After Elvis Presley died in 1977, Lester Bangs famously wrote "We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis." After seeing the outpouring of responses to David Bowie's passing this week—from all corners of society, every age group, men, women, trans, white, black, Latino—I'm not so sure Lester was right. Bowie and Elvis shared more than just a birthday, I think. I don't want to overstate the case, but I've been genuinely shocked at how widespread and diverse the responses have been. Even people who didn't necessarily consider themselves to be David Bowie fanatics were moved beyond the feelings that normally come when a beloved celebrity passes away. And it was very much a group mourning, from Brixton to New Orleans (or on Facebook and Twitter), a collective expression of grief and celebration of Bowie's music and its impact on people from all walks of life, from LGBT scenesters in London and New York to straight, geeky kids in Wisconsin like me.
I was surprised by how hard Bowie's passing hit me. Aside from Station to Station, one of my favorite albums of all time, his music hasn't been on heavy rotation for me for years. I kept up with every new release until Earthling (I even liked Outside and the first Tin Machine album), but I stopped paying much attention after that. More's the pity, as both Heathen (2002) and Reality (2003) are excellent albums, I'd find out later. I adore 2013's The Next Day, and spent hours in the David Bowie Is... exhibit when it ran in Chicago in 2014. On the first few listens the day it came out, Blackstar sure sounded like a great album. I'd seen the videos for the title track and "Lazarus," and found myself obsessed with the latter, a song clearly from the point of view of a dying man even before we found out that it was literally a song from a dying man. But if you'd asked me on January 9 if I listened to a lot of Bowie, the answer would have been "not really." (I'm by no means alone or even an outlier in having this response; Memphis-based music writer John Floyd wrote in an email, "considering how much I've underrated him over the decades, it's staggering just how much a part of my life his music has always been.")
Since I heard of Bowie's passing, I've realized how much his music, almost as much as anyone else's, has been a constant part of my life since I first heard "Space Oddity" on the radio in 1979 or so, when I was about 13. I'd heard him and seen him before then, but that's the song that made me say "What is this?" and call the radio station to find out. In retrospect, it's absurd that I didn't recognize it as Bowie. I spent a lot of time in the mid-70s with my cousin Chet; he wasn't really my cousin, but his parents were close enough to mine that we called them aunt and uncle, and I spent a lot of time at their house. Chet had an older foster brother named Jim, who introduced me to 1970s rock—he'd play Bowie, The Who, Roxy Music, and Lou Reed while we played ping-pong in the basement.
I don't recall any specific songs or albums, but Bowie had made enough of an impression on me that when he played Milwaukee in 1976, I read the concert review in the newspaper and proceeded to tell my friends I'd gone to the show. I can't imagine they believed me, but even then I knew that seeing a David Bowie concert would have been just about the coolest thing I could do. And from what I'd read in the review, and seen of him on TV, I knew there was something dangerous about him. I was a pretty square kid, but being a Bowie fan—or at least pretending to be—made me feel like I was in on something that the other kids didn't get.
After I heard "Space Oddity," I got the Changesonebowie greatest-hits compilation as soon as I could, then checked out as many of the albums as I could from the library. Jumping forward a few years, the car my parents got me when I turned 16—a 1970 Olds Cutlass that was as at odds with my persona as would have been a screw-down hairdo—had an 8-track player, and even in 1982 8-track tapes were hard to come by. I only had three that I recall: Elvis Costello's My Aim is True and Bowie's Lodger and Station to Station. Even though I was still pretty straightlaced—student council, honor roll, debate team, jazz ensemble—I couldn't stand most of the music that was popular among my peers, and reveled in cranking up "African Night Flight" or "Boys Keep Swinging" to combat the REO Speedwagon and .38 Special in the high school parking lot.
Even better was when my friend Mike got the Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) cassette, which we surreptitiously popped in the high school P.A. system while an entire lunchroom full of band geeks and their parents assembled pizzas for a fundraiser. If I remember correctly, it lasted just until Bowie shouted "Shut up!" at the end of "It's No Game" before teenagers and teachers alike demanded we turn it off.
By the time Bowie reached peak popularity with Let's Dance in 1983, I'd gotten just oppositional enough about Top 40 music that I attempted to resist and resent Bowie's embrace of MTV, but even then I knew that only a fool would try to deny the greatness of the title track and "Modern Love."
His next two albums, Tonight and Never Let Me Down, were mostly dreck (save for "Blue Jean;" see paragraph above). But by the time they came out, I was in college and digging deep into Bowie's back catalog, falling in love with the rest of the Berlin trilogy, much to the chagrin of my roommate, who preferred Mötley Crüe and Ratt. (I'm pretty sure that my review of Tonight for The Daily Cardinal at the University of Wisconsin was the first negative review I ever wrote.)
The band I formed in grad school played a mix of originals and covers (Tom Petty, The Smithereens, CCR), and we tried doing Tin Machine's "Heaven's in Here," but couldn't make it work. Our drummer, a skinny little Springsteen fan from New Jersey, suggested we try "Rebel, Rebel," and it went over like gangbusters. The fact that I—a pudgy guy from Wisconsin who could at the time best be described as "burly"—could get away with singing that song in a throaty, slightly twangy growl says a hell of a lot about its power. At more than one show, when we'd exhausted our repertoire, the crowd called for us to play it again. One of those times was in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, to an audience with an average age of about 19, meaning they weren't even born when the song came out.
What's the point of this traipse down memory lane? Part of it is simply to acknowledge the enduring power of David Bowie's music; as I wrote in a review of a Bowie concert for Paste in 2004, the guitar riffs for songs like "Rebel, Rebel" and "Ziggy Stardust" are simply part of our DNA now. Songs like "Heroes," "Life on Mars," and "Changes" are staples on radio, movie soundtracks, and even advertisements because the melodies are inventive and sturdy, and the emotions they evoke are something approaching universal.
I realize "universal" is a loaded word, but in the case of concepts like yearning, hope, and personal evolution, I think it's apropos. It's also apropos in relation to Bowie. For as transgressive, experimental, and avant-garde as he could be, he never veered too far from the pop mainstream. He aggressively pushed gender boundaries and definitions; he drew on cabaret, Kabuki, surrealism, expressionism, and more for his costumes and stage shows; he pulled from the Beats and science fiction for his lyrical themes and approach to writing; and he integrated everything from English music hall to modern jazz into his sounds. But he did it all in a way that made it accessible to a wide audience, using pop and rock music traditions to ground even his most experimental work. In the midst of even his most angular and jarring albums—Lodger and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)—you'll find straightforward, lovely ballads like "Fantastic Voyage" and "Teenage Wildlife" anchoring the more adventurous excursions that filled out the discs.
All of those excursions—musical, visual, and cultural—were as powerful as they were precisely because Bowie undertook them in the context of popular music and popular culture, rather than in the narrower confines of the avant-garde. Bowie himself was never quite in the vanguard; we might draw a parallel between him and Steve Jobs as people who didn't so much invent new things as take the inventions of others and repackage them in ways that resonated with a wider audience. That's not to say he was a mere opportunist or dilettante; by all accounts, Bowie could go toe-to-toe with just about anyone when it came to a deep understanding and appreciation of all the cultural expressions he adapted. But even at his most experimental, Bowie never lost sight of the value of bringing as many people as possible along for the ride. When he donned a skirt and brought Klaus Nomi on Saturday Night Live to sing "TVC 15" and "Boys Keep Swinging," to pick just one example in his almost 50-year career, he brought downtown New York and Berlin to middle America, and middle America was better for it. And even if you'd never seen Bowie on stage or on screen, the line "she's not sure if you're a boy or a girl" in "Rebel, Rebel" was an opening to a life in which gender roles were fluid—and if something like gender wasn't set in stone, then what else might be up for grabs?
David Bowie & Klaus Nomi - TVC15 & Boys Keep... by ZapMan69
Tom Junod explores this question beautifully in an essay for Esquire. Of "Rebel, Rebel," he writes "But what makes it one of the ten-or-so greatest of all rock songs is the simple fact that it's not just a song but, like of all of Bowie's music, an invitation—to love the unloved and to value the undervalued, both in others and oneself."
Even in death, Bowie's mainstream revolution continues. The day after he died, his videos were viewed on Vevo 51 million times, with "Lazarus" alone getting 11.1 million looks. The previous single-day record was 36 million for Adele on the day she debuted "Hello." It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it goes a long way toward reminding us just how popular Bowie is, even though he never had a #1 album until Blackstar. And, more importantly, it goes a long way toward remind us what's possible in our own lives, that no one is merely what they seem on the surface, and that if we share even the parts of us that seem least "normal," how many people might accept our invitation. Let the children boogie.
Thanks to Charles Hughes for his edits and suggestions.
