In the aftermath of Monday, January 11, we were witnesses to a peculiar flood of diverse imagery through various media. We heard science fiction lullabies, anthems of lovers defying all odds, and calls to express our true selves. We saw flashes of striking fashion, live reports from a Soho apartment building adorned with flowers, and an outpouring of grief by current trendsetters. As relative outsiders to a cultural phenomenon who had been a dormant figure in our lifetimes, we, young adults of a generation cast as “millennials” attending a technology-focused university, can justly ask in an effort to understand this seemingly-removed icon and his impact: What does David Bowie mean to us?
The answer to this may lie in the technology we’re engaging with; Bowie can be rightfully attributed as the first major artist to both release a downloadable single, 1997’s lovably dated drum-and-bass dabbling “Telling Lies,” and start an internet service provider. The equally-as-dated “BowieNet” gave musicians a chance to get ahead of the technological curve and users 20 megabytes to start their own site. For majors living in the Babbio Center, a quick Google search for “Bowie Bonds” will bring up a lesson in utilizing intellectual property (the rights to his earlier work) as collateral.
In the CAL department, people can see his past walking around the Morton-Peirce-Kidde complex. Director of the Sound Synthesis Research Center Carlos Alomar is the individual responsible for Bowie’s meaningful engagement with American soul music on 1974’s “Young Americans,” a close collaborator from then on, bringing his character to several tours and culminating in “Fly,” an energetic cut off 2003’s “Reality.” Alomar now continues to provide guitar instruction for students and runs the Sound Synthesis Research Center, a lab featuring the latest in music technology alongside art rock icon Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategy” inspiration cards, providing the same inspiration to current students that drove Bowie’s work from 1977 to 1979.
Technical advancements like those in the Sound Synthesis Research Center show the mark of an individual who worked tirelessly to push against the boundaries of what an artist can do, something that’s further substantiated in finding what David Bowie meant to others. For some, he represented a disruption of gender: his proclamation of being gay in a 1972 NME interview and his continued manipulation of sexuality through his identity was decades before our current societal and cultural recognition of gender expression. To others, a pioneer in genre subversion: it would be hard to imagine acts like Kanye West and David Byrne shifting styles between projects without Bowie first blurring the lines between pop, funk, krautrock, electronica, folk, and soul, engaging each in a deferential fashion free of uninformed appropriation. But to most, his output acted as a refuge for those living outside the norm, lyrics like “These children that you spit on, as they try to change their worlds, are immune to your consultations, they’re quite aware of what they’re going through” and “Oh no, love, you’re not alone” became sources of comfort for fans in his wake.
In the weeks leading up to his passing, Bowie carefully prevented his sickness—an eighteen month battle with cancer only known to immediate family and close collaborators—from marring his otherworldly image and career at a time that other artists refer to as their “twilight years” with such human decay. His last public offerings became retrospectives of this state: Lazarus, a theatrical continuation of his 1976 film, “The Man Who Fell To Earth,” starring Michael C. Hall as an immortal being attempting to find a way back to his home planet. Blackstar, his last album released on his sixty-ninth birthday two days before his passing, is a jazz-rock epic enveloping telling statements like “I can’t give everything away” and “Look up here, I’m in heaven / I’ve got scars that can’t be seen.” The only way he could earnestly convey his condition to a world that couldn’t possibly fathom it was through his art.
So no matter what he means to us, whether it’s as small as watching Emma Watson embodying the euphoric nature of “Heroes” as it plays in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” or as impactful as a welcoming escape from normativity, we cannot deny him as having an influence in our relationship with culture. After all the symbolism of flight, from visions of a future in space to his last single, “Lazarus,” with its imagery of being “free, just like that bluebird,” an ideal can be drawn for extraordinary, cross-disciplinary inspiration. We can surely find David Bowie as an advocate for freedom of identity, collaboration, and, yes, freedom for innovation.
Listen to a curated playlist of Bowie classics and deep cuts via WCPR’s Spotify.
