About January 2016: And then Bowie died

In 2009, I wrote a book about the decade that, in strict calendrical terms, was then stumbling to a close. I suggested, however, that the period of time I was describing really began on a blue New York morning when the first plane hit the first tower and ended seven years later only a few blocks away when the US economy imploded in a puff of, if not logic, then sudden and unexpected self-awareness. (This of course allowed me to suggest that anything that happened in the few months between my completing the book and 31 December, 2009 were essentially irrelevant). The alternative is what the historian Ferdinand Mount called decaditis, the assumption that human events pay scrupulous attention to Gregorian norms, and suddenly decide to behave differently because they find themselves in the Noughties or the 1920s or whenever.

And the same, of course applies to individual years, but every now and then something happens on or around the beginning of January that sets the tone for the next 12 months. And if we follow the conventional Dad Rock narrative that 2016 was The Year When Lots Of Famous People Especially Pop Stars Died (see here to decide whether that’s true) then it pretty much followed the rules. In retrospective we could be wilfully contrarian and say that the process began on 28 December of the previous year, when Lemmy growled his last, but let’s stick with Bowie, which means the year started on 10 January, or maybe more accurately 11 January because that’s when so many of us found out. 

I got the news at work, in the editorial department of an Asian lifestyle magazine. Idly checking out Facebook, I chanced upon an article from the Hollywood Reporter, posted in the Fantasy Death League site. Shock, denial, sadness, all the usual reactions. The problem was, that I was surrounded by 20-somethings who weren’t entirely sure who Bowie was, and certainly didn’t get why I seemed so stunned by his demise. For the rest of the day I consoled myself in the virtual world, connecting with friends of a similar vintage who knew what he meant, who had danced to his rhythms and those of his acolytes. I don’t think I did much work. Something had been reset, tweaked, knocked out of place, within me and within so many people I knew.

Because maybe 2016 really did start roughly on schedule. Lots of people died (Pierre Boulez, Alan Rickman, Terry Wogan in the same month) but I don’t think it was until April (Prince, Victoria Wood) that the whole Death Year thing was apparent. And then Brexit happened and then Trump happened and here we all are a decade later. But what we didn’t necessarily realise at the time was that Bowie’s death was a curtain-raiser not just for a miserable year but for a succession of calamities that extended well, well beyond its conventional boundaries. In some ways, it’s still 2016. As someone remarked a bit later, back when Twitter was still vaguely human: 

If I just assume that I have been having a weird dream, which started with Bowie dying, then the last 31 months or so make more sense 

Where we find ourselves now is Bowie’s world, and we just live in it.

PS: Of course, this is subjective. There are people even younger than those who were my colleagues in 2016 and their memories of that year are rather different. As this article suggests, 

Looking at Instagram, around 2016, there was no carousel posts... People were posting a picture of their avocado, and it wasn't so performative... There weren't short-form reels, so there wasn't that algorithmic kind of fatigue that people have now. 

and 

To be honest, 2016 was the year of Snapchat stories... If I go back through my Snapchat memories, it's pretty much all from 2016. Instagram was all about photos, we didn't have to worry about Reels, we didn't have to worry about updating our stories all the time. It was just a simple, chilled life. 

and only after we’ve dealt with that important stuff, in passing:

It was a particularly gloomy year for celebrity deaths, with legends including David Bowie, Prince, George Michael and Alan Rickman all passing away. And 2016 also saw some major world events - such as the UK Brexit referendum and Donald Trump's first US election win - that continue to divide people, whether they celebrated or despaired at the result. 

PPS: Or for a more conventional explanation to those baffled colleagues, not to mention the Gen Z-ers worrying about Reels, here’s Martin James, a few hours after the news broke: 

Throw a pebble into the pool of popular culture over the last 50 years and Bowie is never too many ripples from the centre. The Beatles scratched the surface, but Bowie excavated it, renovated and tore it all down again, just to start all over again.

PPPS: And my own contribution in the aftermath:

...maybe what we’re really grieving for is the fact that however often we paint on that Aladdin Sane flash, we are not and never will be Bowie.

About Lazarus

So I went to Lazarus, which was great. And yes, it is a jukebox musical, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. The London run is almost over, so most of the things that need to be said about it have already been said, but what surprised me is how filmic it is — not just the inevitable back projections but the wide box in which all the action takes place, as if everything’s being shown in Cinemascope; the actors seem there but not there, flickering images on your retina. And yes, Michael C Hall is Thomas Jerome Newton from The Man Who Fell To Earth but not Bowie, and he’s not trying to be.

And inevitably I thought about what and who else is here but not here and what’s happened between the show opening in New York at the end of 2015, when Bowie was alive and would never die; and now, when a pantomime villain, a malevolent space beast has Fallen To Earth. 2016 happened, of course, and all the wrong people died.

And I thought about what art is going to look like in a world with the Bowies dying and the Trumps in charge, the people who fused Newton’s eyes still pulling the strings; and I went home and drank cold gin (I didn’t really) and ran my fingers over the scars that can’t be seen and read this depressing article in the FT about culture under Trump and this even more depressing article in The Quietus about the commodification of the alternative, not to mention the fact that his people don’t seem to think that hip-hop is properly American, and then I read about the government’s bright idea to turn the UK into a sort of cold, porridge-coloured Singapore (I went there once but it was closed) and all the stars that never were will try to sell mortgages to the stars that never will be and the only theatre will be jukebox musicals, but not like Lazarus. And there will still be music, but not like Bowie’s, more like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

About this year: Farage sings Bowie

As part of the all-encompassing need to package up time into arbitrary chunks and assign specific characteristics to them (and yes, do read my book about the Noughties, you know you want to), 2016 has been identified in most of the valedictory reviews as a year of a) seismic political shocks; and b) dead celebrities. Of course, this is partly a matter of perspective; if you spent most of the 12 months cowering from barrel bombs in Aleppo, it’s possible that the demise of David Gest may have left you less than moved.

But even in more peaceful parts of the world, I wonder whether this neat labelling of the year is that accurate. For many people, of course, the results of the Brexit referendum and the US election weren’t at all shocking; they came either as a pleasant surprise or simply as a natural fulfillment of all that is right and good in the world; and I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that the people who were happy enough with those developments were also those who weren’t too upset when the news came in that David Bowie or Prince or Carrie Fisher wouldn’t be seeing 2017. I did get into a minor online skirmish with one gentlemen who couldn’t understand why so much more attention was being paid to the death of a “poofter” such as George Michael than to a salt-of-the-earth denim-clad rocker like Rick Parfitt of Status Quo, who had left us the day before.

Now, no disrespect to the late Mr Parfitt, who plied his trade with commitment, energy and self-deprecating humour for nearly 50 years, but I think the common thread that unites many of the big-name, blue-chip deaths of the year (Bowie, Prince, Fisher, Michael, Muhammad Ali, Leonard Cohen, even poor old Pete Burns) is that in their lives and their work they interrogated and challenged fundamental, preconceived notions about gender, race, sexuality and more. Parfitt, bless him, didn’t. And – I’m just running on instinct here, with no empirical data to hand, but bear with me – the people who supported Trump and Farage tended to be the same people who wished those notions had gone happily unchallenged, who yearn for a time and a place when America is great again and the Black and White Minstrels are still on the telly (it’s just a bit of harmless fun) and there’s honey still for tea. For them, 2016 was about political triumph and vindication, with maybe a bit of sadness that Rick Parfitt died.

It’s a small matter in the greater scheme of things, but I’ve got a morbid yearning for both Trump and Farage to show up on Desert Island Discs, so we can find out what really pushes their cultural and emotional buttons. I’m guessing neither of them would pick a Bowie track – unless Farage is prepared to admit that his go-to karaoke piece is ‘The Laughing Gnome’.

PS: While we’re on the subject – who’s going to play at the inauguration?

PPS: Ah, question answered. Thanks to David Jacobson.

About Bowie

Talking heads from David Cameron upwards have had their say on David Bowie and why he was important and what he really meant. The guy’s barely been (secretly) cremated and already a backlash has started, the main criticism being that this is an orgy of irrational grief unprecedented since the whole Diana thing; maybe even more over the top since this mourning is amplified by social media. (I learned of Diana's death from the TV news; I learned of Bowie’s from the Fantasy Death League Facebook group.)

So, leaving aside the comprehensible grief of his family and close friends, are we permitted to mourn? And if so, why are we doing so with such intensity?

First, I think, because it was a shock. This may seem a little strange, because Bowie was 69; not exactly a ripe old age these days, but a point in life where banal infirmities such as cancer are liable to become part of the background music at least. It’s not as if he was a member of the 27 club, although few would have been surprised had he joined that unhappy institution; when Bowie actually was 27, the period when he appeared in the documentary Cracked Actor, he claimed to exist on a diet of red peppers, milk and cocaine. 

But it wasn’t so much the shock that he had died; it was the realisation that he even *could* die. More than any other performer — maybe only Michael Jackson came close — he had become inextricably linked with his evolving, reincarnating personas, so we rather lost sight of the flesh and blood underneath. Yes, in theory, we knew that he’d spent the past 20 or so years in domestic bliss with his gorgeous wife and beloved daughter, the sort of thing to which mere mortals aspire — but at the same time he was still Ziggy and the Duke and Screaming Lord Byron and they can never die. How can you kill something that was never conventionally alive?

That collective delusion apart, why was he important, why was he mourned? Well, there’s the music of course and, in purely artistic terms, he wrote and performed some great pop. I could never claim to have been a devote Bowiephile in the way that some of my friends were; I owned maybe half a dozen albums in various forms; saw him in concert just the once. But his own music is just the start of it; it’s his influence on huge swathes of what came after — glam, punk, indie, new romantic, synth pop, industrial, event elements of soul, funk and dance — is incalculable. For the past few days I’ve been surrounded by people who were perhaps too young to have fully understood what Bowie meant, some even who’d never heard of him. I’ve been trying to construct for them a musical universe in which Bowie never existed, a sort of It’s A Wonderful Life in which Jimmy Stewart has screwed-up eyes and screwed-down hairdo — and it’s a horribly bland place, I can tell you.

But it’s not just the music, is it? What Bowie really offered was a sense of identity and belonging for those of us who didn’t really belong. The square pegs, the left-handers, the kids who got picked last for the football team. Inevitably there have been countless references to a specific TV performance of Starman in July 1972, a moment that appears to have transformed the lives of pretty much everyone who saw it, each believing that when he sang “I had to phone someone so I picked on you” it was a personal invitation to attend some kind of Bacchanalian tea party. I missed that moment but there were plenty more through the years, a series of glorious happenings that never seemed contrived, second-guessing the zeitgeist while selling records almost as an afterthought. The sounds and the costumes and the characters changed but what remained consistent was his otherness, out of time, out of place, at once cool and awkward, Hamlet and Meursault and Josef K, how we wanted to be and how we were in one package. As we put on our red shoes and immediately fell wanking to the floor, he was a sort of Platonic ideal of how to be. And now that he’s dead — and even though his death was enigmatic and surprising and delivered with extraordinary timing, he’s dead — we realise that he was mere meat and bones and earwax like the rest of us.

But he did it so well. And those of us 40- and 50-somethings who stumbled through our dreary existences for the past week, sharing memories and tears and fuzzy YouTube clips of strange TV appearances in 1976, maybe what we’re really grieving for is the fact that however often we paint on that Aladdin Sane flash, we are not and never will be Bowie.