when I think about it, Bowie is as close as it gets. I had a similar experience with Lou Reed, when I spent the night before his death listening devotedly to his music and then finding out the next morning and thinking it a cruel joke. Obviously it’s not, because it wasn’t news delivered for me, because it wasn’t a cruel cosmic coincidence, but it happened and there I was a Transformer T-shirt on and his fragile, cutting voice still ringing in my ears, he the last thing played on my iPod. Not that I would, but after a thing like that you don’t stop listening to him or The Velvet Underground ever. And then this Monday comes, and I had Bowie playing not just within those same 24 hours but regularly throughout the previous week. He’s one of those artists, the ones you love the most, that you drift in and out of intense periods of listening, and as far as you may stray there isn’t an end. I was coming back into an intense period, what with the arrival of Blackstar, and I love(d) its intense jazzy propulsion and the tightly-wound electronic feel and the raw croaking voice of Bowie that takes us as close to him as he has ever allowed, the context of which I somehow (I think like most of us) remained blind to, and which all suddenly overwhelmed the world a few hours later. It was just approaching 6:30am and I was returning from a friend’s room, my intention to watch a film (The Parallax View), which I loaded up on Netflix. There it is, it’s own tab open on chrome, a couple of seconds played before I had paused so the Columbia logo was just beginning, but I turned over to Twitter as is my compulsion, psyching myself up for the film, and to refresh myself (needlessly), because for reasons and reasons it has become my virtual hub. And thank God I have that need instilled in me to drift through the streams of consciousness of birdsong because otherwise I would have been two hours late. I think one of the first tweets there in my feed was from the official David Bowie page, announcing his death. And I fell into the same angry scepticism, if not borderline denial that everyone else did. Everyone was hoping (or insisting) that it was a hoax. People brought to each other’s attention the same announcement on his Facebook page and his very own website, but the consensus (ah, that fickle thing) was that it was a hoax, a shitty, terrible hoax that somehow got this far. And then Duncan Jones, is son confirmed it, and that was it, my stomach flinched and crunched like it had taken a good kick (a very professional booting) and something, somewhere else inside me, dissipated, melted...departed in me as quickly and suddenly as a bird takes flight and beats its wings out of view. The sound of its flutter remains just a moment after you've registered its disappearance, and then it’s gone entirely. It was some peace-of-mind I didn’t know I had, that just as Bowie taught us if he can express himself like that then we can too, that if he was alive and OK, then I was too. It’s completely dumb, but that’s about as close as I can estimate it. And thank god there was somebody I could talk to personally, somebody who could help me relieve in at least some small part the immediate weight of this, and somebody who I could break the news as kindly as I could before she got newsflash after newsflash. Somebody who has actually taken the ethos of Bowie and done something with it, somebody who has earned their grief, most importantly somebody who loves Bowie and who can share the pain, doesn’t have to justify it, question it, challenge it, somebody who knows it isn’t stupid or silly to mourn. And I wasn’t sure if it was self-pityingly indulgent of me or appropriate, but I got my cider out of the fridge (fruity cider is a dangerous drink for sorrowing in, don’t do that. just don’t) and drank, gulp after gulp without even stopping to savour the cans or keep count. And I kept stationed in my room, not straying far from my laptop, and spent the next 7 hours in this vicinity witnessing eulogy after eulogy, pouring over every word and image, trying to let nothing by, checking the accounts of all the people I respect and admire, checking random celebrity accounts, looking into the lives of completely random people to see how much they were acknowledging this, and the answer is: with total outpouring. All of this unbrokenly accompanied by David Bowie, album after album, what quickly became clear was that the best part of the (technologically privileged) waking world had turned their thought to David Bowie, that collective consciousness had become a mass-eulogy. There was thought after thought, recollection, remembrances, multitudes of anecdotes, from people so disparate and from such diverse fields of thought and interest and ideology that putting them in a room together could be ill-advised, yet social barriers were totally erased. All united under Bowie. Lemmy (restless in peace) was a relentlessly boisterous man and a rock-star of the old-guard and had his own admirers, but he did provoke anywhere near as much grief and introspection as Bowie, nevermind unite everybody there is to unite. Death isn’t a competition goddamit I know, but Bowie’s death was not just a passing that anybody could just mutter some obligatory acknowledgement for and move on, it was an event that removed a little piece from inside each and every person, and gave something back, some shared and restored humanity. He wasn’t just a distant rock-god of bravado and swagger that we could enjoy with distance he was, for the people who even at a bare minimum liked him, he was something to ponder and wonder at. He couldn’t be defined and described like one of those rock-gods, if you want to call him a rock-god, then you would probably have to agree he was the atop the peak. And people called him many things, trying to find a word that satisfied their loss, but I’ve never witnessed a loss so incalculable. And radio-shows began as soon as working hours began that gave people a place to listen to his music in a completely new context, one that they had never anticipated, and allowed them to pour over old stories and broadcast them to the world, and each Bowie story a person had was another necessary piece in the mosaic of grief that was created for him, another hug or pat or smile, another vindication of every moment he had been alive, another strengthening of the name David Bowie, how indestructible that sound is now, another layer of emotion in the sonic landscape of his music. People that I had never seen until now talk about Bowie, people you wouldn’t necessarily associate with him talked about him, and I got to realise just associated he was, because why would a person reject him? There is always so much you don’t know about a person, but to discover again and again, for each and every person, a thing in common, and uniting factor, to find David Bowie present time and time again was awing. It solidified and made unbreakable in my mind how important he was and is. And on YouTube, in video after video there were comments of acknowledgement and mourning, and there continue to be as I'm writing these, and there will continue to be after I'm finished writing, not just on the greatest hit million plus vevo uploads, but far-and-wide, from obscure handheld footage of a performance from any given decade to a compilation video of amusing Bowie moments to an interview, to a documentary, they were there. Video upon video each one uploaded long before Bowie died, each one offering some new aspect of Bowie, a different view or perspective, or maybe the same one uploaded in a different definition, but all of them scoured before and after, because fascination of him as never ceased. I appreciated none of this on this incredible scale before his death, but now it all seemed so obvious, so clear, like the very candid farewell of Blackstar becomes so apparent now. YouTube has more stock of Bowie, than near anything else, it’s an emporium where everyone can find some Bowie. You can skim the surface or scour the vaults, but he’s there. I saw a picture of Bowie with Paul McCartney (the lovable gopher) and it hit me there and then how positively square he (which seems obvious) and The Beatles are in comparison. The go-to cliché that there will never be another one like them, here is a fundamental inescapable truth, because how could there ever be another one like Bowie. I can’t imagine ever seeing the internet, a virtual landscape so often confusing and hostile, become a dedicated shrine added to and guarded with quite the same passion and intensity. Who else is there? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I’m sure this is the same for most people, actually. And I don’t mean to suggest here that I’m the one with the burden of pain and I’ve got to remind the world what actually happened. I was to hesitant to use the word grief because what have I done to earn that? Why do, I some absolutely generic male white heterosexual teenage fan that’s never displayed an ounce of courage in his life get to sob and weep on tumblr’s shoulder? Beause I’m feeling something? There are people of course who have experienced Bowie in person, who have been following him since the early 70s when he first swaggered upon the stage, glitter and guitar ,fuzzy hair like fur, face with inscrutable glee, body in some bizarre alien androgyny and challenged the what you thought you knew about yourself. There are the people who benefitted from his music in the most profound of ways, who found his music and experienced the power of its liberation: like it would later help to bring down the Berlin wall it would destroy the boundaries society had put their expression, the walls around their biological needs. If it was cool for Bowie to look like that, it was cool for us too. I’m sure people heard Rebel Rebel and heard safety and defence in its delightful celebration of androgyny, heard the voice of Bowie just about laughing triumphantly at the idea of confusing your mother, lauding you for being a hot tramp, and then everything started to be ok. I’m sure there were the people for who Bowie fulfilled one of the most necessary functions of art and heard his authorative wail: “Oh no love! You’re not alone.” and they believed it, and they knew it. And people exposed to his Berlin era and heard these truly realmless sounds not bound by any accepted genre, heard in their electric energy and underlying humanity, so stark and present, heard Low and felt its true metamorphic quality and knew change was not just OK, it was needed. And people who heard him in the ‘80s and felt his paradoxical Bowie power as one of the biggest things yet an antidote to the other big things, heard him in the 90s, so him evading Trent Reznor on the city streets and wanted to chase him too, chase him right into the 2000s, where he wouldn’t pioneer any more trends so much as he would bring together all the trends he had ever pioneered, and then he would lie in wait for the the rest of the decade and emerge in his final resurgence and people would rediscover him, and discover him anew, and people would have met him consciously for the first time on monday and people will meet him now and people will continue to meet him. I’m just another person, I know, I’m not the final word on Bowie and I’m not trying to be, I wouldn’t ever want to be, there shouldn’t be. I’m another person who feels him so greatly, incredibly, ineffably, and on Monday I realised just how many of us there are. Just look at a population clock, a 7 billion figure isn’t inaccurate. And all the newborns ever adding to that figure? Well they’re just Bowie fans-to-be. In that narrative we have in the far future where aliens will discover our planet and look through the archaeological remains of this current humanity, they might find the Beatles and hold them as representatives of humanity, but they’ll find Bowie and think ‘Others got here first?’

Alright that’s being facetious. One of the popular cliches is to celebrate Bowie as something other than human, and as goddamn...transcendent as he was, unbounded by human restraints as most of us are (sexuality and...cocaine) but isn’t that maybe just a little....dehumanising? The intention isn’t to reduce him to something lesser than us, quite the bloody opposite, but we’re constantly celebrating him like he was something beyond our ultimate understanding our even something untangible when he made himself both of those things for us. (Gotta watch my tone, sound like I’m Jesus preaching, oops) I was wondering if that isn’t just as dangerous as idolising that we’ve given any other rockstar, because even if its just in casual speech we’re depriving them of ability to be human, we’re not allowing them the same opportunities to be assholes our to fail or to be confused or scared or to let us down, because they’re supposed to be something greater than us. Well Bowie was something greater than us, but maybe he’s just the next step in human evolution. Maybe he’s the pinnacle of humanity, not it’s most welcome visitor.

He was an unbelievably great human (not that I’m writing a college essay here and I’ve gotta back-up my statements, but let’s do some Bowie sharing. Here is one that’s already made the rounds, but for those that haven’t seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZGiVzIr8Qg) whose effect was greater than what any single human seems capable of. His name carried a weight, not just a twinge of recognition or a little happiness or a few memories. It was a weight of something powerful, immovable, permanent, fundamental, necessary. He was elemental that way. In news of his passing we all said the same thing: “He’s just somebody you never considered loosing” “You didn’t think it could happen to him” “Death isn’t a concept relevant to Bowie” There are people that have had a presence in your life for so long that their mortality doesn’t come into question, and when they die you are stunned but ultimately it’s another death that needs to be accepted, but with Bowie he wasn’t just entrenched in culture, he was a space inside us, because through the best part of 6 individual decades of constantly experimenting with art at the forefront of the popular consciousness, you don’t just reach out and connect, you become a part of the people. Isn’t that just amazing how incredibly personal it was for all of us? I can say it so matter-of-factly now, but before Monday morning I didn’t realise to what extent Bowie was a kind of life inside me, a permanently residing energy. And when I found out, I was shocked out how something felt ripped out of me. I was deflated in such a surprise burst, because I didn’t consciously know how well and truly Bowie had affected me. I’ve listened to his music in fluctuations between semi-regularly and devotedly throughout the past 2/3 years, and I loved him, but I didn’t know how much my mind and body had kind of ushered him in as a resident, welcomed him in like nutrients, like food; re-programmed to his music, his soul, his alien antics and his charming british gentlemanliness, his mad poetry, his commanding baritone and his disarming falsetto, the swimming darkness of his lower notes and the exultant tremor of his higher ones (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvC9oOwU3lk) all of it running through the body like another liquid, like blood, so when he died my body and the deepest reaches of my mind quaked before I could even register it: a vital ingredient was gone. Bowie was often a long and challenging journey into strange new lands that required fortitude and sensitivity, but he was also so visceral and punchy and immediate, and the body gets it first. That’s why in the immediate aftermath I put on Station to Station and just let my body mourn, sway in pain. That album is totally unlocked for me, that is my favourite, that is my dance record and my thinking record and my pain record and a collection of 6 individual songs more fully-formed than most others, more wound-up and more bled out, like a series of stunningly intricate dance moves performed and landed and taken right to the floor on which you lie during the final song and just breathe. And that visceral quality is why this exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt2KlkBUgXA

And it doesn’t need to be stated how visually recognisable Bowie was, how he changed fashion and dressed to excite the mind, arouse the mind, put ideas in the mind, how his face was something else, something fixating and so perfect, the contours a landscape of the next planet. Cinema loved him, naturally. It’s why he worked with some of the most beloved directors, directors who worked with unique experimental vision that Bowie had a place in, from David Lynch, to Martin Scorsese, from Nagisa Ôshima to Nicolas Roeg. And of course Nicolas Roeg cast him in The Man Who Fell to Earth which I had to watch on Monday, and who else could have been the alien, Thomas Jerome Newton? It’s a film that’s in tune with Bowie, constructed around his persona: weirdly aloof, like has galaxies worth of pain on his mind, but excitable and decadent too, frail and sensitive, he’s at once present and occupied with things unknowable to us, he’s at once both alien and human, a herald of things greater than us yet ridden with the same flaws; it’s a combination that perhaps makes him universal; and so what better persona to have than Bowie to guide us through the abstact realms of confusion and despair that permeate a Roeg film, who more appropriate for a director’s in whose work time is so fluid it and precarious as to replicate the psyche, and which piece of art better to encapsulate the figure of Bowie?

Fluidity, movement, metamorphosis, change.

“What’s the word for things not being the same as always. You know. I’m sure there’s one. Isn’t there?”

Ah, change.

That cliché that we love to spout about him too, about how his game was change, like a chameleon, he imitated his surroundings but there was never a solid, constant, underlying being. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4C3KqUS0tk - Bowie, charming humble Bowie takes a dig at his trademark, and this cliché amongst many other great moments here) Well, change was kind of his...manifesto, as some people like to put it, as suggested in that beautiful bouncing nighclubby yet wistful summary of life’s transience song called Changes way back in ‘71. He did change, so regularly so seamlessly, from hairdo to genre to culture to very smallest sonic whispers. Music is changing, evolving all the time, we know that and that’s not a strange fact. It’s fun to chart the narrative of popular music from the ‘50s onward, because we can see its developments, its smallest bumps and inclines in with retrospective detail, see how the unhinged glee of glam bled into the fervor of punk and that into more sombre industrial places and out again into slicker romantic light, and much more before and after and in-between, and within each of those periods, within each indivual zeitgeist, it’s rare that someone ever comes with momentum, and relevance, to continue into the next, let alone set the pace, leading it. We have the luxury to trace time. We get to put our finger along the timeline, along its individual moments. But is it the moment you stop to try and combat the forces of time, you are done? (”Time may change me...”) Maybe it’s the song that brought clarity to Bowie, allowed him to arrive at the Bowie we have on Blackstar. You can take any lyric from that song and make it the philosophical slogan of his life, it’s rather phenomenal how much truth is in that song, but maybe, not chasing a richer man, becoming a different man, he held to the same core, throughout all the change he held the same essence.

If I may quote Sandman again: “I think....sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die.”

It seems like artists have their window, and it is shut, a brief moment to burn, and then snuff. That is our fate in general yes, (woohoo, we’ve always got that to look forward too) but art always carries death, I think, the thought of it, the prospect of it, it is in its nature. Art doesn’t die, but it does kill us. Think of those who died trying to hold on to the same music, being ground down into dust, and those who jumped to new things, and left something of themselves behind. Change or die isn’t the final ultimatum though, David Bowie died many many times, always to change. Most people can’t do that, but then, you know, most of us aren’t David Bowie, and who the hell is ever going to be. Although, that’s not the point. We shouldn’t replace him, we’ve got to preserve the space he left. Remember in Primary School (or whatever equivalent pre-pubescent school you were in, dear person, all these may be a post-80s thing) those rainbow parachutes that would be brought out, on the rarest of occasions (always to bring the greatest fun) and your class would gather around its circumference each holding a piece and you would pull it taught and somebody would go on top, or underneath...? Well, let’s pretend that space David Bowie created and left is the space underneath our collective Rainbow parachute, and we’ve all got to hold a piece and make sure it doesn’t sag.

That space we’re protecting is the final death, the death of mortal, corporeal David Bowie, and obviously nothing could prepare for that, although death happened regularly in his work, death permeated it, death gave farewell to each persona, and change brought us the next one. It’s one of the greatest gifts an artist has given us, taken us by the hand through the terror and wild uncertainty and maybe downright fun and exhilaration of our own mortality, I’m just as scared of death as ever, I don’t know what can cure me of my existential terror, if there is one, but I’m sure as shit not going to let go of Bowie, decline that hand of his. I’ve felt unbelievable terror for my life, a depression that built to such a wild storm, a blustering hurricane blowing such volatile air it forced me on to my bed and pinned me there, a hurricane so strong it felt like it ripped a hole open in the air, a void, and if I so much as turned my head when I was lying there on that occasion I would be sucked into it, dead. I know, I know, I know, I know this time I have 25 Bowie albums and more work besides, there. for. me. It’s silly and I know I can’t promise anything but I want to believe that if I have the opportunity to die peacefully, on that deathbed you hear so much about, that Bowie will play at some point. But, even all his artistic deaths, like Ziggy’s goodbye (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-G1Uy0OkCw) were not final like a real, well and true death, Ziggy was no longer Mr Stardust but he was subject to metamorphosis, to the cabaret wildness of Aladdin Sane and was heard in final echoes in Diamond Dogs, not just a single mortal blow that he was powerless to. It’s not an artist’s responsibility to help us face death, and Bowie won’t have failed if I have final moments in which I am overcome with dread. I don’t know if a single person could change that, I don’t know if we ourselves can. I don’t think there is a single force that is any solution, only the accumulated experience of life. And it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that Bowie can be a solution, or rather the solution, because he seemed to encompass just about the greatest spectrum of life. He had such a full life. Over the past days I’ve seen pictures and videos of him with people from the likes of Aretha Franklin to Dario Argento and I wonder which people didn’t have the fortune to meet him. So because he seemed to encompass life, he is all you need. Living isn't just listening to his entire catalogue. But I guess the fact I had to tell myself that is a testament to him enough.

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