Bowie Obituaries

It's taken me a long time to write my own ideas of David Bowie's death, and my obituary for him. I had come to a point in my music where Bowie's new music was largely peripheral in my attention after the rather ironically named Never Let Me Down. Heathen and a few other things I heard I liked, but I didn't rush out and buy them, either. 

At Christmastime, I had a weekday off of all responsibilities and wandered into a thrift shop, where I found the Sound And Vision CDs for $2. No book, no box, but the most important part for only $2! I loaded them into the CD player in my car and started a big Bowie kick. I pulled all my Bowie records down and put them on the shelf in the living room and immersed myself in Bowie for about two weeks before his birthday on January 8. And Blackstar got me excited again. Really excited. KEXP held "Intergalactic Bowie Day" on January 8, and I listened all day long. I kept swimming in an ocean of Bowie's music, and I've felt (about Bowie and many other records I've played in the last six months), that I'm hearing the music as though for the first time. The hair on my arms stand up when I hear music again. It's like a blockage in my brain has moved aside, and music is painting my neurons like they did when I was 15, 16 years old.

Then of course, January 10, I woke for work, grabbed my phone off the night stand, and saw the headline from the Chicago Tribune, that Bowie had died.

I was crushed. Gutted. KEXP responded as they could only be expected to: a shell-shocked second "Intergalactic Bowie Day," but this time the stories were memoirs, no longer quite the same ebullient admiration of an audience wondering of the next thing on the horizon. From now on, all we can do is line the records up on the shelf of time and point to the intersections of his life and the recordings. He was really gone. I wept as though I had lost a favorite uncle. I felt like a fool, to weep for a dead celebrity. But I then realized just how much Bowie had meant to me all these years.

I couldn't bring myself to listen to the album Blackstar for a couple of weeks. I had to just love his records like I did when he was alive. Just love those records. Not this one. I finally said, "Okay, David, what do you want to say to me?" and I listened (thanks to Amazon Prime Music streaming, I could hear it all). I heard in the first track his omniscient voice assuring me, while the music fluidly plucked the piano off Hunky Dory, the backup vocals from Ziggy and Aladdin Sane, the stomp and sway from Station To Station...it was as though he condensed one of his greatest hits records down into a song from beyond the grave. His lyrics assured me that there is only love and light after death, and that he had ceased fearing stepping over that threshold. And I finally accepted his death and wept harder than I had about his death. And finally, by the end of the record, I was reconciled with his death.

Since then, I've enjoyed three obituaries particularly well: Stewart Berman's and Tom Ewing's on Pitchfork, and Chris Jones' in the Chicago Tribune:

Profound was Bowie's sense of detachment from his own celebrity. Heck, maybe even unique. Thus he was able to create a separate character — David Bowie — allowing him to live as David Robert Jones in relative quiet. David Bowie was the performance-art project of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, whose name, of course, was David Robert Jones.

And

Bowie wrote, composed and filmed his own end, much as Shakespeare seemed to do in "The Tempest," actually. And in so doing he was able to offer his fans and lovers a sense of completion — and we all need a sense of completion — while buying his real self some honest-to-God privacy.

And yet I can say that Blackstar was given to us as a deeply personal and loving tribute to us, his fans.