Bowie(s)

The 20th century was the age of the frontline news photo, the water-cooler TV moment, the must-have LP, but all those heat-of-the-moment things have been demoted or disappeared in our new century's digital realignment. In our current post-everything age, Bowie's death was another reminder of how times have changed: an oldtime star who once enacted his alter ego Ziggy Stardust's demise as an old-fashioned diva-esque theatrical goodbye-ee, and who more or less staged his own death online, with admirable restraint, impeccable good manners, and a profoundly surprising, legacy-salvaging last work, Blackstar. His career began in the early-to-mid 1960s when rock music itself had barely got up a head of steam, BBC2 had just become the UK's third TV channel, and there was very little 'media' to register the underground tremors of rock. By the time he died, the music and the culture it gave birth to had boomed, then bust. There is still music and obscene amounts of money to be made – perhaps more than ever. But it sometimes all feels like little more than a Potemkin masquerade, mass nostalgia for a time when rock really mattered. It's impossible to imagine something like Bowie's masterpiece Low (1977) coming out now, an album split down the middle like an old Mad centrepiece, one half fidgety pop songs (the whitest blues ever recorded), the other just pure tone.

Ian Penman in London Review of Books. Onder het mom van een recensie van vier boeken over Bowie en glamrock gaat de meester natuurlijk zijn eigen gang en maakt vervolgens de boeken onnodig. Best wel een streek. Ik vraag me trouwens af hoe lang het nog duurt voordat dit soort artikelen ook niet meer dan een herinnering zijn. In zekere zin kunnen ze alleen in deze periode worden geschreven, een wijze melancholie van iemand die weet dat een tijdperk ten einde is gekomen en de toekomst...ondenkbaar is?