Why There Will Never Be Another Like David Bowie
Hunter Desportes via Wikimedia Commons
On the 8th of January 2016, David Bowie celebrated what he knew to be his final birthday by releasing his album Blackstar. He passed away two days later, and in doing so immortalised himself as an artist unafraid to add his own death to a legendary oeuvre. I remember when David Bowie died – I was in the car, and he was playing on every single radio station. His death was like a seismic-radio wave; you could say he died the way he lived.
I only truly discovered Bowie five years later, and realised that he was not one man, but a collection of eccentric, gender-bending, era-defying and defining characters. ‘David Bowie’ was the creative vessel that continued throughout his life of art. He knew that being himself was not being what the people wanted but instead being unapologetically new.
One of the many genres that Bowie pioneered was glam rock in the early 70s, which his first persona, Ziggy Stardust, came to define. More than this, Bowie also epitomised the word ‘camp’, and, by refusing to elaborate on his sexuality (they’re shoe shoes, silly), cemented himself as a queer icon. In a time of celebrities being outed, gay conspiracies, and repulsive ‘transvestigations’, I believe that Bowie’s 1973 interview snap-back ‘shoe shoes’ is strangely current. His ability to permeate culture while still being avant-garde, and to (arguably) pull off some of the latex that he did, is a testament to the self-security he radiated in being an individual. Personas – from Major Tom to the Thin White Duke – and albums such as Hunky Dory and Let’s Dance reflect their respective time periods, but also began normalising queer expressions of identity. Perhaps it’s as much the timing of Bowie’s art that makes him sui generis; he anchored non-conformity in the mainstream of a previous generation’s culture – a gift for anyone who has had to explain gender to their grandad.
In some of his most important work, Bowie did not hesitate on serious themes; Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide, Conversation Piece, and Always Crashing in the Same Car address depression face-on. It’s hard to believe this is the same man who leans so forcefully into the pastiche of I’m Afraid of Americans and TVC-15 (a song about Iggy Pop’s hallucination of his girlfriend being sucked into a television). But Bowie’s most widespread nugget of wisdom comes at the end of Under Pressure, where he, dare I say, outshines Freddie Mercury – in a Queen song no less. The line ‘Love’s such an old-fashioned word’ has a fanbase of its own.
There are many things people don’t know about David Bowie. He trained as a Buddhist Monk, he left LA for Berlin in the 70s (recovering from a cocaine blackout period during which he had no memory of composing the masterpiece album Station to Station), and wrote what is now known as the Berlin Trilogy, three ground-breaking art-rock albums. He started on a musical adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 before being denied the rights by Orwell’s estate, so he reworked it into the album Diamond Dogs (that’s how we got Rebel Rebel). He also posthumously paid for the Binley Woods Village Hall car park. Finally, born in Brixton, and cremated in New Jersey, his ashes were scattered in Bali according to the Buddhist ritual meant to bring about renewal. But somehow, I think his renewal had already happened. Knowing all of this, it’s not surprising that he used his own death for an album; David Bowie was more than his music; he was the uniqueness of the decades, the novelty of his own, expressive identity, and a lifetime commitment to creating art.