And the Stars Look Very Different Today
One of my earliest memories is of a darkened classroom, where a substitute teacher told me and a dozen other first graders to lay down on the floor beneath our desks while she played “Space Oddity” by David Bowie through her computer speakers. At the time, the five-minute song seemed longer and more vivid than any movie I’d seen (think of a small child experiencing an unfamiliar room as a mysterious landscape with a forest of human legs), and I zoomed through a dreamlike journey behind the control panel of gum globs that dotted the underside of my desk. It’s hard to imagine a more enthralling experience for a kid whose ideal future was employment as either an astronaut or a rock star. Looking back, I’ve often wondered whether that teacher was stoned, or hungover, or just a Bowie-loving weirdo. But, regardless of her motivations, that experience cemented Bowie as a part of my learning and self-exploration for years to come.
As I grew and changed throughout my early life, the music of David Bowie was never far away. Covers of Bowie songs by Kurt Cobain and, later, Seu Jorge, shaped my adolescent sensibilities. “Suffragette City” blared through my car speakers on repeat as I left home in Alabama to move to Arkansas for school. Hunky Dory provided the soundtrack for my walks to work while I lived in Brussels for a semester, and, after graduating from college, Young Americans was the most-spun record in my first Little Rock apartment. On a recent tour with my band Swampbird, we wore out The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (one of three albums available offline on my phone) in the van as we traveled up the East Coast. Each period of my life for the past decade, certainly my most exciting and transformative to date, has its own inextricably associated Bowie album.
Though I cherish my particular experiences of David Bowie, his opus approaches a universality that is rarely achieved in pop culture. His aesthetic was ambitious and cosmic, weaving androgynous futurism with kabuki theatrics and countless other global tropes. Bowie embraced this fluid self-presentation, famously claiming that he re-invented himself so often that, “[he] was in denial that [he] was originally an overweight Korean woman.” And his other-worldly charm continued to the end of his time on earth, moving from outer space to the afterlife in his latest studio release, Blackstar. The album's second single, “Lazarus,” whose video was released two days before Bowie's death, opens with the somber suggestion, “look up here, I’m in heaven.”
Among all the mourning that I’ve seen and heard today following Bowie’s death from cancer, I’ve sensed an undercurrent of gratitude. Millions of fans around the world (and across generations) are grateful to have experienced his music, his personality, and his expansive imagination. He displayed unmatched talent, unflagging energy, and unwavering courage throughout nearly five decades of creative endeavors. For me and many others, he was a hero and a genius who will be, and is already, sorely missed.
by Z. Hale