AK wrote:
RIP David.
I've spent a lot of time these two or three months listening to his discography in anticipation of Blackstar, and I've continually marvelled how one man could possibly have such genius to make the albums he's made. He went on, although it would have been easy to stop and enjoy the success he had, yet he was pushing forward. Until the very end. So much of Blackstar resonates more deeply because of this.
It was always a nice thought, knowing that whatever I was doing, somewhere in the world in that very moment David Bowie was going on about his life, doing whatever he was doing, probably using that amazing talent of his to make new music. It was fun thinking he might be in the studio that very moment and I just had no clue. Or enjoying a cup of coffee. But no more.
I've had The Man Who Fell to Earth and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence on Blu for a while. Somehow didn't get around to watch them, but I will now.
That's the remarkable thing, isn't it? With all the great work he did, he had every right to just rest on his laurels like almost every star of his generation ultimately, but he kept striving and pushing until the end. His loss is sad and shocking, but he's left us with a tremendous legacy and back catalogue. I'm too young to have been around when he first broke through, he had a seismic influence on his times, when what he represented was new and strange, though his best music still somehow sounds futuristic. I'm too young to have been in that particular early 1970s cultural moment, but Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens articulated it very eloquently around the time the
David Bowie Is exhibition (which I was privileged enough to see, and had an amazing collection of costumes, handwritten lyrics, and other memorabilia, though the timing of it has a different feel now) came to Melbourne last year:
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/dav ... ht986.htmlBeyond that, I think Bowie's own modest words (promoting
Scary Monsters) nicely sum up what he was trying to do:
Quote:
There are an awful lot of mistakes on that album that I went with, rather than cut them out. One tries as much as possible to put oneself on the line artistically. But after the Dadaists, who pronounced that art is dead…Once you’ve said art is dead, it’s very hard to get more radical than that. Since 1924 art’s been dead, so what the hell can we do with it from there on? One tries to at least keep readdressing the thing…