Third Anniversary of Bowie's Death
My new year begins, as it did last year, with thoughts of David Bowie. I wonder if this will become a tradition. Anyway, I'm spending this third anniversary of Bowie's death with my favorite album of his: the 1969
David Bowie, better known as
Space Oddity.
I am continually astounded by the sheer creative beauty of this album, its illimitable poetry and magic. From "Space Oddity" to "Cygnet Committee" to "Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud" to "Memory of a Free Festival", this album catches the spirit of the late 60s perfectly: naive young people thinking music and love could save the world, dreamers forming clubs and societies for the sole purpose of getting together and creating art. "Cygnet Committee" just keeps on giving to me. Bowie creates a whole world in one song, from the ends of despair to the heights of an unrealized hope, from the small club of likeminded artists to the wide expanse of a future horizon. There's so much room here for my imagination to explore.
When Bowie was on point, his interviews could be incisive and profound, and probably my favorite of his is his 1999 BBC interview.
The BBC covers a lot of ground in this 16-minute sit-down with the contemplative, philosophical, exuberant artist. Bowie talks of his exquisite roleplaying ability, borne of a kind of shyness of the stage, even though he wanted in his youth nothing more than to write musical theater, and so he reinvented himself throughout the 70s, living out in rock lifestyle his dream of writing musicals. He was a creator, a storyteller, and not just a songwriter. Related to the constant adopting of roles, he seems to be happy in not knowing who he really is. I'm not sure if I believe him, though. He knows a lot about himself. Well, he's better at
describing himself than
identifying himself.
They also briefly cover substance abuse in the interview, and Bowie talks of when he was young and how he would sabotage relationships in order to create the tension he needed to write. I appreciate the brutal honesty about his alcoholism, too. Bowie was a man of such refreshing honesty.
And then they get to what I consider is the most fascinating part of the conversation:
the internet. He is prescient in his appreciation of what the internet is capable of, and he touches on how it is a tool by which the artist is demystified in the estimation of the audience. It is the decentralized voice, image, and media through which listeners interact with music--the gatekeepers are dead, a fact he is very happy about. With the rise of genre identification, music has become more about the audience than the trailblazing artist who stands above everyone and leads, pointing the way to the stars. The internet exemplifies the democratization of ideas. And it isn't just as tool, as the interviewer believes. It's "an alien lifeform", both exhilarating and terrifying in its potential. This musing on what the internet means brings Bowie to a contemplation of the philosophy of art: that art is not completed until the the audience brings its interpretation to it. This is what the internet will highlight and expand upon.
Hats off to Bowie for grace in the face of idiocy. That interviewer is an obtuse, condescending, scoffing as
shole.