- Jimmy King
Since David Bowie’s death, his lyrics have taken on an eerie second life. I don’t just mean the lyrics specifically from Blackstar, the exquisite, gutting farewell album that came out on his 69th birthday, two days before he died. Bowie’s entire catalog is littered with prescient lyrics about passing on from the material world.
Mortality and the afterlife loom in his first-ever hit, 1969’s “Space Oddity.” (“Though I’m past 100,000 miles/I’m feeling very still/And I think my spaceship knows which way to go/Tell my wife I love her very much.” “She knows!” Ground Control helpfully replies.) With his breakthrough album, 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Bowie upped the ante, turning Major Tom’s singular, doomed fate into that of all mankind, detailing an apocalypse presaged by an astral visitor. (On the concert tours that followed, Bowie performed Jacques Brel’s “My Death,” in case songs like “Five Years” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” didn’t drive the point home fast enough.) Later tracks like “Fantastic Voyage” and “Heroes” continue the fatalistic bent, and the threat of catastrophe even traipses around the edges of his dancehall anthem, “Let’s Dance.” (“Let’s dance/For fear your grace should fall/Let’s dance/For fear tonight is all.”)
It could be said that David Bowie died dozens of times before he actually departed this mortal plane on Sunday, January 10, 2016. The first was in 1966, when he abandoned his Christian name, David Jones (a professional decision made when another Englishman with the same name began making waves over in America on a television show called The Monkees). The newly renamed David Bowie attempted multiple careers before “Space Oddity”—and, later, Ziggy Stardust—caught on. He was at various times a hard-hitting mod, an Anthony Newley-type music-hall song-and-dance man, a longhaired utopian hippie who founded the Beckenham Arts Lab, an actual mime, and an earnest folksinger armed with only a 12-string guitar and a parcel of feelings. None of those phases stuck, thank goodness, and Bowie, indicating the pattern that would become the hallmark of his chameleonic career, jettisoned his identity again and again.
Even when people started paying attention, Bowie remained difficult to pin down: The heavy-metal thrombosis of 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World could not be more at odds with the lilting, piano-led ballads of 1971’s Hunky Dory. And in 1973, at the height of his initial rise to fame, the newly minted superstar announced his retirement from the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon. “Not only is it the last show of the tour,” he informed a crowd of weeping fans, “it’s the last show that we’ll ever do.”
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MORE DAVID BOWIE…
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