It’s hard for me to contemplate a world without David Bowie for a number of reasons. The first one is Blackstar, an album he released into the ether three days ago, confirming to the press, old fans, jaded curmudgeons and casual listeners, that there were still new sounds to explore; that rock ‘n’ roll, despite the rumours, was not dead. To listen to Blackstar is to expose yourself to an artiste so alive, so committed to pushing boundaries, that the notion of his mere body giving up is a piece of news that is almost prosaic.
I came to Bowie in my teens, when Doordarshan condescended to air snippets of the song Dancing In The Street during the 1986 Grammy Awards. I found it mildly amusing, at best, but it prompted me to pick up a pirated copy of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars on cassette from a stall on Mumbai’s DN Road, when pirated cassettes were still the only way for us impoverished Third World folk to find out what the rest of the world had long been used to.
Ziggy Stardust was released in 1972. I realised it was nothing like Dancing In The Street, and it taught me my first lesson about listening to Bowie: You must expect or anticipate nothing.
The sound of magic
There’s always something magical tucked away in every single album Bowie put out since his eponymous debut in 1967. There was Space Oddity in 1969, The Man Who Sold The World in 1970, reintroduced to the world by that other visionary, Kurt Cobain, the touching Kooks written for his son on the Hunky Dory album in 1971, every single note on Ziggy Stardust, The Jean Genie from Aladdin Sane, his astonishing covers on Pin Ups in 1973, the overwhelming, hugely ambitious concept album Diamond Dogs in 1974, his experiments with American soul music on Young Americans in 1975, and a further four decades of music that encompassed everything from hip-hop and dance to electronica, acid jazz, grime, industrial rock and, a week ago, an album inspired by free jazz described by The Independent as “the most extreme of his entire career”.
I manage, somehow, to listen to Ziggy Stardust at least once every other month, decades after that pirated cassette made its way into my home in exchange for Rs 35. I now own multiple copies of it on CD, afraid that one may wear out when I need to listen to it. Don’t judge me; others like me exist.
I don’t have a favourite Bowie album. What I do have is a favourite live album titled Bowie at the Beeb, a double CD that brings together a number of his hits as well as covers of songs by artists he either collaborated with, was inspired by or, in the case of Lou Reed, gave new life to.
The last song on Blackstar is titled I Can’t Give Everything Away. Unless unreleased recordings make their way to us in the coming years, it is the final message Bowie left us. And in the second verse lies a clue: “Seeing more and feeling less, Saying no but meaning yes, This is all I ever meant, That’s the message that I sent.”
Earlier this morning, I tweeted in admittedly bathetic fashion: “How can we live in a world without David Bowie? There is no God.” Some strange man I don’t know, from some corner of a planet I am unfamiliar with, responded with the message: “That’s because Bowie is God.” And there was nothing more for either of us to say.
Here is another lesson I have learned today: If there is something to be done musically, David Bowie has probably done it already. I honestly don’t know how I’m going to live without the knowledge that he’s tucked away in a studio somewhere, creating sounds we haven’t been taught to listen to yet.