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Watching #davidbowiefiveyears Music. I don't think I could tire of this film. #manwhofelltoearth #low #ashestoashes #bluejean #putonyourredshoesanddancetheblues #berlin #low #goldenyears #fashion #wearethegoonsquadandwerecoming4u #brianeno #nilerogers #lazurus

#fashion #goldenyears #davidbowiefiveyears #lazurus #brianeno #bluejean #ashestoashes #berlin #putonyourredshoesanddancetheblues #wearethegoonsquadandwerecoming4u #low #nilerogers #manwhofelltoearth

Reflecting on David Bowie and one of my favorite songs of his

I had something queued up to write about this week, but the thought of coming home from work last night and listening to anything except David Bowie seemed like a crime for someone who presumes even to love music, let alone write about it publicly. Bowie was a huge influence on all genres of pop music and an infatuation of music lovers the world over, and this loss cannot be understated. He was also ahead of his time in every aspect of his career. An influential figure in the glam-punk rat pack of 1970’s New York along with Iggy Pop, Lou Reed (also recently departed) and Andy Warhol, he brought exploration of sexuality and gender identity to the leather-jacket-clad New York rock and roll scene. You could call him an early trans figure, but that wouldn’t quite do it justice; he seemed to eschew gender altogether.

It’s been a tough few months for rock and roll hero worshippers like me, what with the recent deaths of Scott Weiland and Lemmy, but the death of David Bowie is a gut punch of another magnitude just because it truly seemed, logic be damned, to be impossible. Bowie wasn’t as notorious for substance abuse as those other rockers, but that explanation is too facile - the reason we never expected to lose him is that everything about the persona he created, from his androgyny to his extraterrestrial subject matter, combined to present a figure so unique as to seem other-worldly and thus immortal. He spent his career as a shape-shifter; he was so many different people, so how can a singular human death end it all so suddenly? In a sense, David Bowie had already died a dozen times, but the knowledge that he won’t be reincarnated this time as some new character for us to love and emulate is too much for some of us to bear.

So I decided, instead, to write about Five Years, the opening track of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (damn it, Bowie, so much for a low word count), his 1972 masterpiece. It’s one of those albums on which every song is indispensable, so good that no sooner are you sad one of them has ended that you’re thrilled the next one has begun. So good that electric guitar, flute, and saxophone can exist in the span of two songs and there’s nothing awkward or tacky about it. So good that I once spent almost an entire semester in college listening to nothing else.

But I digress. Five Years is a sleepy-tempoed melancholy waltz that crescendoes for about four minutes until Bowie ends the song screaming the chorus over weeping violins. It’s a piano-driven tune that, with the exception of a short bridge in the middle, relies on the same 4-chord progression for its duration. And it’s unspeakably beautiful.

I’m a sick bastard, fascinated by cults, the apocalypse, and other such darkness, and so the song’s theme--a town copes with the news that the world will end in five years for unexplained reasons--hooks me on the lyrics in a way other Bowie songs don’t. Everyone--fat/skinny people, tall/short people, nobody people and somebody people--have their reactions to the news, and everyone is doing weird things: there’s a wounded soldier staring at a Cadillac and a cop on his knees kissing a priest’s feet.

But there’s also beauty to the song’s poetry. Bowie is a fly on the wall until about halfway through, when he addresses an unnamed listener for the first time with the line, “Think I saw you in an ice cream parlor drinking milkshakes cold and long,” managing, in two commonplace, unpretentious adjectives, to make a milkshake sound more delicious, more viscerally appealing, than I ever could.

Something about that line--perhaps its happiness in the midst of the song’s morbid subject matter--sends a lump into my throat every time I hear it. That same lump that has been in my throat the last couple days now that the tall, glammy weirdo is gone.

You can find more of Nick’s writing here.

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