David Bowie R.I.P

Did anybody here ever partake of BowieNet? I still have copies of the little ad included in the Virgin reissue series CDs. It looked like a forecast of a bunch of big current web ventures (tumblr, reddit, twitter etc.).

Stephin Merritt tribute:

David Bowie’s importance -- at least in my life, and probably in the lives of most people -- is, in a way, more important than the entire gay rights movement. Bowie is about the freedom to have any identity you want, not just gendered. Space alien, crazy person -- it’s all tied together, and it’s all sorts of fun.

It’s not like Aladdin Sane is depressing. It’s fun! And on Diamond Dogs, it’s the end of the world -- and it’s fun! David Bowie showed everybody that they could have absolutely ridiculous clothing and makeup, and not just that it was androgynous, but that it was pointedly absurd, like a gold circle on your forehead.

Ziggy & Mick reunited again, pass the fuckin glitter boys

In listening back to old stuff I have to say I reaaaaaally love the percussion/bass sound from the Ziggy era

dont ask me to describe it or explain why i just do

Chris Frantz: http://nypost.com/2016/01/11/from-one-hall-of-famer-to-another-thank-you-david-bowie/

Years later, in 1982, we had the good fortune to meet David when we played the Montreux Jazz Festival with Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club. He had a home nearby, and he decided to drop into our dressing room to say hello.

Dressed very unpretentiously in a brown anorak and a Shetland wool tweed cap, he was friendly and a little bit shy. By this time, we knew, through our mutual collaborator Brian Eno, that our music had been an influence on his, and I can tell you this was a great honor.

David looked at the spread of snacks the promoter had provided for us and asked, “Are you going to be eating that cheese?”

“No,” we said, and he wrapped it up in a napkin and put it in the pocket of his jacket.

Then he asked. “Are you going to be eating those nuts? “No,” we said, and he wrapped those up and put them in his pocket, too. He giggled as he did so.

interviewed him in 2003 for…yeah, Reality, right before his long break. Like JiC sez up there a bit, in the late '90s-early '00s, he released so many records and played around the NY area so often that you possibly could take him for granted. Saw the 50th birthday show at MSG in 1997, which was a clusterfuck, and so much preferred Roseland with his 90s band in 1996.

Was pants-shittingly nervous for the interview, and for that matter anticipated that he would be wearing an exquisite suit from some avant garde japanese designer. uh uh: had on a rugby shirt and chinos. Could not have been more pleasant and less self involved.

Stephin Merritt tribute🔗:

I think one of the most touching testimonials to Bowie, one that I suspect the man himself would have appreciated, is that his passing has inspired so many genuinely insightful and moving tributes from those whose opinions might otherwise be ordinary or unremarkable.

The Lennon comparison upthread may not be far off.

that Lorde thing made me cry all over again

and yes the last "pop" star loss that was this personal and painful for me was Lennon (I was 14 in Dec 1980)

he was like this super cool uncle, I have no idea how I would have dealt with high school bisexuality if he hadn't been there with his advice and maturity.

If you like the Berlin period, Bowie in Berlin was pretty good iirc.

2nded

Rest easy Bowie

This is really going to take a while to assimilate, maybe even forever, because it was never possible to assimilate "Bowie" really, is it? His M.O. was to show up obliquely. His personas were in dialogue with the culture, but we often didn't know what the substance of that dialogue was, so that in the narrative of pop culture he appeared as a non sequitur, or what we might call in these parts a "WTF" generator. And this is so bullshit, even to talk about him that way... but how else? I was eight when "Starman" hit the airwaves, and I never forget the pang it triggered in me, that sense of enormous, empty, yearning space. For years thereafter, he was always there, surveying us, curating us, and biding his time for his next entrance. This distant, unsettling creature was comforting to me, without my really noticing, because he made the world larger and kept the possibility of (weird) rebirth alive.

Thank you Mr. Bowie, and don't forget about us.

Thank you Mr. Bowie, and don't forget about us.

Madison Square Garden about ten minutes after Elvis hit the stage. I had the humiliating experience of walking down the center aisle
Handsome Dick Manitoba just said that he and Scott Kempner paid eight dollars each to go to that show and they sat very close to Bowie. After the show SK made his way up to Bowie and asked him what he thought of the show to which the answer was the one word "undeniable."

great post collardio

watched "The Prestige" tonight. it was great. David Bowie electrifies a cat in it:

http://lolpics.se/pics/9025.gif

I was trying to parse through just WHY I felt so empty and shitty last night and this morning, I haven't taken a celeb death this hard ever.

Initially I thought that it had something to do with the fact that Bowie occupied this kind of past-tense-yet-still-existing role in the world since my introduction to him, but of course, he continued to exist as an album-maker and actor and curator and video game character and so on and so on.

I realized that what I was experiencing was less so the death of a single man but the death of an institution-- the best analogy I could think of would be Doctor Who. We had Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke and Jareth and 90s Renaissance Man and Tesla and dotage-Bowie, same as we had Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker and Peter Davison and Christopher Eccleston and so on. But the idea of Doctor Who actually DYING is ludicrous and that's what I think I'm experiencing. That this continuously changing and evolving and active shapeshifter is now dead is really tough to digest

otm

the last time i felt anything like this was when paul hester from crowded house committed suicide, and that was partly because of how confronting & tragic the death itself was.

this is different, obv. the sadness runs a lot deeper, and it's going to hang around a lot longer

it definitely feels like a more monolithic loss that goes beyond just a person who sang songs

http://payload430.cargocollective.com/1/16/514318/10917782/Im-a-Blackstar-gif-600-945.gif

Martin Gore, from FB:

David Bowie - Where does one start? Is it too obvious to state that he was the most influential artist for people of our generation and younger? Ziggy Stardust was the first album I owned and his ability to innovate meant that I was waiting patiently for the release of Blackstar just a few days ago.

I have heard Bowie blasting from Mr. Gahan’s dressing room way too many times to begin to count. Heroes was the first song that we ever played as the original Depeche Mode. We were all much more than casual fans.

He is the only artist who compelled us to rush to a record store on day one of a release back in the days of vinyl and beyond. His music is what grabbed us but he was so much more than just a musician.

To follow Bowie, to be one of his fans, was to be led on a magical, winding journey. He constantly pushed boundaries and introduced us to styles and genres we were unaware of or didn’t exist before he invented them.

He was a star - the star of stars. For us, he was the greatest legend. A legend who never rested on his laurels but continued to experiment up until his death.

We, along with the rest of the world, mourn the loss of our greatest talent. This will be a hard one to recover from.

^that is awesome

(I'd love Karl Malone maken a complimentary one of the cover of Low in which the clouds would be moving ever so slightly)

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Photo spread from Rock Scene shared by Devo on FB:

https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/12439328_10153885596069136_6353212039980039986_n.jpg?oh=b9963a7ddd4900230f4cda4d257ed63c&oe=574A08E1

Since hearing this profoundly sad news I keep thinking about a Leonard Michaels quote I love very much and how graciously and elegantly Bowie has, by all accounts, exemplified it: "Courage is continuing to perform your daily tasks, and being hopeful despite the odds, not inflicting your fears on others, and remaining sensitive to their needs and expectations, and also not supposing, because you're dying, nothing matters any longer."

Sort of agree with FGTI that what's so emotionally rug-pulling about this is not the death of a man but the death of an Institution.

But at the same time feeling that the Institution is, in so many ways still so alive, and that's what hurts so much. That ~Bowie~ is not some edifice that happened a long time ago, but an archetype, a mode of being/creating/performing. The Idea of Bowie was something I was really glad to have alive in the cultural slipstream. It's not even about Fandom or about Being A Fan, it's this thing where Pop Music and Pop Culture is intensely tribal, and the sense of... even without performing fandom or participating in a fandom (I didn't do either; but funnily enough, he kept turning up in fandoms I was in) there was a massive sense of this is ~The Tribe I Belonged To~ and the sense that that tribe's benevolent leader is gone.

That analogy isn't v good. Replace Dr Who with Bond and it gets worse.

http://pitchfork.com/news/62847-nile-rodgers-reflects-on-david-bowie/ - touching interview with Nile Rodgers about Bowie. Some good stories in there and some more evidence of his genius/overall decency as a human.

How familiar was "The Man Who Sold the World" when Nirvana covered it? I figured it took real crate digging for Cobain to own its host album. It wasn't even a hit in America.

Bowirheads knew it. I didn't ever recall hearing it, not being one.

You people sure think about music a lot.

*bowieheads

welcome to the board i love music

i thought TMWSTW was more or less disowned or ignored in terms of the DB canon until the nirvana cover. bowie's version is still the weaker one.

He was so good at putting people together, like who else would have dreamed of pairing sweaty, up and coming roadhouse blues revivalist Stevie Ray with the very out of fashion king of disco Nile? But it worked

This thread (& the stuff it links to) has been a great companion in the last 30 hours.

Last weekend was Bowie weekend in my family: on Saturday we all (parents, siblings, their children, some friends, 15 in total!) visited the Bowie Is exhibition. The two days we spend together felt so…I don’t know, it was more than family. Then yesterday morning when I parked the car at work, the weekend came full circle when 5 text messages arrived nearly simultaneously… taking my breath away. It was a weird day, doing hardly any work (shit job that’ll be finished in two weeks), texting with family and friends, going outside for a smoke and listening to “Lazarus”… Left early, picked up the Blackstar LP, closed the curtains and had a great evening listening, texting, calling, reminiscing, ripping the ’93 singles collection to my gf’s ipod…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyFAnA9oPRE

i thought TMWSTW was more or less disowned or ignored in terms of the DB canon until the nirvana cover.

Americans have some funny ideas.

but they are ours.

kinda funny in the NPR interview how he says things later echoed by Stephin Merritt: 1) i'd rather someone else was singing my songs, 2) I wouldn't play live if i didn't have to.

one thing that keeps circling back for me is how he was kind of the coin of the realm for many different circles of outsiders - the burnout hippies who i hung out with for a while would listen to bowie with awe and wonder, but then i'd be traveling in vastly disparate social circles - ostensibly normal people with secret lives in high school; the people at the underage queer niteclub that saved my life in '85/'86; board game geeks - and no matter what they were genuinely into, everybody'd come into contact not just with bowie as a celebrity, a fixture, but with the music, the albums, the stuff in there. on the few occasions where I'd meet somebody with no opinion about Bowie, it would seem odd - really almost a religious attitude from me: how can you not care about this?

A few years ago I was watching the news and there was some piece about Bowie & Iman. My mother happened to pass though the living room and remarked "Isn't he that Alvin Stardust guy?". I couldn't believe that someone could be so ignorant. It was like a teenager from the US saying "Who's this Abraham Lincoln dude?".

After I saw the Chicago Bowie Is ... exhibit I got into a few arguments/debates with friends as to who else could support a similar exhibit. Beatles, of course, probably Bob Dylan. But during the course of our discussions the only person I could come up with as a possible successor to Bowie was Madonna, someone else who proved throughout her career a really smart synthesizer of someone else's ideas, a recognizer and savvy poacher of talent, an icon that changed the direction of the cultural dialogue. (And, coincidentally enough, overlapped with Bowie's commercial/public peak thanks in no small part to the very next record Nile Rodgers produced). But she's far less creatively restless, I think, or at least far more concerned with what other people think, though in a sense her career right now maybe parallels Bowie c. "Hours" or something like that. A transition/holding pattern. Live performance is also much more important to Madonna, too. She needs that energy, which is why she works so hard to get that. But Bowie got all his energy from ideas. That was enough, and possibly explained why, no matter what he did, it always seemed so natural and effortless. No stories as far as I know of Bowie laboring in the studio. That was his happy place.

Listening to "Lust for Life" right now, still perhaps or at least often enough my favorite Bowie-related project.

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'Had no idea he had been still alive', girl at office, 22yrs.

Madonna's his greatest heir.

I got into a few arguments/debates with friends as to who else could support a similar exhibit.

Yeah, but it got panned as BS, iirc.

Madonna may be his offspring but she didn't inherit his soul.

tbf Bowie has a thirty year head start on Björk, but she's more of a spiritual heir than Madonna imo.

Bill Buckley's former mag:

Millions of words will be written about the death of David Bowie, the theatrical pop singer who died of cancer at the age of 69. He was famous for the various dramatis personae he adopted over the years—Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke—and for his experiments in androgyny, having surfed a wave of sexual indeterminacy (the rumored affair with Mick Jagger, etc.) right up until the moment that wave crested, at which point he married a famous supermodel and adopted a somewhat more conventional aesthetic. Very few men will ever be able to say that they aged as gracefully.

Bowie was an influential figure in music, art, and fashion, but he was a pretty good armchair economist, too, having chosen a necessarily entrepreneurial occupation. He was quick to appreciate the cultural importance of the Internet, and in 2002 he gave a famous interview with the New York Times in which he made some predictions about the future of the music industry: the decline of labels, the emergence of the utility model of music distribution, the blurring of previously clear lines of ownership and authorship, the decline of effective copyright (he wasn’t quite right in predicting that copyright would simply cease to exist in a decade) and the return of performance as the central economic activity for musicians.

He was a financial innovator, too, raising $55 million via the now-famous “Bowie bond,” in which he traded future royalties for cash money in hand. (This turned out to be a much better deal for Bowie than for his investors.) That wasn’t entirely successful, but the idea clearly influenced subsequent projects such as Kickstarter. No one has quite figured out what business models are in fact going to be effective for cultural undertakings such as music, publishing, and journalism, but Bowie was ahead of the curve in identifying the underlying problem.

As any entrepreneur will tell you, recruiting the right people is an enormous challenge. Bowie had the good sense to spot Stevie Ray Vaughan, whose contribution to “Let’s Dance” was simply irreplaceable. Bowie in fact had nearly impeccable taste in guitarists: Reeves Gabrels, Adrian Belew, etc. He was an excellent personnel man.

And without being cynical, there was a fair amount of marketing savvy behind his enigmatic image and his penchant for playing a new character every few years: He was like a fine restaurant with no fixed menu, where the atmosphere “isn’t painted on the walls,” as they say. He wasn’t all things to everyone, but his portfolio was well-diversified.

The artist was admirable, to be sure, but the businessman wasn’t half bad, either. The free market isn’t only about investment bankers and factories. Increasingly, it isn’t even mainly about that. It is about human flourishing. David Bowie’s career was a reminder that business can be beautiful.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/429557/david-bowie-was-brilliant-businessman

He's only got a 20 year start on her, really. Which feels mad to say. I feel like time is compressing.

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brendanOB • 21 hours ago

He was also a pretty good dad, if an unconventional one. There are interviews with his son, director Duncan Jones, that make this clear. Good dad, entrepreneurial, wore a lot of suits... he's a conservative icon!

Avatar The Old Man brendanOB • 17 hours ago

Although showing up late to his wedding because he was engaging in a three-some (with his wife-to-be) isn't exactly Bill Buckley behavior. But he had many conservative attributes.