Our world was always too small for David Bowie – Dagbladet.no

A life of 69 years and a musical career of more than half a century struck the dot yesterday.

For a painful message to wake up – the artist who refused to solidify is dead.

There are only three days ago he released his last and most vital album, “Black Star” and I sit with the same emptiness that when producer hero J Dilla died – just three days after he released his ‘Donuts’ in 2006.

There are many on Earth that makes ingenious thing, but not many with certainty can mention as genius. In popens world there are few – if any – that deserve the honorable designation more than David Bowie.

Even on screen, he created iconic moments, whether he played the equally alienated Nikola Tesla in “The Prestige “a bully version of himself in the TV series” Extras “and that Jareth The Goblin King in fantasty-flmen” Labyrinth. “

No one has cultivated the concept of” image “like him, and no one has treated pop more as their playground. Whether it was as Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane or the Thin White Duke, through folk rock, funk, jazz or electronica. Already in 1996 he released the song “Telling Lies’ exclusively on the Internet. He always looked forward.

Not only has he been an inexhaustible source of renewal through six decades, but also a kind of spiritual leader of all those who have felt differently.

For long hair, for androgynous, for quirky and ahead of their time.

Maybe that was why he never stopped looking at the stars.

As my colleague wrote in a review of “Black Star” last Friday: “Similar to Sun Ra and other African Americans have David Bowie sought away from the Earth – perhaps because there is no space for them.”

Our world has always been too small for David Bowie. And then it’s certainly not enough room for him in a newspaper comment, either.

Bowie said it might be best for 43 years ago. During his last concert as Ziggy Stardust character on 3 July 1973 he translated Jacques Brel “La Mort” to “My Death” – and finished with:

My death waits there in a double bed
Sails of oblivion and my head
So pull up your sheets against the passing hour

But whatever lies behind the door
There is nothing much to do
Angel or devil, I do not care
For in front of That door there is, Thank You.

Thanks for everything, David Robert Jones.

Click for the content

Equal Dagbladet Opinions on Facebook.