On Bowie

by Simon Critchley

  The figure of the corrupt priest keeps resurfacing in Bowie, most recently in the title track of The Next Day. This is a point taken to a delightful, mannerist excess in Floria Sigismondi’s accompanying video, featuring Gary Oldman as the decadent priest, Marion Cotillard as the whore/mystic who receives the stigmata of Christ, and Bowie himself as the doomsday prophet who suddenly disappears at the end, presumably ascended to heaven. The priest is “stiff in hate demanding fun begin / Of his women dressed as men for the pleasure of that priest”.

  Bowie goes on:

  First they give you everything that you want

  Then they take back everything that you have

  They live upon their feet and they die

  upon their knees

  They can work with Satan while they dress

  like the saints

  They know God exists for the Devil told

  them so

  They scream my name aloud down into

  the well below.

  Bowie is obsessed with the church and priesthood, I think, because they have fraudulently co-opted, branded, marketed and moralised the experience of transcendence. As the great medieval mystic Marguerite Porete would put it, Holy Church the Great has reduced itself to Holy Church the Lesser. The only argument for God’s church seems to derive from holy war with Satan, the Devil, the Anti-Christ, the adversary. Seen in this light, Bowie at times resembles an iconoclastic Lutheran. Appalled by the heathen existence of our civilisation and decadence of existing, organised religion, he yearns after a true religiosity, a dimension of the spiritual life uncontaminated by church or state. Doubtless this is what drove Bowie very early into the willing and open arms of Buddhism.

  SOMETHING LIKE THIS DESIRE FOR A TRUE religiosity can be felt in the exquisite, subtle and densely textured opening song from Heathen. Its title, “Sunday”, connotes the Christian Sabbath and also suggests a family resemblance to Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”, which itself struggles with Christian belief, before concluding, “Death is the mother of beauty, mystical.”

  Bowie wrote “Sunday” very early in the morning in the rural surroundings of the Allaire recording studio in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. He told Interview magazine,

  I would get up very early in the morning, about six and work in the studio before anybody else got there. The words to “Sunday” were tumbling out, the song came out almost written as I was playing it through, and there were two deer grazing down in the grounds below and there was a car passing very slowly on the other side of the reservoir. This was very early in the morning, and there was something so still and primal about what I was looking at outside and there were tears running down my face as I was writing this thing. It was just extraordinary.

  “Sunday” is a hymn, a prayer or, perhaps better, a psalm, where Bowie ends with words addressed to God: “All my trials, Lord, will be remembered.” The song was interpreted as a response to the 9/11 attacks on New York, but all of the imagery is bucolic, with talk of bracken and birds, heat and rain. Bowie, at his most devout and devotional, permits the word nothing to pepper and punctuate the song. He begins with the words “Nothing remains”. The kernel of the track concerns how we can keep hold of such a nothing. As the song slowly begins to build, Bowie sings,

  For in truth, it’s the beginning of nothing

  And nothing has changed

  Everything has changed

  For in truth, it’s the beginning of an end

  And nothing has changed

  Everything has changed.

  Bowie simply refuses to reconcile the apparent contradiction between nothing and everything. At once, nothing has changed and everything has changed. But this song is not the expression of some bovine, New Age contentment that everything is nothing or vice versa. This is not musical Xanax. What underpins each millisecond of “Sunday” is a mood of fear, trembling and sickness unto death. This is revealed at the heart of the song, when one voice becomes two, and Tony Visconti’s bizarre, Buddhistic two-noted chanting accompanies Bowie. Visconti’s voice intones,

  In your fear, seek only peace,

  In your fear, seek only love,

  In your fear, in your fear.

  While Bowie sings over the top,

  In your fear,

  Of what we have become

  Take to the fire

  Now we must burn

  All that we are

  Rise together

  Through these clouds.

  In our fear of what we have become, with our bodies wearing the rags and patches of time, we must burn all that we are. Only when we have extinguished and annihilated ourselves, might we then rise up, elevate through the clouds. Up. At this point, the climax of the song, both voices in unison sing an extended

  As on wings.

  It is truly a spine-tingling moment, which echoes the ending of Stevens’s poem:

  … Casual flocks of pigeons make,

  Ambiguous undulations as they sink,

  Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

  Where Stevens’ birds descend, Bowie ends in ascending, most phoenix-like. Nothing remains. Everything has changed.

  WHERE ARE WE NOW? I HAVE TALKED ABOUT Bowie’s extraordinary discipline as an artist. He is a creator of illusions that know that they are illusions. We learned to follow him from illusion to illusion and in doing so grew up. Behind the illusion is not an ever-elusive reality, but nothing. Yet, this nothing is not nothing, as it were. It is not the void, rest or cessation of movement. It is a massively restless nothing, shaped by our fear, notably our timor mortis, our fearful sickness unto death.

  For, in truth, it is the beginning of an end. Each single moment is the beginning of an end. And death is the mother of beauty, mystical, most musical. There is no final reconciliation and no final peace. This is why we are restless and scared. But this is also why someone like Bowie, without finding false solace in sham Gods, could go on asking questions, go on making, go on constantly surprising and delighting: today, and the next day, and another day.

  Just for an instant, for the duration of a song, a seemingly silly, simple, puerile pop song, we can decreate all that is creaturely (or Critchley) about us, and imagine some other way of existing, something utopian. Such is the tremendous hope that speaks out of Bowie’s music. This is Bowie’s step, his act of freedom taken in face of the majesty of the absurd and the presence of human beings. Such is the power of his poetry.

  Something beautiful and completely unexpected happened on the morning of Tuesday 8 January 2013, Bowie’s sixty-sixth birthday. I got out of bed in the blank cold of the Brooklyn midwinter to find messages from my old Bowie fan-friends, Keith Ansell-Pearson and John Simmons. A new Bowie song with a stunning video by Tony Oursler had just been dropped on to the Internet without any announcement.

  I watched “Where Are We Now?” in quiet disbelief. The song was number one on iTunes in the UK by 3 p.m. in the afternoon (such is the speed of life).

  The song is about the past, specifically Bowie’s time in Berlin in the late 1970s – his most fecund creative period. Bowie himself once admitted that nothing else he recorded comes close to the work of that time. “Where Are We Now?” is an episodic act of memory, a scattering of synecdoches, fragments brought together through the naming of places, like Potsdamer Platz, the Dschungel nightclub, KaDeWe department store, and Bösebrücke, a former border crossing between East and West Berlin. Bowie is a “man lost in time” who is “walking the dead”.

  I can’t begin to explain the effect that this video had on me together with the prospect of a new album, The Next Day, whose cover was an iconoclastic obliteration of the 1977 cover of ‘Heroes’. The album was released on 8 March, a preordered item that silently inserted itself into my iPhone on the morning of that day. Of course, the amazing thing was that this album even existed at all. But it helped that it was really good. I mean it made me happy. Bowie was not dead yet. Far from it. Nor were we. As long as there was sun, rain,
fire, me and you.

  Bowie released four videos to accompany The Next Day. But there were no interviews, no announcement of tour dates, no explanations, no media froth. This was what was so beautiful about the whole thing. Bowie had produced sound and vision. Nothing more. Personally, I didn’t need a David Bowie that appeared on dumb chat shows with uninformed and disrespectful hosts, chatting in his best, cheeky Cockney accent and studied evasion. But I did need his music.1

  One more memory of that year, 2013: the other big Bowie event was David Bowie Is, an exhibition that ran for six months at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, before going on tour to different parts of the world (Toronto, São Paulo, Berlin, Chicago, Paris, Groningen).

  The crowds in London were massive. When I turned up at the V&A one morning in early June, the line was so long that I eventually gave up trying to get in. But then I found a way of sneaking in without paying by following closely behind a couple of special guests (I don’t know who they were, a woman and her child), who were being escorted past the guards into the exhibition space. We looked like a rather older version of the Holy Family as I tagged along slowly behind, keeping my head down. I got in. Inside I was amazed by the amount of stuff Bowie had preserved, even the keys to his apartment in Berlin. I mean, who does that?

  The climax of the exhibition was a huge room with a plethora of video material extending around three walls, featuring fragments of live performances going back to the 1970s. The place was packed. Luckily, I found a seat and sat there for about forty minutes soaking in the end of one cycle of videos and the entirety of the next.

  It finished, appropriately enough, with “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”, maybe from the Hammersmith Odeon performance in July 1973. The song ended. The lights came up. Around me, people were just smiling. Just happy. Wonderful. Oh no love, you’re not alone.

  I don’t want Bowie to stop, I told myself. But he will. And so will I.

  Footnote

  1.As far as I’m aware, the only time that Bowie broke his public silence about The Next Day was to send a double-spaced, left-justified list of some forty-two words to Rick Moody, a writer whom Bowie admired. The list, which functions like a flow diagram for the album, includes intriguing terms like “Effigies”, “Anarchist”, “Chthonic”, “Transference”, “Flitting”, “Tyrant”, “Funereal”, “Glide”, “Trace”, “Tragic” and “Nerve”. Moody uses each of the words as levers for a brilliant, illuminating, extended meditation on The Next Day. It is far and away the best piece of writing I’ve seen about the album that places it in the broad context of Bowie’s other work and rightly ennobles it by treating it as a piece of serious, consequential, conceptual art: therumpus.net/2013/04/swinging-modern-sounds-44-and-another-day

  “I believe in a future revolution in

  dispositions and ways of seeing that

  will put all of the past to shame.”

  Friedrich Hölderlin

  ON THE TITLE TRACK OF BLACKSTAR, RELEASED just a couple of days before his death, Bowie sings, “I’m not a pop star.” For me, and for his millions of fans, he was much more than that. He was someone who simply made us feel alive. This is what makes his death so hard to take.

  As the years passed, Bowie’s survival became more and more important to me. He continued. He endured. He kept going. He kept making his art. Bowie exerted a massive aesthetic discipline, created and survived. Indeed, survival became a theme of his art. Bowie’s death just feels wrong. How can we go on without him?

  Bowie incarnated a world of unknown pleasures and sparkling intelligence. He offered an escape route from the suburban hellholes that we inhabited. Bowie spoke most eloquently to the disaffected, to those who didn’t feel right in their skin, the socially awkward, the alienated. He spoke to the weirdos, the freaks, the outsiders and drew us in to an extraordinary intimacy, reaching each of us individually, although we knew this was total fantasy. But make no mistake, this was a love story. A love story that, in my case, has lasted about forty-four years.

  After hearing the news of Bowie’s death, I listened to him sing “nothing remains” – the opening words of “Sunday,” the languid first track on the 2002 album Heathen. The song seems now like a lamentation, a prayer or a psalm for the dead. Of course, it is extremely tempting to interpret these words in the light of Bowie’s death in the obvious way. Nothing remains for us after his death. All is lost.

  But this would be a huge mistake.

  As we’ve seen in this little book, the word “nothing” peppers and punctuates Bowie’s entire body of work, from the “hold on to nothing” of “After All”, from The Man Who Sold the World, through the scintillating, dystopian visions of Diamond Dogs and the refrain “We’re nothing and nothing can help us” from “‘Heroes’” and onward all the way to the triumph that is Blackstar, which might just be his best record in thirty years. Nothing is everywhere in Bowie. Its valences flit through so many of his songs.

  Does that mean that Bowie was some sort of nihilist? Does it mean that his music, from the cultural disintegration of Diamond Dogs, through the depressive languor of Low, on to the apparent melancholia of “Lazarus”, is some sort of message of gloom and doom?

  On the contrary. Let’s take Blackstar, the album that now has to be seen as a message to his fans from beyond the grave, which I and so many others listened to compulsively after its release on January 8th and then with different ears since the news of his death was announced in New York at 1.30 a.m. on Monday 11th January 2016. In the final track, “I Can’t Give Everything Away”, whose title is a response to the demand for meaning Bowie’s listeners kept making over the decades, he sings,

  Seeing more and feeling less

  Saying no but meaning yes

  This is all I ever meant

  That’s the message that I sent.

  Within Bowie’s negativity, beneath his apparent naysaying and gloom, one can hear a clear Yes, an absolute and unconditional affirmation of life in all of its chaotic complexity, but also its moments of transport and delight. For Bowie, I think, it is only when we clear away all the fakery of social convention, the popery and jiggery-pokery of organised religion and the compulsory happiness that plagues our culture, that we can hear the Yes that resounds across his music.

  At the core of Bowie’s music and his apparent negativity is a profound yearning for connection and, most of all, for love.

  What was being negated by Bowie was all the nonsense, the falsity, the accrued social meanings, traditions and morass of identity that shackled us, especially in relation to gender and class. His songs revealed how fragile all these meanings were and gave us the capacity for reinvention. They gave us the belief that our capacity for changes was, like his, seemingly limitless.

  Of course, as I said earlier, there are limits, obviously mortal limits, to how far we can reshape ourselves – even for Bowie, who seemed eternal. But when I listen to Bowie’s songs I hear an extraordinary hope for transformation. And I don’t think I am alone in this.

  The core of this hope, which gives it a visceral register that touches the deepest level of our desire is the sense that, as he sings in “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” “On no, love, you’re not alone”, the sense that we can be heroes, just for a day, and that we can be us just for a day, with some new sense of what it means to be us. This also has a political meaning. Bowie was often wrongly seen, particularly back in the 1970s, as some kind of right-wing nationalist (I note, with some pleasure, that Bowie, unlike Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney, turned down the offer of a knighthood from the Queen in 2003).

  There’s another line from Blackstar, on “Dollar Days”, that is particularly powerful. Bowie sings,

  If I never see the English evergreens

  I’m running to

  It’s nothing to me

  It’s nothing to see

  Bowie will now never see those evergreens. But this is not just wistful nostalgia on his part, for they are nothing to him and nothing to see. Conceal
ed in Bowie’s often dystopian words is an appeal to utopia, to the possible transformation not just of who we are, but of where we are.

  Bowie, for me, belongs to the best of a utopian aesthetic tradition that longs for a “yes” within the cramped, petty relentless “no” of Englishness. What his music yearned for and allowed us to imagine were new forms of being together, new intensities of desire and love in keener visions and sharper sounds. In my imaginings at least, this is how I choose to hear the quotation from the poet Hölderlin that begins this chapter. Bowie’s music permits us to imagine a future revolution in dispositions and ways of seeing. In hearing differently, we might be able to behave and see in a way that puts the past to shame.

  BOWIE’S MUSIC OFFERS US AN OUTSTRETCHED hand and leads us to the darkest places, the loneliest places, but also the most tender places, the places where we need love and where desire is deeply felt. His music is not cold. It is the polar opposite of cold.

  Despite its massive and obvious sadness, Bowie’s was the best of deaths. If there was ever the “good” death of a major cultural figure, a dignified death, then this was it. If a death can be a work of art, a statement completely consistent with an artist’s aesthetic, then this is what happened on January 10th, 2016. Bowie turned death into an art and art into death. He didn’t die a dumb rock-star death at the age of twenty-seven. Nor did he fade out in a fog of addiction, decay and disgrace, leaving his fans to shore together the fragments of a ruined life. This was a noble death in the gift of privacy with all of his fans listening to his new album.

  Of course, Bowie’s work was about death from the get go. In “Space Oddity”, Major Tom drifts off into space, lucidly aware of his reduction to the commodity form, and dies telling his wife he loves her. And so it goes, from Bowie’s Scott Walker-inflected cover of Jacques Brel’s “My Death”, through “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” to “We are the Dead” from Diamond Dogs and onwards up to a terrific late track like “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die” from The Next Day, a love song of hatred, which ends with the words,