Twilight of the Rock Gods
With David Bowie’s death last week, we are seeing the beginning of the end of the entire rock and roll era, says Neil McCormick
With David Bowie’s final curtaincall, we are witnessing the end of an era, as the original stars of the explosive rock culture that convulsed the world in the second half of the 20th century are slowly extinguished. We are entering the Twilight of the Rock Gods.
Deaths of the famous compel us all to contemplate the meaning of our own lives and times, and the deaths of rock stars carry a very particular sting. Its most iconic figures – those great, symbolic archetypes of an age whose art, lifestyle and spirit was substantially defined by the egotistic and energetic values of youth – have turned into old men.
Whatever your reaction to Bowie’s death (the most elegantly stagemanaged exit in pop history), we can be sure of one thing: that there is more of this to come. And for a while, at least. I don’t want to tempt fate – indeed, I try not to even think about it – but when Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Debbie Harry, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards eventually shuffle off this mortal coil, we may have to mark the entire rock and roll era over. Who knows what forces of collective shock and sadness that will unleash.
Rock’s hedonistic exuberance claimed many sacrificial victims in its earliest days. Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison – founder members of the ‘‘27 Club’’, a supergroup of influential musicians who died at the same young age and who were most recently joined by Amy Winehouse – were victims of a modern Icarus myth with a moral that’s plain to see. Elvis Presley died of hubristic excess, the same fate that would later befall the self-styled king of pop, Michael Jackson. Two of the Beatles, John and George, were taken before their time.
But with Bowie dead at 69, from here on it is old age that will be doing the reaping.
The pages of music magazines are increasingly taken up with obituaries, and rock journalists make gallows humour about being on death watch. Record companies have departments dedicated to posthumous releases, with regular meetings to assess the health of ageing icons and plan strategies for maximising the commercial impact of whoever might be next to go.
When I was invited to hear Bowie’s latest album, Blackstar, in December, I was surprised by how confident his record company were that they had a massive million-seller on their hands. It struck me as far too complex and abstruse for mainstream commercial appeal, especially in an era of fading record sales. But perhaps they knew something I didn’t.
To some, I suppose, it is all just pop music. Yet a cultural movement that shook the world to its core surely represents something of much greater significance than mere entertainment.
It required a kind of collective hysteria, or perhaps collective fantasy, to raise Elvis up like a king and elevate the Beatles to some kind of fourheaded god, fulfilling and expressing unarticulated needs in a post-war era of massive social and psychological upheaval. It was apparent to me, even as a teenager, that, in our secular age, the colourful pantheon of pop stars that provided so much focus and fascination for idolatry represented something almost supernatural, occupying the same kind of archetypal roles once held by demigods and saints.
If so, it is intriguing to speculate what St Bowie might represent. I could certainly tell you what he means to me, but that might not be the same thing he means to you. Of all pop stars, he was the most multifarious, an ambiguous shapeshifter wide open to subjective interpretation. In 1972, I felt I was singled out for revelation. “I had to tell someone so I picked on you,” sang a disembodied voice from my bedside radio, and a whole new world opened up for me – and, it turns out, untold numbers of others.
“There’s a starman waiting in the sky…” he promised, and was as good as his word. I was transported across space and time with Ziggy Stardust, struck by the lightning bolt of Aladdin
Sane, hounded through apocalyptic ruins by the Diamond Dogs, seduced by the Cracked Actor, alienated by the Thin White Duke, and dumped, frozen and bewildered in electro paralysis in Berlin. In his dazzling artistry, daring style, unabashed intelligence, intensity of emotion, cultivation of magic, mystery and imagination, Bowie was a figure who bridged high and low culture, reverberating on so many different levels.
With bone structure like an Egon Schiele sketch, the alien stare of mismatched eyes and movements like a stick insect performing mime, Bowie was as striking visually as he was musically. He had a voice that glided from crackling whisper to stentorian croon over ever-shifting vistas of sound and a name that folded plain English suburbia into a lethal frontier knife. In Jungian terms, you can find in Bowie both a celebration of the power of Ego and the deeper connection of Self, a conduit between our conscious and unconscious worlds. If Bowie symbolised any single characteristic it was perhaps embracing difference – “loving the alien”, as he put it in song.
Observing the outpouring of grief and commemoration at his death, it was notable how many people spoke of the way Bowie, in his glorious, unabashed strangeness, made them feel there was a place for them in the world, no matter what their particular quirks. He had become a secular patron saint of outsiders.
This was a quality not always universally admired. His provocatively androgynous image had a menacing allure in the Seventies, and interviews in which he described himself as a bisexual drug-user in an open marriage did not endear him to all sections of the public. Yet by the time of his multi-million-selling mainstream global smash Let’s Dance, in 1983, the outsider had become insider.
“Heroes” (complete with ironic quotation marks) was barely a hit in 1977, but by 2012 it was the unofficial theme of the London Olympics, completing an unlikely journey from defiance in the face of despair to bellicose anthem of athletic valour. Bowie’s death was mourned by a prime minister, indicating just how far he had travelled from being a symbol of counterculture transgression to a shared icon of mainstream tolerance. Yet, until the very end, Bowie himself remained unfathomably mysterious.
Tony Visconti, his long-term producer, rightly described his death as “a work of art”. It appears that Bowie was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer 18 months ago, although he managed to keep this secret from all but his very closest family and allies. During this period, Bowie released Nothing Has Changed, an elegantly compiled retrospective of his entire career, and continued to work steadily, in secret, creating a surreal off-Broadway musical
Lazarus (in which he revisits the stranded alien of The Man Who Fell
To Earth and his attempts to escape back into space) and an elegiac final album. Blackstar was presaged by strange, funereal videos featuring images of a dead astronaut on a distant planet beneath a sun in eclipse and a bed-ridden Bowie with a bandaged head and buttons for eyes, singing that he was going to be free like a bluebird as he retreated into a cupboard and closed the door on himself.
The album’s release, on Bowie’s 69th birthday, ensured the world was already talking about the great old wizard when news came through that he had died, just two days later. It was like a magic trick, a vanishing act, but one conducted without grandstanding. Following his own explicit wishes, Bowie was quietly cremated “without any fuss” and without even family and friends present.
Death must come to all of us, and our response to the deaths of public figures mirrors our own deepest feelings, hopes and fears about mortality. The impression left by Bowie was of death approached fearlessly, a life fulfilled, Ego and Self utterly reconciled. His beautiful final music suddenly revealed itself as a balm for people’s grief.
The real significance of the Twilight of the Rock Gods is how our symbolic representatives light the way in encroaching darkness. All generations must bury their heroes. The strangeness of this particular generation’s crossing to the undiscovered country is amplified by rock’s deep correlation with the vitality of perpetual youth. The images and music we still see and hear everywhere rarely represent the giants of rock culture as they are but as they once were, in their glorious prime, with a force so potent they have retained their power for successive generations. Boys who can never grow up make for an unusual vanguard in the hinterland of old age.
In this, as in all things, Bowie has proved an exception and inspiration. His final gift to us – perhaps his most extraordinary contribution to popular culture – was the gift of a good death.
‘In our secular age, pop stars occupied roles held by saints’ ‘Bowie was as striking visually as he was musically’