So what was the message? All of his records, he confided cheerfully to a French interviewer around the release of his 2002 album, Heathen, were basically about “alienation and isolation,” and one by one his hyperbolic half-men brought the news and then fragmented upon its utterance. His famous personae, those bearers of strange ultra-knowledge, appeared and disappeared like evanescent messengers. One by one, Bowie’s hyperbolic half-men brought the news and then fragmented upon its utterance. Visually and sonically he was always onto the next thing, the new feeling, but there was no obsolescence: Songs didn’t go out of date they passed with eerie smoothness into the revolving cabaret of his back catalog. What links, for example, the kitchen-sink realism of “Life on Mars?,” from 1971- It’s a god-awful small affair / To the girl with the mousy hair / But her mummy is yelling no / And her daddy has told her to go-to the exultant, piratical nonsense of 1979’s “Red Sails”: Red sails / Thunder ocean / Red sails / Sailor can’t dance like you, followed by a war whoop of falsetto that is somehow both very camp and hair-raisingly atavistic? Nothing but the wraith-like, connect-the-dots presence of the master himself.Ĭhronology won’t help you either, because Bowie was the absolute embodiment of a 20th-century artist-swirling, fusing, channeling, stealing, refracting, in pieces and in phases, the phases themselves sometimes simultaneous, sometimes recurring. You don’t pore over Bowie’s lyrics in search of a system, or decode them like a squinting Dylanologist. “The words just jolly it along.” Which is at once a piece of jocular English understatement and a moment of coolly reckoned artistic clarity. “In the chords and melodies is everything I want to say,” Bowie once declared. By your touch (and yours, and yours) he is obliterated. His most wildly compassionate lyric, the nakedest act of emotional outreach in his entire songbook, and it’s not even him singing it-it’s Ziggy Stardust, his interstellar blow job of a fabricated rock star, for whom the longed-for moment of connection will be, unfortunately, terminal. Gimme your hands / ’Cause you’re wonderful! Gimme your hands! screams Ziggy at the edge of the stage, projecting himself into a black hole of adoration. It’s the last number on his 1972 rock opera, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and the song at the conclusion of which-according to Bowie’s messianic conception of the character of Ziggy Stardust, a guitar-wielding idol descended from the firmament-the singer is torn to pieces by his fans, or aliens, or both. “Rock’n’Roll Suicide” is his theatrical muse at maximum inflation-a showstopper, literally. Or maybe four or five of the most potent lyricists, because in his decentered, repeatedly selving way he commanded a variety of modes and manners. Oh no, love, you’re not alone … All the knives seem to lacerate your brain / I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain / You’re not alone!ĭavid Bowie, we now realize, with his words chiming posthumously in our heads, was one of the most potent lyricists in rock history. I n the dark days of January, as the news of David Bowie’s death gusted bleakly across the info-seas and all the boats trembled, a number of people I know found themselves murmuring, or singing in their brains, the lyrics to “Rock’n’Roll Suicide.” Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth … Why this song, at that moment? Because it’s a song about not being isolated by suffering, a soul-spanning song that begins minutely, with a single person in fidgety, mentally distressed close-up- You pull on your finger / Then another finger / Then cigarette-and amplifies unstoppably toward a salvific, histrionic, orchestra-of-the-nervous-system climax.
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