Bowie is dead.
The words stood oppressively still on the screen, in contrast with my head, which was beginning to spin. What is she saying, I thought. She can’t mean David Bowie. She did mean David Bowie, of course. It was hard to comprehend, because I started to realise that David had never really been alive the way she and I were alive.
He existed—and so he must still exist—in the sadness I feel when Five Years finally climaxes into a soaring chorus, in the image of Logan Lerman in the back of a pickup that invariably accompanies the opening guitar wail in Heroes.
I was technically still fifteen when Bowie first made an impression on me. I had heard Golden Years in the Heath Ledger comedy A Knight’s Tale when I was much younger, but it didn’t make me feel as much as Ashes To Ashes did ten minutes before I turned sixteen. Strung out in heaven’s high, hitting an all-time low. That’s precisely where I felt I was that night, one step into a more grown-up world. Songs have that nasty habit of being able to express your feelings in another person’s words and voice. Bowie’s songs, more so. His raw vocals make a line like ‘sordid details following’ feel like it carries a ton more emotional weight than it would read.
There’s a scene in this Canadian film called C.R.A.Z.Y where the teenage protagonist Zac paints his face like Ziggy Stardust and sings Space Oddity to the mirror. I love that scene, because Space Oddity Bowie wasn’t even remotely close to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars Bowie. Zac had appropriated the look to fit the Bowie he had constructed in his head. I think that’s what everyone did with Bowie. He was a construct more than a man. So of course we loved him.
I cried when it hit me that he was dead. I hadn’t cried over anyone’s death since Steve Irwin. Even I was surprised at how much he had meant to me. I didn’t cry because the world had lost him, because I had lost the part of myself that assured me he was going to live forever. It’s odd, because the music he made would always be there and it shouldn’t have mattered if he was there or not. But it did. The aura around that music would forever be tinted by the fact that he isn’t around anymore.
It’s selfish of me to be so affected, not by his death but by his caesurae to exist. I can’t deny that David had, in fact, existed regardless of what I thought of him. He was an iconoclast, a saviour to so many, and, if all his interviews are anything to go by, a genuinely nice person. He, and his music, had meant so much to many, many people. If so many people could have lost a piece of themselves all at once, it could only be through Bowie. That’s really what David was; a figure, larger than life, created out of the most powerful feelings in millions of people.
I will miss him, because he was a part of me. But I will also miss him because we have all lost him, his voice, his guitar playing, his acting, his incredible personality, and his ability to create magic with his stories about space, Major Tom, and the end of the world.
If you thought you’d blow our minds, Bowie, you sure did. Thanks for coming and meeting us.
Friday Afternoons 