Why Bowie?

Today would have been David Bowie’s 77th birthday. I’m taking the occasion to reflect on why I write this blog, and why it’s focused on Bowie.

I feel compelled to start by acknowledging that nobody reads this blog. If I’m wrong about that, and somebody reads this blog, I can say with certainty that nobody talks to me about it. Nonetheless, for the last few years I have reliably updated it on a daily basis. There is at least one person who is interested in what I write here— me.

But, as Nathan Adler* might put it, I’m getting ahead of myself.

What I should have started with is simply that I like David Bowie. I like listening to his music. I like thinking about his music. I think he managed to remain interesting to look at throughout his life. I have found, in more recent times, that some very intelligent people have put a lot of thought into Bowie, and I often like reading their analysis. I couldn’t maintain a daily, years-ongoing blog about a subject I wasn’t interested in, but I can about Bowie.

Bowie invites (invited?) contemplation. His best lyrics are obscure and sometimes injected with nonsense, allowing the listener to interpret in ways Bowie himself might not have contemplated. One of the great students of Bowie I discovered over the past year or two is a music professor named Leah Kardos. I read her book, Blackstar Theory, which gets into a level of analysis deeper and more complex than anything I can capable of doing. I also came across slides and notes for a lecture she gave on Bowie, which I’ll link to here.

What particularly stood out to me was the text her of 10th slide, which she begins by quoting Bowie himself saying, “All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings.”

She follows this with her own observation:

And this is what we do, we make multiple readings. We can follow the signs and connect threads, we paint the details into the landscape. Further to this, we can contextualise the songs within the whole, interconnected body of work, one that is still growing.

Our close listening and analysis rewards us with personally constructed meanings that furnish pop songs with the stuff of multifaceted context and time-space connections, triggering nostalgia and memory to colour how we understand and feel in this present moment as we engage in the act of listening

This is what I do with Bowie’s music, especially his lyrics (Kardos has a much better grasp with the music itself). And she gets to what I get from Bowie’s music— time-space connections, personal meanings, nostalgia…what she said.

So good, it’s not just me then.

I couldn’t use Bowie’s body of work if I didn’t know it. There’s a virtuous cycle here— I like listening to Bowie, which keeps me coming back. In so doing, I become more and more familiar with his enormous body of work and can’t help but think about it. In so doing, I think of other things, make those time-space connections and have added reason to return to Bowie.

I suspect that any topic with depth could serve a similar purpose. There’s a book on my shelf I’m looking forward to reading called, Shakespeare in a Divided America. There’s a whole sub-genre of books about life lessons based on the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. Of course, this is the whole point of studying religious texts, at least for the religious.

I don’t mean to equate the collected works of David Bowie to the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita, but I will say there’s more of a similarity to the idea behind the line from Blake, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower, hold Infinity in the palm of your hand and Eternity in an hour.” There’s a lot that can come from contemplating something far smaller and seemingly simpler than David Bowie.

Which brings me back to — I like Bowie. Blake, the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita have a lot of interesting words and concepts, but none of them have Bowie’s singing voice or retinue of guitarists.

Still, I am sometimes pushed into a defensive posture because of this blog. If I did with the Bible what I do with Bowie, I’d be a priest. With Bowie, to some, I’m obsessed. I suspect I’d get a similar reaction if this blog was all about William Blake, but maybe not. By virtue of being a 19th Century poet, Blake seems like a weightier figure than Bowie. The idea of being “obsessed” with someone like Blake might come off as haughty, but elevated compared to excessive interest in the guy who played Jareth the Goblin King. The distance and impenetrability of someone like Blake or Shakespeare gives their super-fans a bit of a pass. I can’t be too judgmental about something I don’t know or understand. But I remember “Let’s Dance” from the 80s and just don’t see it. Obsessed!

So, having essentially been studying Bowie for years, I’ll say that his work does indeed have heft. I suspect he will leave as much or more of a mark on the culture two hundreds years from now as we sense of Blake today (but no, probably not so much as Shakespeare).

But I don’t write a daily Bowie blog (that nobody reads) because I think I’m doing important work on an important subject.

Stipulating what I (kind of) started with — that I like Bowie— and that I couldn’t sustain an effort like this on a topic that didn’t interest me as much, part of the reason to do this is that the commitment to a daily post is itself a discipline I find helps order my life and way of thinking. I’m at a stage in my life that has less structure than ever before. Committing to a few daily activities helps me from spinning out of control, dancing out in space if you will.** This might be difficult to understand to someone with a more ridged schedule, as I had for most of my life, but I find it easier to plot out my day and week if I have a few anchors. This blog is one of those anchors.

In a similar way, the discipline of analysis is something I take from what I do in this blog to other parts of my life, and from other parts of my life back to this blog. Even in day-to-day conversation, I find that people are at best often indirect and at worst don’t know what they want to say. I’m guilty of this too. But I think I get a better sense of what others might be trying to say by thinking about the meaning and connections of their words, word order, analogies and references. I also think I can make myself understood better by being self aware of what I mean by what I say.

Bowie often leads me to think about things that are more or less unrelated to Bowie. Or help me understand those things through a Bowie-shaped lens. There’s a Bowie song, or phrase from a song to go along with just about anything. Using one of them as a starting point can take me to places I might otherwise have difficulty finding at all. If you want some examples of what I’m talking about, read this blog. I update it daily!

I’m not sure how long I can continue doing a daily blog about Bowie. As it is, one-seventh of my posts (Free Form Fridays) have nothing to do with Bowie (though even then, it is often tough for me to avoid any reference to Bowie whatsoever). For the foreseeable future, I think I have plenty left to say.

I have plenty left to say now. This isn’t the totality of the answer to the question, “Why Bowie?” But that’s another benefit of a daily blog with no end point. I can come back to this thread later. It’s only forever. Not long at all.***

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* One of Bowie’s many characters from the album 1. Outside (1995).
** “Dancing Out In Space” is from The Next Day (2013).
*** “It’s only forever. Not long at all” is from “Underground (1986).