ASHES to ASHES
They are going to start dropping off fast now, the great British pop legends. The death of the ageless David Bowie, following closely that of the seemingly unkillable methamphetamine advocate Lemmy, is the signal for further shocks to those of us whose imaginations are graffititagged with the music of the baby boom.
It was one thing when hard living caught up with Brian Jones and Keith Moon, and another thing when John Lennon was struck down by a men- tally disordered fan. These are forms of occupational hazard for geniuses. Bowie died a little young, but not all that young: he had just turned 69. And his 1947 birthdate makes him a rather late entrant to the class of deities to which he belongs.
When we look at the enduring core of what we still awkwardly refer to as “rock music,” what we find is bizarre: a group of people born between about 1940 and 1948, mostly on one island.
This cluster of neighbours took black American folk music and electric instruments and used them to hammer out a musical language whose vocabulary and power eventually rivalled that of the old western orchestral tradition.
Somehow the seeds of war fell on England and sowed giants. It can’t just have been the bombs, even if Bowie did use the V- 2 as a metaphor on the Heroes LP. ( Has any single person, in retrospect, done so much to make Germany cool? They need to give Bowie a monument the size of the Hermannsdenkmal.)
If we understood how to reproduce such a flowering of ability, someone else would have done it. It had something to do with English kids suddenly being fed American popular culture through a fire hose. It had something to do with the weird English progressive schools and art academies that recur in the biographies of the greats, including Bowie. It had something to do with ’50s abundance and promise following on the heels of austerity and crisis.
The awful news of Bowie’s demise on Sunday reveals that he was not quite the same kind of star as notional equals like Ray Davies, Pete Townshend or even Mick Jagger. He was a songwriter of the first rank, an omnivore and a multi-instrumentalist whose taste in collaborators is a legend unto itself — yet his involvement in music seems almost circumstantial. It was the thing one happened to do, born where and when he was.
He gave so many excellent cinema and television performances that one suspects pop stardom’s gain might have been acting’s loss. What might Bowie have achieved if circumstances had steered him into the Royal Shakespeare Company instead of blues clubs? Is there an alternate reality in which people are reminiscing about Sir David Jones’s Richard III and regretting that he never got around to Lear?
One is tempted to add that Bowie could have been a great fashion designer or conceptual artist — but, then, he was both those things, when he wasn’t, hohum, dashing off Life on Mars or Sound and Vision. He was not of the fashion world as such, but slip out on any night, in any city of size from Tokyo to Toronto, and you’ll see homages to Bowie. Any ambitious, expensive pop concert still follows the Bowie idiom. His imprint on world culture is rivalled by few other pop stars, and perhaps none has its breadth. One is tempted to invoke Elvis or Dylan.
And that’s before reckoning with any of his deeper social and political resonances. To gay men David Bowie is effectively a saint. The transgender moment of 2015 is unthinkable without forerunners of stylish androgyny like Bowie. ( Even the word “transgender” sounds like a Bowie-ism.) He played a minor role in the end of the Cold War. I’m sure your mind is probably, as mine is, reeling with Bowie moments you had never snapped together into a complete picture: I think of him popping up on Saturday Night Live with his delirious auto- destructo Tin Machine combo, or walking off with Ricky Gervais’ Extras series.
Pop music has become, by and large, what it was before Bowie’s generation arrived: it has defaulted to its ordinary commodified state. It thus seems faintly unbelievable that there ever could be such a performer as David Bowie. Who’s the closest we have left to a David Bowie — Lady Gaga? I like Gaga, she has talent and guts and humour. But it goes to show the nature of an age of decadence. All you can hope for is to exist as a self-conscious commentary, a doodle in the margins of someone else’s book.
Even among geniuses Bowie presents an enigma. He wasn’t a half-wild man-child pursued by obscure demons. His drug phase was prolonged, but having survived it, he settled into a conventional, almost establishment-flavoured family life, free of visible torment. He wasn’t an outsider or a nebbish trying to revenge himself on the world or steal women back from the cute boys — his own good looks were his foot in the door of the music profession.
He kept clear of political labels. Like many English artists, he turned down a knighthood, but not out of contrived working-class anger. He merely said “I don’t know what it’s for.” Maybe he sensed, accurately, that putting a “Sir” in front of “David Bowie” would be a gilding of the lily.