In the center of everything, still and always, David Bowie – publico

                 

                         
                     

                 

 
 

Two years before announcing the abandonment of stages during an interview in which spoke of George Orwell and Anthony Burgess, two writers who quoted directly in his work, which had pointed out the poetry of Baudelaire, a Matisse painting and Text of Martin Amis, the journalist of the New York Daily News asked him if he saw himself as an intellectual. Bowie fled the connotation and responded as only Bowie could answer. “What I have is a malevolent curiosity. It is what guides my need to write and is probably what leads me to look at things in a somewhat skewed. I actually tend to take on a different perspective than most people. “

The work of David Bowie, and the relevance of this work, it really makes it is the specific look. Bowie was (it’s) revolutionary precisely the ability to build, disc after disc, decade after decade, a new place: the curiosity led him to look closely at everything around him, but the reflection returned in was invariably something else – along .. more than five decades, as this was their genius

Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, Thin White Duke were some of their masks All gathered build a new face: the Bowie himself – “even if it was very shy, I found I could climb the stage if he had a new identity,” he said in the aforementioned interview “Then,” he added, “I learned to dismiss this identity to become real, maybe not real. towards Bruce Springsteen, but at least an approximation to reality on stage. “

Musically, Bowie out very early man under construction, initially following the rock’n’roll route with plastic saxophone under the arm, unsure, as I said, wanting to be Elvis Presley or John Coltrane. Then he enthused with the elegance of mods, whose visual adopted, and always with the idea of ​​very stark scene, debuted in feature-length with an album that was meant to be singing music-hall, singles pop, psychedelia Gentleman. It could not, however, be all at once – never would see really if it did. It was necessary to determine the radar

When invents the character Ziggy Stardust, the alien and androgynous being fallen on Earth, decisively transforms the 1970s -. Major Tom, the Space oddity , his first great success, suffered a metamorphosis and abandoned the ghostly silence of the cosmos to present to the world, to act in the world. In 1971, a year before presenting Ziggy, had edited the album Hunky Dory one that turns out to be the summary song of your creative attitude. Changes , obviously, “ Turn and face the strange ch-ch-ch-ch-changes ”

Meat and fireworks.

Bowie had not come first. When we are introduced to Ziggy Stardust, as Marc Bolan led his T. Rex UK outside, sequins sparkling on stage, eyes lit with make-up, announcing the good news of glam-rock – the primordial energy of rock’n’roll recovered and transformed into full period of sexual revolution, and surf the ‘serious’ dreams of the hippie counterculture. Bowie realized, which in Bolan was intuition, with Bowie became one built from scratch universe as a reflection of his time as the creator of that time (always able to choose employees, had beside him Tony Visconti, Marc Bolan partner in glam definition of T. Rex)

Sound and vision, rock’n’roll dreams made flesh and fireworks -. so captivating and surprising that in England, the entire generation which would then punk, post-punk, the new-wave, synth-pop and the New Romantics know where was the day in 1972 when the alien Ziggy proved to the nation on the show Top of the Pops . Ziggy could not live forever. I fear it even in Alladin Sane , published in 1973, but could not have it much longer.

Nothing in David Bowie was static and its recording career is that reflection . When a reporter from New Musical Express asked, we were in 1978, which his great contribution to rock’n’roll, said: “I am responsible for opening a whole new school of pretentiousness.” The mood gets you well, but in this case it might be better to use another person’s quote to explain their impact. “Bowie existed for all the misfits learn that the singularity is a precious thing, changed the world forever” – told the director Guillermo del Toro in reaction to the death of Bowie

Expanding

dead Ziggy, the man who gave her body went on.. expanding universe: in tribute to those who came before, as Syd Barrett, The Who, the Kinks or Them in versions album Pin Ups , the last recorded with the Spiders From Mars, and Diamond Dogs giving glam-rock dizziness ( Rebel Rebel explains everything) the dystopian nightmare of 1984 , the work of George Orwell which provided the inspiration .

We were in 1974, almost half of the decade of all excesses, and Bowie had much to do until the end. Reinvented itself as Thin White Duke, the fact that man and hairstyle classic, glam lying behind him, which would surrender to the wonders of soul and American funk – one soul and funk of his own as recorded in Young Americans , 1975 Album Eating, legend has it, a cocaine diet, milk and peppers, began, between delirium and paranoia induced by the first heroic consumption, preparing the way for one of reinventions most celebrated of his career

Station to Station , 1976 was the bridge -. the soul reinvented the period immediately following the flow into the mechanical universe, electronic, that German adventurers built in central Europe (krautrock, they called it). Then, with Brian Eno, the magician of synthesizers and machinery spare with Roxy Music, the pioneer of ambient music, went into exile in Berlin to create a trilogy which remains one of the highlights in the history of popular urban music – Low and Heroes , both published in 1977, and Lodger , launched in 1979 and already recorded away from Germany, but still . it under their effect

Again, David Bowie discovered, peering around where seethed something new and transformer and incorporated it in them to enrich themselves – and to enrich us. The bold nature of its intervention, a quality that is transversal to all his work, is in the way brought to the center of popular culture the language of margins, giving it an understandable and open to all sense. Low , Heroes and Lodger are composed of serious experimentation and consequently, uncompromising, but are also the album where we find a single immaculate as Heroes (with Robert Fripp, former guitarist of King Crimson to contribute decisively to the final result).

According to the zeitgeist

The 1970s, the decade that David Bowie created, were coming to an end. With Scary Monsters (1980) and it contains songs like Ashes to ashes and Fashion foreshadowed the pop sophistication that would follow. With Let’s Dance , three years later, became superstar pop: realized the sign of the times, and he had always known to put in scene according to the zeitgeist came Almighty in the heart of the MTV generation.

In the 1990s also saw him try to get in tune with contemporary glow in Outside or this Earthling created under the sign of the then emerging drum’n’bass – it was released in 1997 and was more interesting as a concept than in its implementation. Reality , the last album released before the retirement announcement as showing someone who, despite all the changes and all shades, could crystallize a pop language unmistakably his. Ten years later, the album surprise The Next Day looked like a close cycle. Bowie to revisit to yourself before you move on. Now Blackstar .

I imagine it discreet at the table of a small New York club. Sitting in a corner, discreet, listens carefully to free jazz, knowing the past but willing the future of the band who had recommended him. Hear, peers, finds. It was with them, with the musicians saxophonist Donny McCaslin led by, who prepared his last manifesto. “ In the center of it all “, would hear months later, dazed, surprised again sucked into the new place searching for himself. The last. We were there in 2015, “ in the center of it all “. At 68, 69 around the corner, met Bowie. Furthermore. Always.