David Bowie

"Changes" was always my least favorite Bowie song. I felt it sounded insipid sometimes. Or that it was too adored by an otherwise-indifferent mainstream, maybe. Or, maybe it was because a well-intending soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend used the notion of the song as an example of why she needed to dump me....

It's 6:26 a.m. and 25 minutes ago, that song made me cry. Why does it hurt so much? Because David Bowie was an element on to himself. It's going to feel like a piece of the natural world (or very unnatural world), however small or substantial in your weighing, is now gone....

David Bowie is dead. Can you imagine how many times you're going to read that across your news feeds, today, in hyperbolic headline form... How many times will you have to read it, eight, nine, before it doesn't sound surreal...

I mean, let's get hyperbolic here: was there ever a "pop star" more mystical...or mythical-seeming, for that matter. I mean, I'm even having trouble keeping my focus, here, because I was sure the words would just come, but I keep pausing and staring up at a spot in the ceiling or through a certain pane of my window glass as I listen to his music, to his voice...

Was he ever really here? Such an air of the ethereal wreathed no other singer so densely. And he's died before. He's been re-invented, before, so many times. You could swear he was immortal or you could swear that he was never truly here, on this mortal coil, some other celestial being, or an embodied concept from halfway round the galaxy, some alien program made corporeal to step softly and sing powerfully as he subtly showed us some kind of way....

Not to make this religious, but Jesus...how many of us wanted to be as cool as David Bowie? As stylish, as together, as graceful, as smooth....that voice...the way it broke....those eyes...the way they glared.... Even when he put out a cheesy song or if he danced with puppets...it was somehow still cool. Even when he danced in unfortunate pastels with Mick Jagger in the 1980's for a cover song, it was still like Mick was the foolish one and David Bowie was still...infallible.

The iconoclast, in art, blazes a trail in which others follow, helpless but to mimic the dynamic grace of their inventive progressions because one cannot question the torchbearer (especially when said-torchbearer is so supernaturally charismatic) in the midst of a storm of complacency; the iconoclast cuts through, struts in full vivid weirdness and goshwow flamboyancy toward a validation that quickly congeals and becomes unquestionable, such strange new emotions excavated through wobbly, shimmying, dazzlingly nightmarish songs, translated from a seemingly primal core. You could feel truly outside of yourself when you heard a David Bowie song... even "Changes."

The whole Ziggy Stardust iconography helped, and The Man Who Fell To Earth helped, and the different eye-pigments helped....but (and this is a credit to his vision and sense for aesthetic,) he affected that sense that he was above us...not in class or in worth, but the closest thing we could find to the divine inside of a vinyl record shop. This was the guy, you'd say, while holding a copy of Low or of Aladdin Sane, who lives in the clouds, or can teleport, he probably travels through propelled levitation, he could read your mind if you stood too close to him....he knows exactly what kind of almost-moody/yet-super-cool song you want to hear at this moment in your life... Even if it's "Changes." Even if this is a "Change" I still am having trouble accepting, even after the fourth or fifth headline announcing his death. Even if I'm crying, now, more (or more sincerely) than I had for any girlfriend...

David Bowie was supposed to live forever because part of his  magic was suggesting that he stood (or soared) outside of the boundaries and rules of our material sphere; mortality did not apply to him. Even now, as we grieve, the type of cancer David Bowie died from has not been declared... What took him? Who took him? Did he leave voluntarily? The mythology will spin and spin... David Bowie was unconquerable, to me; his name, itself, felt like an adjective as much as it felt like a religion. I know... Super hero worship. But the wound's still fresh, as I write this. Brace yourself for cliches amid the sentimentaly, today... Everyone's going to want to say: There was David Bowie and then there was everyone else... And even I couldn't avoid saying it. I always believed it. Still will...that won't change.
RIP