Editor’s Pick: Five Years Without Bowie
In a way, it seems like yesterday, waking up to that horrible news, just one day after waking up to his new recording on our phones. A new record, “Blackstar,” came out on his birthday, and the next day he was gone. But it also seems like a lifetime ago, because of all the horrible things that have happened since.
A really moving remembrance in today’s New York Times:
It does feel as though things began to fall apart with Bowie’s death. World events slid from bad to worse, and from there it has all been one long downhill slalom that has exceeded the bounds of sense (and even satire) and avalanched into this: hateful violence, political chaos, insurrection and the grinding gruesomeness of the pandemic present.
From “What Would David Bowie Do?” by Simon Critchley.
And we’re also looking back at Steven S. Drachman’s musings a few years ago, in these pages, which made a similar point, even before the pandemic:
He stuck around to celebrate his birthday, release his last album, and then he departed the planet Earth the next day. The planet seemed to come unmoored from its orbit during the next twelve months without Bowie to anchor it. You know what I mean.
From “For David Bowie, on the Anniversary of his Death and Birth” by Steven S. Drachman, with art by Jackie Nett
Classical radio station WQXR remembers Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy with a stream of a performance from 2018:
This week which marks the anniversary of Bowie’s birth and death, we’re celebrating David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy – Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger – with a five-part series of music recorded in October 2018 at Brookfield Place. Each night opened with members of the versatile New York-based Wordless Music Orchestra performing works that Bowie was listening to at the time or that might have influenced his sound world. These “setting the context” works were followed by the all-star cast of musicians led by Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiberg who performed their arrangements of the three records.
From “David Bowie Week, Part 5 – Inspirations and Related Works“
In the years since his death, there is the usual attempt to rewrite his legacy, to smooth out the inevitable artistic failings, which were so rare in Bowie’s career. The worst, so far, was the attempt to re-do Bowie’s “Never Let Me Down” album, to re-position the blame. But it is important to remember Bowie as human, with at least a few misfires in a life of triumphs. Here are a few thoughts on that.
Finally, you can stream Bowie’s stage show, “Lazarus,” this weekend only. It’s a musical sequel to the science fiction film, The Man who Fell to Earth, which starred Bowie back in 1975, and was itself based on a novel by Walter Tevis, who wrote The Queen’s Gambit.
Image by Matthew Davis / Unstock
Not the best songs ever written, and not our favorite songs, but these are catchy songs we can listen to over and over again without ever getting tired of them:
Eden was no fan of perfection. She swam in trivia, in the failures of the world. Her favorite music created by blues musicians from the 1920s who had never quite made it big, and who had died in obscurity, and her favorite television shows all canceled after only a few episodes ten years earlier. She read and re-read fifty-year-old books from defunct publishing houses, and she solicited type-written manuscripts from the survivors of deceased writers who had never found a venue for their work; she velobound these drafts and read them on the subway, or carried them into the park…. She recited passages out loud to Alice, breathlessly; she looked up every few moments and smiled a joyous smile of discovery.
A great masterwork of animation by Roger Rabbit animator Richard Williams, on which he labored for 30 years before, in rapid succession: 1) Warner Bros agreed to fund its completion, 2) Disney stole the whole idea and many of the characters and released Aladdin before Williams could finish his more ambitious film, 3) Warner Bros fired him and sold the movie to Miramax; 4) Miramax chopped the movie to pieces, threw away half of what Williams had completed, and paid a Korean animation studio to finish it on the cheap, and 5) the distributor dumped the film in theaters the last week of August under a different title.
David Bowie’s death was not just any death. It’s been said before, and it will be said again, that he’d always seemed somehow above mundane things like dying. It didn’t seem worth his time. And some people realized it then for this first time: if it could happen to David Bowie, it will really happen to me. But worse than that, worse than the realization of one’s own death, was this: no more Bowie music, ever. 