Ten years without David Bowie has also been 10 years very much with David Bowie. His death hasn’t meant a disappearance or even a precious, gentle fading away. So far, it looks as though he will be around for as long as there is a forever, in immortal movement, sending clues about how art and music should liberate the soul, provoke the imagination and encourage people to go further.
He’s living a resonant afterlife through his songs of pain and pleasure, connection and disconnection, songs dedicated to making something happen. A robust legacy is growing that it seems he had been carefully, sometimes chaotically, preparing for through his years as shape-shifting prophet, philosopher and for many the ultimate dream pop star, dazzled by the sheer joy of creation.
His greatest legacy is, in a word, his timelessness. In more words; he embedded thought into performance and changed our conception of reality, as an artist should. With immense self-assurance and rampant self-consciousness, he turned his life into a transformative, celebratory and emotional work of art made up of songs, singing, style and radical vulnerability; he was filled with ideas, spirituality, ways, means, materials, mystery, wit and possibilities, and made the world his.
He found his own voice – listening to the crazy voices in his head – and then exaggerated it. He was a great scavenger, combining what existed into something that had never existed before. Life was his syllabus. He read and studied, looked and learned, and he gathered from everywhere, driven to become an utterly unique individual, one with a conscience, which constantly kept his curiosity fresh.
He contained multitudes, but in essence, he was a performance artist as pop singer working with space and time, an elusive, charming cultural conceptualist who understood that art is a form of knowing yourself and how that can involve following your work into its darkest corners and strangest manifestations. In a way, as an artist, he wasn’t making objects, as much as some of his greatest artworks were records. He was making mythologies. He was modifying consciousness with lunatic ambition in the way others had modified his consciousness, from Little Richard and Friedrich Nietzsche to Lou Reed and William Burroughs.
David Jones begat David Bowie begat Major Tom begat Ziggy Stardust begat Aladdin Sane begat the Man Who Fell to Earth begat Thin White Duke, the dark, immoral and anguished side of his personality, an insight into how dangerously easy he was finding it by the mid-70s to change his personality and indulge in his own self-deceptions, which led to a genuinely scary, life-threatening time. The Thin White Duke represented an inner conflict between light and dark as he faced up to the hidden demons always waiting to spring forth, and ultimately showcased Bowie’s love of almost gothic, delusional melodrama, whatever the risks.
He kept working and thinking to the very end, experimenting wildly with the limits of show business, seeing things coming few others did, making a masterpiece out of growing old. With his final album Blackstar he created a dramatic finale, a grand final performance, the courageous conclusion of a fantastic adventure, conquering fate through hauntingly beautiful and cunning, uncanny music – even at the end, he was still wondering what next, still reinventing himself, still thinking about life, guessing where he was heading, determined as ever to produce an enlightened masterpiece, to live on.
The man who sang so brilliantly of changes, in life, in circumstances, in appearance, as a special and necessary form of creative energy – as nature’s delight – had now made the biggest change of all. His fans were not ready for this ultimate change, this spectacular exit, for him ultimately a long-expected transition, an inevitable new stage, a new set of absurdities, but also the universe itself didn’t seem ready.
It didn’t take long after David Bowie died for people to start saying that everything fell apart after 2016. His soul-shaking, time-stopping departure seemed to have wreaked havoc on the earth, as if he alone had been placating the malevolent forces that challenge the equilibrium.
It was a mad shock to the system that a legendary, beloved entertainer and someone a generation or three had grown up with had died too early, even if by only a few years. Something did seem to go missing, as if there was now menace hanging in the sterile air, a threat to mind and limb, to dreams and hope, to a world of soul and morality, love and romance he’d often written about.
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There is some thought that he was the cosmic glue that was holding the universe together, and that since his death we have entered a darker, nastier era, where technology is slipping out of our control, social media is warping reality and politicians are ruling by fear.
However tempting it is to believe it, he wasn’t necessarily such a miraculous metaphysical adhesive. He was, though, one of the greatest examples of a musician taking special advantage of the special postwar conditions which led to a free-wheeling counter-cultural commitment to remake a shattered reality in a freer, fairer, more progressive way. He was a significant symbol of a resonant late 20th-century Renaissance which was taken for granted as if it would always be around, unhindered by wretched spoilsport cynics.
As the world changes, his songs change with it, ready for anything, signs of hope that his form of grace and empathy still has a place, whoever and whatever is trying to take charge. His songs and their belief in the power of the imagination increasingly shine a light on the current intellectually incurious, mind-limiting backlash to the counter-cultural freedoms and artistic urgency he represented so spectacularly.
There will always be the songs, that often imagined the end of the world, but by doing so, helped us imagine how we might survive the end of the world, one way or another. However bad it seems, we are always beginning, finding ways to survive, to keep dreaming. Art and music, he made clear, changes the world faster than politics.
There will always be his albums. And if you ask me perhaps the question you really want answering – what is my favourite David Bowie album? – well, as you’re asking this second, it’s Lodger, the final part of the so called “Berlin” trilogy, following the defiant post-pop star experiments of Low and the distilled sensations of Heroes, demonstrating how he was always moving on, travelling through himself and the world around him, recording the response of his personality to where he found himself through seductive, luminous, mind-stretching pop songs.
If you ask me in a minute, it could be the manic heat of The Man Who Sold the World or the magical chill of Blackstar, or the innocence and play of Hunky Dory or the intangible, tormented desolation of Station to Station, all demonstrating how he was always moving on… there was no stopping him as a human being sharing with others so vividly what it is to be a human being, until there is nothing left to be released.
Paul Morley’s Far Above The World; The Time and Space of David Bowie is out now, published by Headline
