Bowie Birthday Reflection: Defiance, Perversion, Regret and Acceptance: Bowie’s March Toward Oblivion
It can be tempting to think that David Bowie had it all planned out from the start. In retrospect, it seems Bowie plotted in 1969 to spend the rest of his career telling the story of Major Tom, an astronaut who escapes the crushing societal pressures of regular life for the numbing stasis of space. And that he knew all along that, more than a decade later, he would reveal in “Ashes to Ashes” that “Space Oddity” wasn’t about space at all but rather about escape through taking drugs. Numbing though the drugs may have been, Major Tom’s excess had turned him into a junkie, strung out in heaven’s high. Even then, it is tempting to think Bowie knew that Major Tom would never fall back to Earth. Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom Coming Home” aside, one day, Tom’s jewel-encrusted remains would be found by a beautiful, half-human, half-beast somewhere out in space—a final image tying all the previous ones together in the “Blackstar” video.
But Bowie probably didn’t have all that in mind when he wrote “Space Oddity” in 1969. As far-seeing as Bowie was, he did not literally see the future. And as much as he may have planned, he was also known to abandon projects, switch direction and famously change up his entire motif. But he was always, or at least from a very early point in his artistic career— aware of his own mortality, conscious of death lingering somewhere on the horizon. Despite multiple changes in trajectory and side quests, the arc of Bowie’s output can be viewed in retrospect as a march toward oblivion.
At this point I should make clear I am writing about the David Bowie of his own art, not the human being behind the art, who I don’t pretend to know. I should also acknowledge that Bowie famously urged his audience to bring their own interpretation to his work, and though I don’t believe (nor did he claim), that he didn’t have his own ideas about the meaning behind his artistic output, he took pains not to tell us what to think. So, as always, what follows is my take on what Bowie left us.
That said, Bowie left us a march toward oblivion, as played out in four distinct phases: an early defiance, followed by perversion, then regret and finally acceptance of the inevitable. Bowie, of course, wrote, recorded and performed hundreds of songs. Not all of them fit neatly into this pattern— but there is a pattern.
Defiance and Abandon
“When they pulled you out of the oxygen tent, you asked for the latest party.”
Thus begins Diamond Dogs, at least thus begins the first real song, after Bowie established a dystopian backdrop of the album’s nightmarish setting, having just proclaimed that this ain’t rock and roll, this is genocide. So in the face of genocide and a world turned upside down, at the first moment after recovering from some unidentified ailment, “you” started looking for the latest party. This, it turns out, would be one of the last expressions of a sentiment Bowie had been expressing over the past few years of defiance and abandon in the face of calamity.
It isn’t as though Bowie, at any point, suggested that irresponsible or self-destructive behavior did not have consequences. On his previous album, Aladdin Sane, he sings of soldiers drinking Champaign (with abandon) the night before a battle with no hint that things would work out just fine. In “The Jean Genie,” purportedly partially inspired by Iggy Pop, Bowie’s protagonist “walks on snow white” and “sleeps in a capsule” amidst the singer’s admonition to “let yourself go.” Yet on the same album, “Billy Dolls,” inspired by the late Bill Murcia of the New York Dolls was consumed while moving through time “in quaaludes and red wine.” To be clear, the “Jean Genie” lyrics can be interpreted to mean that the Iggy-like genie lets himself go, uses cocaine to rev up and takes pills to come down. The song seems to be the celebration of defiant abandon, but even within the context of the album, Bowie invokes the specter of another rock and roller ending up dead by way of a similar lifestyle.
But the theme of defiant abandon was common in Bowie’s early albums. Staying with Aladdin Sane, the narrator of “Panic in Detroit” sees societal breakdown as a media event and attempts to get the autograph of a celebrity revolutionary as the bodies piled up. Earlier, in “Five Years” the song’s narrator witnesses people going about their business amidst news that the “Earth was really dying.” Less apocalyptically, Bowie’s advice to his new son in “Kooks” was to throw his homework on the fire and go on a ride with Dad downtown.
Bowie didn’t see any of this ending in a good place even at this early stage. When his career was too new to truly have an arc, he’d unfurl cycles within albums or even songs. Ziggy rises and falls. Space Oddity begins with Tom leaving Earth for space and ends with “tall Venusians” coming down to Earth (before taking one look and heading back to space). The partying youthful gangs that open Diamond Dogs amidst chaos give in to the promise of order— the “savage lure of 1984.” The album ends with a total defeat of the individual as “we” cry out for Big Brother (think about that— a concept album inspired by 1984 ends with the faceless public calling for Big Brother— Big Brother hadn’t happened yet!) Within the same album, Bowie experiments with his first of what would turn out to be three songs within songs, the “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)” cycle, later to be followed by “Station to Station” and “Blackstar.” For Bowie, things always come around. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Perversion
Bowie presented as a hedonist of sorts from about the time he donned a dress for the cover of The Man Who Sold the World through the time he was singing about “Calamity’s Child” in “Rebel Rebel.” Sexual indiscretion, defiance of societal norms and disregard for rules and laws were all part of the image. Yet Bowie seemed to sense that what seems daring and desirable in a 20-year-old quickly seems perverse and decrepit in someone even a few years older. He seemed aware of this as far back as “Cracked Actor,” which presents a contemptible fifty-year old, self-obsessed actor resorting to abusing a prostitute for sexual satisfaction. The song appears on the same album as Bowie’s unsubtle cover of The Rolling Stones “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” in which he added a spoken word declaration that “they say we were too young… let’s do it, let’s make love.” Out-of-mainstream sex is cute for the “too young” but decrepit for the 50-year-old.
Bowie didn’t wait until he was 50 to start making this observation. As he was approaching his 30th birthday, Bowie began writing about how he was waiting for inspiration, “sound and vision,” and always crashing in the same car. His declaration that “you” (again, “you”) can’t say no to the beauty and the beast acknowledges that the flip side of the beauty is beastly.
Perhaps most explicitly Bowie traced the descent into perversion in his use of the term, “pretty thing,” beginning with the anthemic “Oh! You Pretty Thing,” which equated youth with an entirely different, and superior race than established Homo sapiens. Early on, the Pretty Things were poised to take over from their mamas and papas. But things didn’t quite work out that way. Bowie resurrected the term nearly 20 years later in the Tin Machine song, “Petty Thing,” an ugly sex song that can’t be heard as titillating. Again, where out-of-the-mainstream sex seemed attractive in youth, it seems repulsive in middle age. Not to put too fine a point on it, Bowie would bring the term back once again in a song titled, “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell” in which, he laments, “they wore it out, but they wore it well.”
What Bowie was showing was that the decay that comes with time is inevitable, and that consequences of irresponsible behavior are inescapable. Bowie usually didn’t get preachy. He seldom overtly admonished his audience not to live their lives like he was living his (though occasionally he veered into a song like, “Crack City” which more or less did just that). Instead, he wrote from the perspective of a fragmented and unfulfilled, listing shell on Low, and a pummeled nonconformist on Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). Take, for instance, “Be My Wife.” This is, perhaps, the most self-centered marriage proposal captured in song, in which the lonely narrator makes his case on the basis that he’s lonely. Or, later in “Scream Like a Baby,” where the protagonist, expressing various traits associated with Bowie himself, gets chained, thrown into a wagon, filled with strange drugs and forced into conformity. By the end of Scary Monsters, the singer who was full of defiance in the opening version of “It’s No Game” is spent, defeated and unaccompanied by a samurai- woman in the closing version.
I am truly struggling to think of an optimistic, or even rebellious song from Bowie between “Rebel Rebel” from Diamond Dogs (1974) and “The Wedding Song” from Black Tie White Noise (1993). You won’t find such sentiments in “‘Heroes,’” in which the protagonist makes that case for pretending to be “heroes” for one day even though “nothing will keep us together.” Nor will you find it in “Let’s Dance,” in which the narrator makes the case for dancing “for fear tonight is all.” The hit album, Let’s Dance succeeds in creating the illusion of being a happy-go-lucky pop project while hiding songs with lyrics questioning the efficacy of institutions and warning us that “a judgment made can never bend.” Even Bowie’s later, seemingly even fluffier Never Let Me Down, is replete with songs about nuclear catastrophe (“Time Will Crawl”), a poor woman driven to violence (“Day In Day Out”), the suggestion of suicide for the unloved “if you’re mother don’t love you then the riverbed might” from “Glass Spider”), and lament that “my little red corvette has passed me by” (from the appropriately titled and severely under-appreciated “Zeroes.”) It seems the world inherited by the “homo superior” from “Oh! You Pretty Thing” hasn’t turned out so well. And for Bowie, the world is a metaphor for the self and vice versa.
Still during this phase, with Major Tom floating, strung out in space, Bowie seemed to be describing the disappointing state of affairs. But in the next, he began expressing regret for his own choices.
A Moment of Optimism Before Regret
Before we get to regret, I will pause for a moment on Bowie’s very most optimistic song, because buried within it is an acknowledgement that we are responsible for how we spend our limited time on Earth. “The Wedding Song” was literally written by Bowie for his wedding, to Iman. Instrumental and vocalized versions appear on Black Tie White Noise. The vocalized version contains an extraordinary sequence of lines:
Heaven is smiling down
Heaven’s girl in a wedding gown
I’m going to be so good
Just like a good boy should
I’m going to change my ways
Angel for life
Of all the saints alive
Don’t I feel like a saint alive
She’s not mine for eternity
Though I’ll never fly so high
I’m smiling
What’s truly unusual about this sequence is the acknowledgment that “she’s not mine for eternity.” Most love songs that contemplate eternity suggest the opposite. But Bowie, here, is once again acknowledging his own mortality. He has one shot to be alive, so he takes responsibility for his behavior, promises to be a good boy and to change his ways.
These lines contain references to past Bowie lyrics. The aforementioned “Beauty and the Beast” includes the lines, “I wanted to be good; I wanted no distractions; like every good boy should.” The suggestion there is that, much as with “Ashes to Ashes” in which Bowie expressed an unfulfilled intent to “get clean tonight,” Bowie’s desire to be good goes unfulfilled. Heaven appears in “Beauty and the Beast,” too, but instead of smiling down, Bowie expresses relief that Heaven “left us standing on our feet.”
So, at the hopeful juncture of his second wedding, knowing that the clock is ticking, Bowie acknowledges that his happiness lies in his own hands, and pledges to do better. But that optimism did not last.
It should come as no surprise that for an artist whose career spanned more than half a century, one who wrote and recorded hundreds of songs, not all of them fit neatly together in an unvarying pattern. Bowie wasn’t quite done with the exploration of perversion by the time he wrote “The Wedding Song.” Indeed, that song is an outlier in many respects. Though Bowie had become famous as a married man— to Angie, not Iman, even his marriage was depicted in a perverse light, at least by the standards of the time. Bowie was married to a woman but alternately described himself as gay or bisexual. Plus, and possibly more shockingly, his marriage was open. His marriage was a perversion of the institution of marriage. Bowie, in song and in public presentation celebrated these perversions. But much as Major Tom’s behavior resulted in him becoming a junkie, Bowie’s unconventional marriage became corrupt and ended in divorce.
The word “perverse” does not appear in any Bowie song. Its origins come from the Latin pervertere, which means, “to turn the wrong way.” And though the word is absent from Bowie’s lyrics, the concept of turning the wrong way is ever present. Bowie is constantly turning, sometimes explicitly so (“turn and face the strange, ch-ch-changes”). Sex and sexual identity was obviously a signifiant subject for Bowie, so it comes as no surprise that sex turning the wrong way was ongoing in Bowie’s lyrics. But sex is not the only thing to become perverted for Bowie. The album, 1. Outside, which Bowie described as a “hyper cycle” is in part about murder as art. Art itself becomes perverted.
Bowie never exactly explained what he meant by the term, “hyper cycle,” but it probably had something to do with the emergent concept of hyperlinks. “Cycle” itself suggests a turning, a revolving, but a hyper-cycle could jump from link to link without the turn. To some extent, that describes much of Bowie’s 1990s output— many self references and recurring themes, but few closed circles. Still, Bowie’s self-depiction became that of a corrupted fallen angel, even appearing as a demon in videos and to some extent on stage during this period. Bowie made repeated allusions to his own past, such as in the video for the 1997 song, “Little Wonder,” which featured a Ziggy-clone representing the young Bowie, wandering around a decrepit New York, discovering teeth, eyeballs and, at one point, a mutant mother on a subway with a baby, whose head is the projection of a mouth, which falls off and continues detached throughout the duration of the video silently attempting to say… something. The youthful Ziggy-type is juxtaposed against a monstrous contemporary Bowie, becoming more monster as the video goes on, and as all the characters descend beneath the city’s surface. Are the detached eye and mouth an allusion to perverted sound and vision? In any case, the visual tale is one of descent and corruption. But, despite apparently losing an eye and turning into a fell spirit, the contemporary Bowie in the video does not display regret. That would come next.
Regret.
There was never a period in Bowie’s career during which death was far from his mind. As a teenager, he wrote a song called, “I’m Tired of My Life.” A few years later he recorded “Quicksand,” in which he lamented that “knowledge comes with death’s release.” During the Ziggy period he would cover the song, “My Death” (which he would allude to much later in, “Reality,” with the line, “Now my death is more than just a sad song”). Several of his songs use the language of suicide, notably, of course, “Rock N’ Roll Suicide,” but also songs like “All the Young Dudes” (“Billy rapped all night about his suicide; How he’d kick it in the head when he was 25”) and “Candidate” (“We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band; then jump in the river holding hands9) among others. While none of his songs glorify or advocate violence, many others address war, killing or some other form of looming danger.
Bowie’s awareness of death was intertwined with his sense of the passage of time, such that time, in Bowie songs, often equaled death. This is most obvious in the song, “Time,” but is also just under the surface of other songs, such as “Five Years” (the end is coming, in time), or “1984”— which, in 1974 when the song was released, was looming in the future.
In contrast, space, for Bowie represented stasis. Major Tom was floating out there, not quite dead, but suspended, doing nothing. Later, Bowie would sing “in space its always 1982” (“Slip Away”), which happened to be the year before Let’s Dance, wherein Bowie’s career took another turn (perversion?) from that of an edgy, subversive counterculture figure who scared the parents, into that of a mainstream pop star (my mother, in fact saw Bowie in concert before me, during the Serious Moonlight Tour in 1983). Though Bowie’s fame and acceptance skyrocketed in 1983, he later expressed regret for his 80s output, and his critical reputation never returned to the heights it has achieved before that point until much later— Blackstar, or perhaps The Next Day.
But stasis, for Bowie, was potentially worse than death. ‘The Supermen” led “endless, tragic lives”— immortality was the tragedy. Bowie would revisit this concept in the movie, The Hunger, in which his character, a vampire, lives a couple of centuries in a state of seemingly perpetual youth, only to begin aging rapidly, doomed to spend the rest of eternity alive but little more than an immobile skeleton, trapped in a coffin forever. So Bowie was not in search of immortality. Instead he was in search of the wisdom to make the most of the time he had. And by middle age, he seemed to have concluded that he had failed.
“Ashes to Ashes,” once again, set a marker — “I never done good things; I never done bad things; I never did anything out of the blue.” Within the context of this one song, Bowie reflected on what he had done with his life and career since its prequel, “Space Oddity,” and other than stasis and addiction, he concluded that he hadn’t done much at all. This sense of regret would only get worse before becoming one of Bowie’s dominant themes by the time of his 1999 album, “Hours…”
“Hours…” marks the point that Bowie seemed to give up on the idea of making rock music for young people and instead made music to reflect on middle age. “Thursday’s Child” opens with the lament, “All of my life I’ve tried so hard; doing my best with what I had; nothing much happened all the same.” After rattling off a list of “should haves” in “Survive,” Bowie sighs, “you’re the great mistake I never made.” In “Seven,” though Bowie explicitly sings that he didn’t regret anything at all, he does so amidst acknowledging that he’s forgotten nearly everything from his family and the gods themselves. Nearly the entire album is awash with confusion, maladjustment to a new phase of life, and regret about the past.
The regret continued in his next album, Heathen, an album filled with so much anxiety as to have frequently been thought to be a response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001 (though most of the album had been completed by that event). In “Afraid,” Bowie’s narrator reflects on dong everything he was supposed to but remaining in a perpetual state of fear. This is a sensible state of affairs within the context of the album, which opens with the line, “nothing remains.”
Bowie’s next album, Reality, continued exploring the sentiment. The title track opens with an anecdote suggesting that the narrator had become the type of cracked actor that disgusted him in his youth (“tragic youth was going down on me”). It continues with these possibly autobiographical lines: “I built a wall of sound to separate us; and hid among the junk of wretched highs; I sped from Planet X to Planet Alpha; struggling for reality.” Here, Bowie evokes separation, dissociation from reality, “wretched highs” and metaphorical space travel. The song continues with an echo of having never done good things or bad things but arriving at a place of neutrality: “I’ve been right and I’ve been wrong; Now I’m back where I started from.”
These samples of some of Bowie’s songs from around the turn of the millennium are just that— samples. There are many more that similarly express regret and the idea that he, or at least the song’s narrator had wasted his life. As a youth, Bowie took responsibility for his future in songs such as “Star” (“I can make it all worthwhile as a rock ‘n roll star”) and “Queen Bitch” (“I can do better than that!”). This acceptance of responsibility was part of the daring of youth, and went along with the idea of defiance in the face of doom and chaos. But now, in middle age, after turning to face the wrong way over a period of years Bowie does not attempt to pass off his sense of dissatisfaction and failure on fate or someone else. He has failed, and he regrets not making better use of the time he had squandered as he continued inevitably, toward death (“I got seven days to live my life, or seven ways to die”).
And then, Bowie went silent. For a decade. Before finally coming to grips with the death he saw coming all along.
Acceptance
Bowie’s decade-long retreat from 2003 through 2013 was forced due to ill health, but as ever, his eventual return was distinguished by the replacement of his previous manifestation. Much as, during the pop-heights of Bowie’s Let’s Dance days, during which he had achieved mainstream acceptability while singing subversively dark lyrics, Bowie in the late 90s and early 2000s was singing about failure and regret while appearing friendlier and more accessible than ever. The avuncular Bowie who appeared on talk shows, told jokes and made seemingly endless cameos in movies seemed to many to finally be revealing his true face. Yet, when he retuned in 2013, he did so shrouded in mystery. Giving no interviews and forgoing live performances, Bowie assumed a Sphinx-like stance, letting his music do the talking for him.
Well, not just his music. Bowie was never just about the music. Bowie also presented a concept, and not just with so-called concept albums like Ziggy and 1. Outside. Bowie was often at his best as a lyricist when he was evocative rather than explicit. Several elements of his surprise comeback album, The Next Day exemplified these traits.
The surprise album’s surprise first release, “Where Are We Now,” clearly made references to Bowie’s past in Berlin, the city associated with one of his most critically acclaimed periods in the late 1970s. Yet, unlike some of his more recent outputs, the song had the tone of regret but without corresponding words. Bowie’s voice sounded weak — a partial affectation— and the song contained the memorable repeated line, “walking the dead.” But what did it mean? Clearly, the title alone set the tone of a status-check. The album’s title, The Next Day, and cover, featuring a literally defaced image from the 1977 album, “Heroes,” continues in the vein of acknowledgment that the time Bowie had so feared had now passed. But little if anything in these songs or on the album, despite the presence of death, violence and threat, returned to Bowie’s earlier theme of regret.
“Here I am, not quite dying,” Bowie sang In then title track. He would return to the concept of not-death in “The Stars Are Out Tonight,” in which celebrities are depicted as vampires. The “stars” never sleep, even those who are dead. The song’s narrator repeats— almost taunts— that he hopes they live forever. This is not an emphatic hope. Once again, death does not seem like the worst fate imaginable.
The song is also another example of a cycle, like the Major Tom and Pretty Things sequences in that it brings back the word “star,” and not for the last time. Back in 1972 Bowie outlined his whole plan in the song, “Star,” which appeared alongside “Starman,” “Ziggy Stardust” and “Lady Stardust.” Bowie was associating himself with the word and all its meanings. More than 40 years later his use of the word in a song equating celebrities with the undead, on an album in which he previously declared that he wasn’t quite dying, after having been absent from the scene for a decade was a kind of sardonic expression of self-deprecation. But it wasn’t exactly an expression of regret.
The album is populated by creeps, villains and loathsome characters. It is possible to interpret “You Feel So Lonely you Can Die” as an expression of self-hate— “people don’t like you…death alone shall love you.” Except that Bowie sticks to the second person in that song. He’s singing to someone else. And while he returns to the first person in the album’s dour closing song, “Heat,” in which Bowie sings, “I don’t know who I am” and, “I am a liar,” there’s an absence in that song of missed opportunity or failed efforts. David Bowie is.
In the end, the album doesn’t quite answer the question raised by its lead-off single. Where are we now? Well, not quite dead. But aside from that there’s not much of an answer.
But there’s an answer on Bowie’s next, and last album. “‘I’m a Blackstar,” Bowie proclaims. Whether Bowie was certain that Blackstar would be his final album is unclear, but death clearly was on his mind. And he didn’t seem to fear it. If, in the “Next Day,” Bowie established that he was not quite dying, he repeatedly states in “Dollar Days,” “I’m dying, too.” One of Bowie’s last expressions of wordplay (is it “to” or “too?”), he uses the phrase “I’m dying” elsewhere in the song when he laments, “I’m dying to push their backs against the grain and fool them all again and again.”
This one sentences brings to a close what Bowie had been contemplating from the start. At first glance, “I’m dying to push their backs against the grain” seems to be an expression of desire. But in the context of Bowie’s early expressions of defiance in the face of doom— expressions that did not dismiss the doom, and his subsequent chronicling of such efforts turning the wrong way, the sentence can be read to mean he is literally dying for the purpose of defying norms. All the norm-defying behavior of Bowie’s youth has finally caught up with him. He’s dying in order to force “their” backs against the grain. And he’s doing this through a repeated cycle of fooling them, again and again. He is a seer, he is a liar, he doesn’t know who he is.
But in the end, Bowie won’t spell it all out. Bowie closes the album, and his entire catalog with “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” which is both the song’s title and most-repeated line. Among the few other lines in the song are references to knowledge that something is very wrong, blackout marks and skull designs. “The post returns for prodigal songs”— Bowie, as ever is evocative but not explicit. But it seems like a reckoning. Blackstar is a reckoning.
I read into his choice of closing song a message that in the end, Bowie was telling us, his audience, that it isn’t within him to explain everything and answer all our questions. Is it that he can’t, or doesn’t want to give everything away? I’m going to go with, can’t because Bowie himself didn’t have all the answers. But in the earlier song, “Dollar Days,” Bowie expressed a sense of acceptance, that if he never sees the English evergreens he’s running to, it’s nothing to him.
I once wrote that a philosophy can be read into Bowie’s lyrics that is similar to ancient Cynicism, most associated today with the Greek philosopher Diogenes. When asked about his burial wishes, Diogenes said his body could be thrown to animals. His audience reacted with alarm and expressed concern that the animals would eat his body. Diogenes then asked for a stick, which he obviously could not use to fend off animals once he was already dead. His point was that once he was dead, he had as much use for his body as he had for a stick. It was all over. Bowie is essentially making the same point. Though he hadn’t quite expressed his mission in life as running toward English evergreens before, he in a sense was English, trying to be ever-green with the endless cycle of birth, death and renewal demonstrated by his ever-changing personalities. “Got to keep searching and searching and oh, what will I be believing,” Bowie sang in “Station to Station,” which was visually referenced in the video for “Lazarus,” also from Blackstar. Years later, in the face of his quest ending unfulfilled, Bowie declares it means nothing to him. He will have as much need for answers once dead as Diogenes had for a stick.
Blackstar closed one more circle for Bowie in that video for the title track, when Major Tom’s remains are discovered by the alien girl. The girl wasn’t entirely human. She had a tail. She was the last of a series of part-human-part animals that inhabited Bowie’s imagery, from his own half-dog visage on the cover of Diamond Dogs, to his horse-lady costume for bassist Gail Ann Dorsey worn in live performances and in the video for “Dead Man Walking,” to the character of the Minotaur from 1. Outside. These images are often interpreted to signify transformation, which very well might be the case.
But with Bowie, symbols often have multiple meanings. And in these and other cases, he might have been saying that we, as humans, are not too different than animals. Or we are animals. Animals live in the moment, defying doom because they have no sense of mortality. Just like Major Tom and the Jean Genie and the Rebel Rebel.
In finality Bowie is, then neither an optimist nor a pessimist. He is until he is not. And as he approached that final transformation, he seemed to be OK with that.
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