“We like dancing and we look divine.”

David Bowie, “Rebel Rebel”

from Diamond Dogs, 1974

Finally – Bowie. Forever Bowie. “Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep….” I want to quote Mick Jagger (to be very specific about it) quoting Shelley (from Adonais – Shelley’s own elegy to Keats) – as he did (in exactly this stanza) in a 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Hyde Park only days after the death of erstwhile bandmate (but really part of its soul), Brian Jones. After all the tributes, eulogies, remembrances, anecdotes, what is left to say?

As the shock was just setting in (and this was before I’d even given in to my beast of a cold and gone to bed in a big way), I was thinking about how well the amazing Victoria and Albert Museum show, David Bowie Is, had summed up Bowie’s influence across the full spectrum of art and culture. He simply is – no receding into a past tense for him – and is so many different things, impossible to pin down in any definitive way – musically, theatrically, artistically, culturally, politically, sexually, sartorially, stylistically.  

It was a comfort that the local public and college radio stations were playing Bowie constantly through the week, as I shivered in my sickbed – sparing me any need to hunt for my Bowie CDs (which now seemed sparse – given that I’d sold or given away my vinyl copies of Young Americans, Station to Station, Low, Heroes and Lodger). All those lyrics tailor-made for feverish chill moments: “Look out you rock ‘n’ rollers … pretty soon now, you’re gonna grow older.” “Do you remember the bills you have to pay … for even yesterday?”  

I remember hearing “Space Oddity” for the first time and exactly where I was when I heard it (a junior-wear department in a Bullock’s department store in 1969) – though I would have no idea who was actually singing it until almost three full years later. That voice – with its distinctive wobble and catch and the barest hint of glossed-over east London – was easily recognizable as the same voice singing “The Man Who Sold the World” and “Changes,” which was already becoming something of an anthem. It was only then that I acquired my first Bowie album, Hunky Dory. Dylan (and Warhol) were already icons – and the hard blues Brit-rock that was an early music touchstone had reached a kind of climax in that year and begun to explode in new directions. The most interesting pop music was diversifying and critically evolving. We’d already seen movement in these directions on our own shores – by way of the Velvet Underground (no small coincidence that Lou Reed’s first solo outing, Transformer, was produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson), various folk-influenced rockers, and a smattering of L.A. and California bands. In the meantime (inspired by Rolling Stone?), Warhol had himself launched Interview. The worlds of pop, art music, movies and fashion were beginning to converge. In other words, I was just catching up. And then Ziggy Stardust landed in America. The rest, as they say, is the history of the world long after we’ve left the planet.

It’s been interesting to observe the enormous response we’ve seen in the art world – certainly here in Los Angeles. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any fine artists acknowledging his influence on their work – it’s funny how a resistance to acknowledging a pop/mass cultural influence persists among so many avant-garde artists even as the divide between pop/mass and high art domains has blurred if not dissolved altogether; yet the influence, however subtle or indirect, is there. (The distrust was, of course – as Bowie himself would have pointed out – mutual.) The response to his passing from the world of fashion and design was, as expected, almost universal. Bowie’s influence on the fashion world was immediate (consider my own first encounter) and more or less continuous over more than four decades. (Jean-Paul Gaultier reached back to Bowie’s Ziggy incarnation in a collection only a couple of years ago.) But Bowie’s influence on fashion was merely the by-product of a project that was much larger and more personal. Fashion ‘got’ him first (alongside music) because fashion went global long before the art world. (It also had something to do with what was happening in both art and fashion, as well as music, in London in the 1960s.) But Bowie was never a creature of fashion (though he understood its uses) or even, notwithstanding his beauty and innate elegance, a style icon in the conventional sense.

“Elegance is refusal,” Diana Vreeland once famously said – and Bowie was certainly about that. He refused to be boxed in – to be classed (up or down), classified or categorized – musically, artistically, theatrically, sexually, politically. He was a product of his time without being constrained by it. The glitter- and glam-rock of the early 1970s was simply a logical outgrowth of something that had been going on since David Jones left art school (he also studied dance and theatre – and no small coincidence that so many rockers of that period emerged from the same art schools). That time – the late 1960s and early 1970s – was a time of pose and performance, which is not to say it was merely about artifice or fashion silhouette. It was about a more fundamental shift in consciousness and attitudes. Technology and the sexual revolution naturally played into this shift. Bowie said once in an interview (with Terry Gross on her WHYY program, Fresh Air) that his original notion was to write musicals in a rock idiom – and it sort of makes sense. He’d come out of all of that – art school, dance, the music hall and theatrical pantos, alongside jazz and rock‘n’roll. But he would have to come up with something new: Sandy Wilson had already written The Boy Friend (and Ken Russell made the film – as he would later make a film of The Who’s rock/concept musical Tommy). Besides Ken Russell, there was Nicolas Roeg, who, with Donald Cammell, had turned an entire film around motives of pose, posture (and imposture), and performance – and a vehicle for Mick Jagger – Performance. (Not so coincidentally, the dress Bowie wears on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World was designed by the same Savile Row hipster who had designed the white tunic-dress Jagger wore to that aforementioned Hyde Park concert in 1969 – Michael – sometimes known simply as “Mr.” Fish.) His approach was really something adapted from art school – cross-media and cross-disciplinary, a kind of musical bricolage (albeit with polished production values). It could be raw or minimal, futuristic or simply atmospheric, theatrical or simply danceable. Bowie embraced and embodied the blur.

He also embraced an art of contingency and collaboration. One musical identity – even his own permutations – wasn’t enough for him; hence his collaborations: with Mick Ronson, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Freddie Mercury, Trent Reznor; and on and on. Aside from Iggy and Ronson, if there was a musical contemporary who resembled him, it might have been – for all their differences in styles and sensibility – Frank Zappa, another musician who could never be boxed in.

Which is why the man who played The Man Who Fell to Earth and left the planet (in such ironically timely fashion) as it began its transition to a place not unlike the doomed planet in that film, is and will be probably up to the day we’re finally compelled to leave it.