David Bowie: A Tribute
Davie Bowie; the King of Glam Rock, Ziggy Stardust, the fashion icon, the Man who Sold the World, the Goblin King. Everyone has their own memory of the musical and visual innovator that was David Jones and this is only one of them.
It is, however, a very late one.
At my birth, David Bowie had already been performing for thirty-one years; he had already established an entirely new genre of music; he had already created the critical alter ego, Ziggy Stardust; he had already taken the world by storm. I had missed his development as an innovator of music, of art, and of design by just over three decades but I did not miss his captivating voice.
Like many children of my generation, I had grown up listening to my parents singing his songs. Let’s Dance, Changes, Sound and Vision, Ashes to Ashes, Heroes, Space Oddity, Life on Mars?, Starman – the list of singles goes on and on. They lie in my memory, vague but clear; memories of my father humming Jean Genie as he walked beside me, memories of my mother singing Heroes in the car, memories of my childhood friend and I screaming Oh! You Pretty Things in the living room whilst our parents told us to “shut the hell up” from the neighbouring room. I had watched the 1986 fantasy film, Labyrinth, at my babysitter’s house, captivated by the mysteriousness of the Goblin King, without even recognising that this weirdly dressed man was the singer of “that Golden Years song” that I had loved so much from 2001’s A Knight’s Tale. I had sung along to Fame in Pretty Woman, All the Young Dudes in Clueless, Let’s Dance in Zoolander, Changes in Shrek 2 without ever consciously knowing who this man even was. Bowie continually infiltrated my childhood in subtle yet distinctive ways.
As I grew older, my appreciation towards the Starman changed.
In my early teenage years (like many teenagers before and after me), I began to feel like an outsider. An unfortunate accident and a family tragedy had matured me quicker than my friends and peers and I had begun to feel inwardly and outwardly separate from them. A feeling of isolation clouded my vision. I had friends, of course, but I just could not help feeling distinctively different – worn and broken as I felt. I turned to music, again.
I remember finding an album whilst home alone one day. Indistinguishable from the many albums on the shelves – Nirvana’s Nevermind, Jack Johnson’s Inbetween Dreams, The Rolling Stone’s Sticky Fingers, etc. – I found the Best of Bowie. I may have discovered David Bowie’s music nearer the end of his music career and life but his music remains as important to me as to any other admirer. My love for his music, although not as long lived as the generation before me, is a memorable part of my past, present, and future.
This is my tribute to the Man who Sold the World.
