David Bowie Will Never Die:
Decoding the Icon Who Fell to Earth
When does the character of Bowie
become more real than the human
playing it?
by Sasha Geffen
on January 07, 2016, 6:00pm
of knowing how to do it in a very overt, brave, and yet
commercial kind of way. When he put his arm around Mick
Ronson, that was a very simple symbolism that a lot of people
would get. Yet it was an important leap forward. It was an
important moment in the history of popular culture. That act
was one that did outrage people. It did really help define
today’s cultural landscape.”
Part of Bowie’s enduring legacy owes not just to the fact that
he was willing to break waves and break rules, but that he
could do so from a position just slightly outside the
boundaries of the real. Teenagers in 1972 didn’t just see a
man flirting with another man on Top of the Pops; they saw a
spaceman, an alien, a messiah from above — the same kind
of figure he was singing about and would keep singing about
for decades. “Bowie gave me a hope that there was something
else,” Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan [said].
(…) Tomorrow, Bowie will release his 25th studio album, ★,
and turn 69 while he’s at it. Since his self-titled 1967 debut,
he’s released new records continuously — at least once every
three years — except for the decade after 2003’s Reality,
when he seemed to fade noiselessly into the background.
Some speculated he’d retired. Then he returned, without
warning or explanation. His career takes up half a century; his
legacy grows as steadily as his mystery.
“He was so important to my generation: people who were
born in the ’60s and the ’50s and the early ‘70s,” says David
Buckley, author of the Bowie biography Strange Fascination
and one of the few people on earth who has written a PhD
thesis on the rock star. “He represented a portal, a gateway
out of everyday life to all sorts of different areas that I would
never have been introduced to as a working-class boy from
Liverpool. It’s through David Bowie that I learned about
Brecht, that I learned about Anthony Newley, that I learned
about Kabuki theater, about sexual politics and art and
different groups that I’d never heard of. Paul Morley referred
to him as my generation’s Google. That’s exactly what he
was.”
(…) Four and a half decades ago, Bowie began to rewrite the
rules of pop. (…) “Up to this point, pop music had been
mainly about belonging, about identification with their peers.
This music, carefully choreographed in a dank basement
under a South London escort agency, was a spectacle of notbelonging. For scattered isolated kids around the UK, and
soon on the American East Coast, and then on the West Coast,
this was their day. The day of the outsider.” wrote author Paul
Trynka in his biography David Bowie: Starman.
Science fiction, spectacle, and queerness landed intertwined
in pop culture in that moment. (…) “He’d do stuff with such
commitment that he could actually shift the parameters. There
was a lot of queer culture in Britain before Bowie, but he was
really the most visible person to say, ‘Here I am. I’m
transcending the bounds of sexuality.’ He just had the genius
(…) “He was lucky that he imprinted himself on our
consciousness at a time when people were looking for new
models of how to live,” says Trynka. “That yearning is a
quasi-religious one. In the past, people would wait for the
messiah to come and take us all away and somehow give
meaning to all of these random events that make up our lives.
[Bowie] is really a modern reworking of that.
(…) Latest album director Johan Renck sees Bowie’s career
not strictly as an infatuation with science fiction or mysticism,
but as an exploration of non-belonging. “‘Space Oddity’ to
me is about outsidership and nothing else,” he says. “I
imagine when you are an artist of that stature and that level of
creativity, you start to look at the world differently. If you’re
a very intelligent and very artistic person, of course you
would like to push your writing, your poetry, your art into
figmented realities. It becomes relevant to try it out there.
Maybe he is an escapist to some extent. I am. Maybe there is
something that escapism reveals with imagery and thoughts
that are removed from kitchen-counter reality.”
(…) Since his 2013 return, he’s spoken to the public
exclusively through his work and his collaborators — no
appearances and no performances, at least not in the flesh.
“He has these representatives. It makes him even more
mystical.
(…) “Much of Mr. Bowie’s extraordinary longevity as a rock
god has to do with the feeling that he has never really been
with us ‘in the flesh.’” More than any other pop star, Bowie
has mastered the art of being everywhere and nowhere at the
same time — a little like an alien, a little like God.
The void between Bowie the artist and Bowie the person
arrives at the end of a long-growing schism. For decades he’s
toyed with interviewers, making statements and then
contradicting them, or simply reaching as “far out” as
possible in conversation. “I should like to replace all parts of
my body with plastic equivalents,” he told Music Scene in
1973. “Then I couldn’t grow old. I could just sit inside and
watch it all function perfectly.” (…) “A lot of people think
that the ‘real’ David Bowie is this regular-ass guy who just
created this myth around himself,” says Hether Fortune,
leader of the band Wax Idols. “I don’t think that’s true. I think
that’s who he really is. Through his youth, he was just
struggling to find the best way to show himself without giving
too much away. In the ’70s, he was really out there, really
embracing the spectacle of pop culture. But I think he used it
as a tool and then was like, ‘Okay, I did that. That’s it. I’m
not giving anyone anything other than my work.’ That’s why
you can’t get to him. That’s why it’s impossible to speak with
him or find out the ‘truth’ about David Bowie. He’s made it
impossible, an impenetrable wall where the only truth we
have available to us is the work that he presents to the world.
And that has to be taken as fact.”
The idea that the truth of something lies on its surface is a
Brechtian one and one that’s informed many of pop culture’s
biggest names of the past hundred years, though none so
much as Bowie. The vacancy he leaves where his “real”
personality should be allows fans to crawl deeper into his
work from the outside, searching for authenticity only to
discover they’ve been surrounded by it the whole time. “He
is building up this central, very powerful mystique, the idea
of him being unreachable,” says Trynka. “That in itself is a
potent reaction to what’s happening in the mass media. In the
mass media, music is ever-present. It’s on tap. It’s streaming
out all the time, so it becomes less precious. And then of
course you have the notion of celebrity, which is omnipresent,
with people always tweeting pictures of themselves. The
whole mystique of glamour has been diminished. This is a
masterful reaction where the music is very measured. It
comes out in these little packets, which are precious. In the
meantime, he’s reacted to the ominipresence of celebrity by
just disappearing, which gives him far more glamour than if
he were doing photoshoot after photoshoot.”
If the entirety of David Bowie rests on the surface of David
Bowie — the music, the imagery, the personality that is now
instantly accessible by anyone with an Internet connection —
the essence of David Bowie becomes increasingly less
dependent on David Jones, the aspiring songwriter born on
January 8, 1947, who at some point in the ‘70s exploded into
an entity larger than himself. “I have a lot of theories about
him: He’s had a long-term plan since he was young, a vision
for himself as a character as a way to survive through time
and space,” says Fortune. “Even throughout all of his very
human foibles, like being a drug addict and the ups and downs
of fame, he’s always stayed on this one path.”
(…) “[Velvet Goldmine] basically recreated David Bowie
using the same exact tools that he used to create himself,”
says Fortune. “What they’re insinuating is this person is an
entity that moves through different lives and can come back
through any vessel of its choosing. That it’s not really Bowie;
it’s this other entity. What I think he’s doing with Michael C.
Hall and with Lazarus is, I think he has actually found a way
to do what Velvet Goldmine suggests: to make it so that after
his physical body is gone, anyone can perform as David
Bowie. He’s immortalizing himself. It’s insane. It’s fucking
brilliant.
“Obviously that’s the whole idea of theater,” Fortune adds.
“Anyone can become a role and keep a character alive. That’s
the beauty of theater, and we know that Bowie is an avid
theater person. It’s an obvious fit, but to take those old world
theater ideas of eternal life through art and apply it in a pop
way, as a pop icon — that’s never been done before.”
(…) “When Bowie’s gone, there could be other … not clones,
but ghosts of Bowie.”
“There’s never been anybody else who’s been able to be the
new Bowie, because you can’t replace something that isn’t
gone,” says Fortune. “That’s his greatest power. That’s what
he’s doing in the biggest possible way with Lazarus and ★.
He’s finalizing once and for all, I will never be replaceable. I
will always be present. Always, forever. No one can be me
again — except for anybody, but only if they actually want to
be me.”
(…) “Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all,” said
Bowie to Ingenue Magazine in 1973. “Sometimes I’m just a
collection of other people’s ideas.” That was more than 40
years ago. (…) The core of Bowie — or of everything — is
not what he is, but how he’s seen. Or really, the two are one
and the same. There is no David Bowie except the one you
imagine, and it is always possible to imagine him.
“There is a singular energy that moves throughout each
person, but it’s all fluid. It’s transmittable. It’s like a disease.
You can give it to somebody,” says Fortune. “It doesn’t have
to begin and end with your birth and death. It’s something that
can be moved through time and space, if you can separate
your individual essence from your intellectual ego and allow
it to become this broader thing that can be shared and passed
along.
(…)
 BMIR 94.6 had to talk about David Bowie’s death. As
a journalist, make a report, using information contained
in this article.
David Bowie Will Never Die:
Decoding the Icon Who Fell to Earth
When does the character of Bowie
become more real than the human
playing it?
by Sasha Geffen
on January 07, 2016, 6:00pm
of knowing how to do it in a very overt, brave, and yet
commercial kind of way. When he put his arm around Mick
Ronson, that was a very simple symbolism that a lot of people
would get. Yet it was an important leap forward. It was an
important moment in the history of popular culture. That act
was one that did outrage people. It did really help define
today’s cultural landscape.”
Part of Bowie’s enduring legacy owes not just to the fact that
he was willing to break waves and break rules, but that he
could do so from a position just slightly outside the
boundaries of the real. Teenagers in 1972 didn’t just see a
man flirting with another man on Top of the Pops; they saw a
spaceman, an alien, a messiah from above — the same kind
of figure he was singing about and would keep singing about
for decades. “Bowie gave me a hope that there was something
else,” Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan [said].
(…) Tomorrow, Bowie will release his 25th studio album, ★,
and turn 69 while he’s at it. Since his self-titled 1967 debut,
he’s released new records continuously — at least once every
three years — except for the decade after 2003’s Reality,
when he seemed to fade noiselessly into the background.
Some speculated he’d retired. Then he returned, without
warning or explanation. His career takes up half a century; his
legacy grows as steadily as his mystery.
“He was so important to my generation: people who were
born in the ’60s and the ’50s and the early ‘70s,” says David
Buckley, author of the Bowie biography Strange Fascination
and one of the few people on earth who has written a PhD
thesis on the rock star. “He represented a portal, a gateway
out of everyday life to all sorts of different areas that I would
never have been introduced to as a working-class boy from
Liverpool. It’s through David Bowie that I learned about
Brecht, that I learned about Anthony Newley, that I learned
about Kabuki theater, about sexual politics and art and
different groups that I’d never heard of. Paul Morley referred
to him as my generation’s Google. That’s exactly what he
was.”
(…) Four and a half decades ago, Bowie began to rewrite the
rules of pop. (…) “Up to this point, pop music had been
mainly about belonging, about identification with their peers.
This music, carefully choreographed in a dank basement
under a South London escort agency, was a spectacle of notbelonging. For scattered isolated kids around the UK, and
soon on the American East Coast, and then on the West Coast,
this was their day. The day of the outsider.” wrote author Paul
Trynka in his biography David Bowie: Starman.
Science fiction, spectacle, and queerness landed intertwined
in pop culture in that moment. (…) “He’d do stuff with such
commitment that he could actually shift the parameters. There
was a lot of queer culture in Britain before Bowie, but he was
really the most visible person to say, ‘Here I am. I’m
transcending the bounds of sexuality.’ He just had the genius
(…) “He was lucky that he imprinted himself on our
consciousness at a time when people were looking for new
models of how to live,” says Trynka. “That yearning is a
quasi-religious one. In the past, people would wait for the
messiah to come and take us all away and somehow give
meaning to all of these random events that make up our lives.
[Bowie] is really a modern reworking of that.
(…) Latest album director Johan Renck sees Bowie’s career
not strictly as an infatuation with science fiction or mysticism,
but as an exploration of non-belonging. “‘Space Oddity’ to
me is about outsidership and nothing else,” he says. “I
imagine when you are an artist of that stature and that level of
creativity, you start to look at the world differently. If you’re
a very intelligent and very artistic person, of course you
would like to push your writing, your poetry, your art into
figmented realities. It becomes relevant to try it out there.
Maybe he is an escapist to some extent. I am. Maybe there is
something that escapism reveals with imagery and thoughts
that are removed from kitchen-counter reality.”
(…) Since his 2013 return, he’s spoken to the public
exclusively through his work and his collaborators — no
appearances and no performances, at least not in the flesh.
“He has these representatives. It makes him even more
mystical.
(…) “Much of Mr. Bowie’s extraordinary longevity as a rock
god has to do with the feeling that he has never really been
with us ‘in the flesh.’” More than any other pop star, Bowie
has mastered the art of being everywhere and nowhere at the
same time — a little like an alien, a little like God.
The void between Bowie the artist and Bowie the person
arrives at the end of a long-growing schism. For decades he’s
toyed with interviewers, making statements and then
contradicting them, or simply reaching as “far out” as
possible in conversation. “I should like to replace all parts of
my body with plastic equivalents,” he told Music Scene in
1973. “Then I couldn’t grow old. I could just sit inside and
watch it all function perfectly.” (…) “A lot of people think
that the ‘real’ David Bowie is this regular-ass guy who just
created this myth around himself,” says Hether Fortune,
leader of the band Wax Idols. “I don’t think that’s true. I think
that’s who he really is. Through his youth, he was just
struggling to find the best way to show himself without giving
too much away. In the ’70s, he was really out there, really
embracing the spectacle of pop culture. But I think he used it
as a tool and then was like, ‘Okay, I did that. That’s it. I’m
not giving anyone anything other than my work.’ That’s why
you can’t get to him. That’s why it’s impossible to speak with
him or find out the ‘truth’ about David Bowie. He’s made it
impossible, an impenetrable wall where the only truth we
have available to us is the work that he presents to the world.
And that has to be taken as fact.”
The idea that the truth of something lies on its surface is a
Brechtian one and one that’s informed many of pop culture’s
biggest names of the past hundred years, though none so
much as Bowie. The vacancy he leaves where his “real”
personality should be allows fans to crawl deeper into his
work from the outside, searching for authenticity only to
discover they’ve been surrounded by it the whole time. “He
is building up this central, very powerful mystique, the idea
of him being unreachable,” says Trynka. “That in itself is a
potent reaction to what’s happening in the mass media. In the
mass media, music is ever-present. It’s on tap. It’s streaming
out all the time, so it becomes less precious. And then of
course you have the notion of celebrity, which is omnipresent,
with people always tweeting pictures of themselves. The
whole mystique of glamour has been diminished. This is a
masterful reaction where the music is very measured. It
comes out in these little packets, which are precious. In the
meantime, he’s reacted to the ominipresence of celebrity by
just disappearing, which gives him far more glamour than if
he were doing photoshoot after photoshoot.”
If the entirety of David Bowie rests on the surface of David
Bowie — the music, the imagery, the personality that is now
instantly accessible by anyone with an Internet connection —
the essence of David Bowie becomes increasingly less
dependent on David Jones, the aspiring songwriter born on
January 8, 1947, who at some point in the ‘70s exploded into
an entity larger than himself. “I have a lot of theories about
him: He’s had a long-term plan since he was young, a vision
for himself as a character as a way to survive through time
and space,” says Fortune. “Even throughout all of his very
human foibles, like being a drug addict and the ups and downs
of fame, he’s always stayed on this one path.”
(…) “[Velvet Goldmine] basically recreated David Bowie
using the same exact tools that he used to create himself,”
says Fortune. “What they’re insinuating is this person is an
entity that moves through different lives and can come back
through any vessel of its choosing. That it’s not really Bowie;
it’s this other entity. What I think he’s doing with Michael C.
Hall and with Lazarus is, I think he has actually found a way
to do what Velvet Goldmine suggests: to make it so that after
his physical body is gone, anyone can perform as David
Bowie. He’s immortalizing himself. It’s insane. It’s fucking
brilliant.
“Obviously that’s the whole idea of theater,” Fortune adds.
“Anyone can become a role and keep a character alive. That’s
the beauty of theater, and we know that Bowie is an avid
theater person. It’s an obvious fit, but to take those old world
theater ideas of eternal life through art and apply it in a pop
way, as a pop icon — that’s never been done before.”
(…) “When Bowie’s gone, there could be other … not clones,
but ghosts of Bowie.”
“There’s never been anybody else who’s been able to be the
new Bowie, because you can’t replace something that isn’t
gone,” says Fortune. “That’s his greatest power. That’s what
he’s doing in the biggest possible way with Lazarus and ★.
He’s finalizing once and for all, I will never be replaceable. I
will always be present. Always, forever. No one can be me
again — except for anybody, but only if they actually want to
be me.”
(…) “Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all,” said
Bowie to Ingenue Magazine in 1973. “Sometimes I’m just a
collection of other people’s ideas.” That was more than 40
years ago. (…) The core of Bowie — or of everything — is
not what he is, but how he’s seen. Or really, the two are one
and the same. There is no David Bowie except the one you
imagine, and it is always possible to imagine him.
“There is a singular energy that moves throughout each
person, but it’s all fluid. It’s transmittable. It’s like a disease.
You can give it to somebody,” says Fortune. “It doesn’t have
to begin and end with your birth and death. It’s something that
can be moved through time and space, if you can separate
your individual essence from your intellectual ego and allow
it to become this broader thing that can be shared and passed
along.
(…)
 BMIR 94.6 had to talk about David Bowie’s death. As
a journalist, make a report, using information contained
in this article.