52 Essentials: No. 3, David Bowie
Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down.
On a recent episode of the new Gen Pop podcast, hosts David Chen and Joanna Robinson discussed the role of public grieving in our culture and the backlash against it by some. Their guest in that episode, Megan Garber, had written an article for The Atlantic on the subject entitled "David Bowie and The Rise of the Grief Police" published in The Atlantic.
The criticism leveled by the so-called "Grief Police" is that public expressions of grief, such as hashtags like #RIPDavidBowie, pull the attention away from the deceased and onto the griever. That is, it becomes more about who can craft the cleverest tweet or the most viral meme rather than about genuinely celebrating the deceased. Megan counters those criticisms by pointing out that grieving always has a public aspect in society, and that plays an important role in expressing ourselves and finding solace in one another. As she puts it, "#RIPDavidBowie was a hashtag, yes; it was also a funeral."
The discussion had me thinking about how I expressed my own grief over the death of David Bowie last year. As well as what it is we're doing here exactly.
Bowie's death hit me pretty hard when it happened. Maybe harder than I'd been hit by any celebrity death ever before or since (and 2016 had a lot of celebrity deaths). It's no mystery why. His music has been the soundtrack to nearly every stage of my life. As a kid growing up in the 80s, he was my Goblin King.
As an angsty teen dabbling in goth, he dropped the angsty goth-y Outside and toured with Nine Inch Nails. (It was the one and only time I ever saw him live and I can still feel the awe of seeing him enter the stage for the first time.)
When I moved to New York after 9/11, Heathen captured the mood of the city perfectly.
Shortly after Bowie died, I dug into his back catalog and found "Kooks", which I sang to Max every day for the first few months after his birth:
Expressing my grief over his death helped me to focus on everything that his work has meant to me over the years. Yes, it was far more about me at the end of the day than about Bowie, but isn't that the whole point of art in the first place? Learning more about ourselves by seeing the world through someone else's eyes, if only for a moment?
What I'm hoping to do here is provide some glimpses into what I saw when I was younger, and how those sights and sounds shaped me and guided me to where I am today. If Max can see what I saw and understand how it made me feel, maybe he'll see me a little clearer, too.
I wrote the following piece about a week after Bowie passed away, focusing on a walk-on role he had in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. There's so much more I could say about what Bowie's music and other performances have meant to me over the years. But perhaps more than anything else, I was struck after his death by how he made me feel so much less alone in this world. I hope someday my son can say the same thing about me.
I spent the past week the same way I imagine many people did, by listening almost entirely to David Bowie tracks. The occasional Brian Eno or Velvet Underground track crept into the mix along with other once-removed artists, but if you asked me right now, I’d probably tell you that I could go my entire life absorbing this man’s life work and never grow tired of it. When I haven’t been rediscovering his back catalog, I’ve been reading articles by others with far more knowledge than me memorializing him and discussing their own favorite works (feeding the loop as it points me to other works I hadn’t heard before, which then become my new favorites).
If I had to pick one example of Bowie’s body of work that captures what he meant to me, though, I’d probably pick his brief appearance as Phillip Jeffries in David Lynch’s prequel follow-up to Twin Peaks -- Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
It’s an odd choice, I'll admit. His one and only appearance in the entire Twin Peaks series, it's an inexplicable scene whether viewed in or out of context, having no direct bearing on the larger story and never addressed or referenced anywhere else in the series (so far, at least). At the same time, it also fits in perfectly in that uniquely Lynchian way.
While it’s easy to dismiss the scene (and, well, a lot of Twin Peaks) as meaningless gibberish, the scene also tells a complete short story about a man who's lost, alone and scared, yet at the same time defiant and determined to have his say. Without knowing anything about his character, his background or even how he got into that room, Bowie's Phillip Jeffries is immediately sympathetic, charismatic and enticing. And then, just as you’re drawn into his story and want to know more about him, he disappears in the blink of an eye.
Fire Walk With Me came out in 1992, when I was about 14 years old and about to transition from Junior High to High School. That’s around the time when it’s easy to assume that you’ve seen it all. That for all that parents and teachers talk about graduating and growing up, all you’ve really done is gone sideways down the street to a bigger campus. That nothing ever really changes but the commute. The bell rings and you start class again, just like the day before. It’s the sort of despair that gives birth to cynicism (the laziest of human emotions as well as the dullest).
But then sometimes, if you’re lucky, something will come around that seems … off. A discordant note buried in a familiar tune. It’s the unsettling feeling that someone or something isn’t following the script. You’re sitting in the theater, certain that you’ve seen this film before, when the soundtrack flutters and a character appears from nowhere with wild stories about other worlds, about the dream we’re living turned wondrous and horrible.
What this scene gave me then and now, what I credit Bowie for giving us time and time again, is that hint that of a wider, weirder world waiting just out of view. And with the right set of eyes and willingness to wonder, you might just find a way there.
It can be terrifying, of course, to find the rug pulled out from underneath you. To find yourself in a strange world of space oddities and goblin kings, of cat people and killer stars. You can feel lost, alone and scared. No one, it seems, understood that better than Bowie himself. When you spend a week immersed in Bowie, you hear just how human were his interests and sympathies. For as obsessed as he seems to be with aliens, his lyrics are all about the human condition.
That may seem ironic, but only if we overlook that science fiction’s strength (as with all great art) lies in finding the common humanity beneath the symbolism and metaphors that connects us all. Bowie was an alien, just as we all are aliens in this world. To each other. To ourselves. But in this state of alienation, in this very human condition of loneliness and fear, there’s also wonder. There is beauty. And finally, there is connection.
And that’s it. That’s the amazing trick that Bowie pulled on us, right up to his final hours. This strange and scary world that he teased was always OUR world. A world full of pain and wonder, of all manner of experiences and feelings that seem designed to alienate us from one another until our lives disappear in a blink. But no matter how alone we sometimes feel, like a stranger from a strange land walking into scene from some other unseen place, confused and fearful and living inside a dream beyond our control or comprehension …
Oh no love! You're not alone
No matter what or who you've been
No matter when or where you've seen
All the knives seem to lacerate your brain
I've had my share, I'll help you with the pain
You're not alone