Originally posted January 2016…
Sorry about this long post, feel free to skip this and the 30 song punchline. But if you’re interested, I had to phone someone so I picked on you…
I don’t like the word icon. I’ve heard that word to describe David Bowie approximately 50 times today, on the radio, on Facebook, on TV, and from friends whose opinions I truly value. But the word icon is a place holder for existing in the world fame pantheon, and David Bowie being famous is only important for considering how many people he “touched” (I hate that metaphor too). It’s as if the makeup and the characters and the fashion and the style were as important as the music. I just don’t think they are, although separating the music from the rest of the man is easy to me, and I’m at peace with being in the minority. Icon is a simple word to encompass the complexity of his fashion and concepts and ideas and music and all else. His image was important, but his songwriting (and performing) brilliance is the touchstone.
There are a lot of famous people. There aren’t that many real geniuses. There are fewer that are remembered so positively by so many.
Among my favorite quotes today was from FARK which said: “We’re mourning the loss of one of the few people it seems we all admired. Most of us had no idea he was sick, and in fact it never occurred to us that he could be mortal.” …That’s it: “Really? He’s dead? Can David Bowie die?” No one knew he was sick. How could a guy as wild as Ziggy Stardust still be so classy and leave so quietly, with such dignity? Well, it’s easy to forget that he was the Thin, White Duke too. The class and genius ran almost deep as the everyman sensibilities from his later work, the way he spoke to us misfits in his earliest works, and fantastic sense of humor in his day to day existence in interviews and onstage.
A bunch of Bowie songs remind me of any number of people or places or times in my life, but it’s bigger than how I enjoyed his work. The thing about Bowie is the number of great, REALLY GREAT, well written, fully realized songs that the slightly more than casual listener could sing most of the words to. Like 3-4 songs deep on 6 different albums, maybe more, depending on the definition of “casual listener”. I fear that his conceptual genius overshadows the musical one, because when we try to bury someone AND praise them, we try to encompass them in a 30 second news story. (Listening to the talking heads try to describe him on the news was embarrassing today.) You can’t do it, but like the hypocrite I am, here I’m gonna try:
So, to add to the longest post I could ever be bothered to type with one thumb, I am going to post the titles of every Bowie Song that appeared in my feed today. The criteria is that if it was quoted, it had to be a minimum of two full lines, or a YouTube link, and I am not including cover songs or songs from the new album which I can’t really include in the lexicon today. I won’t bother enumerating which ones came up multiple times, but you can probably guess, although with David Bowie, maybe you can’t. That’s genius.
(Thanks to everyone who contributed, and I won’t out anybody, but thanks particularly to two people who typed the lyrics to entire songs but didn’t add YouTube links. Reading those two was like hearing “The Man Who Sold the World” and “Heroes” in a new way, in my own voice but not out loud.)
Here are the disparate songs that some people I know felt best summarized what they wanted their friends to think of the first day that David Bowie was no longer an earthling:
Heroes, Diamond Dogs, Ziggy Stardust, Changes, Ashes to Ashes, The Man Who Sold the World, The Prettiest Star, Boys Keep Swinging, Suffragette City, Under Pressure, The Little Drummer Boy, Modern Love, Life on Mars, Quicksand, Five Years, Rebel Rebel, Word on A Wing, Stay, Space Oddity, Young Americans, Starman, Moonage Daydream, Blue Jean, Lets Dance, Fame, Rock n Roll Suicide.
These songs were in no order. There are still greatest hits missing.
One more thing:
Recently, I was “arguing” Ziggy Stardust vs. Hunky Dory and which was his best album; you can’t really quantify art, although meritorious jousting over aesthetics is fun. After not resolving that argument for the better part of 30 years now, I am now going to listen to Station to Station.
Ziggy played…gui….tarrrrrrrrrrrrr….