Monday, January 11, 2016

Is There Life on Mars?



I don't think I'm exaggerating  when I say that no one expected this. I mean, here's a tweet on his birthday, two days before he died.


Of course, the tweet I displayed was a slight joke. We all knew that David Bowie wasn't God. That would be silly.  Sure, he made great music, was a great actor where he was able to make his own inherent strangeness work to his benefit, and was just a seemingly great guy. Hell, when was the last time we had a great artist that people were still talking about in a positive light before the person died?

But, even behind the jokiness of David Bowie being God, perhaps it kind of wasn't a joke either.



This is what makes it difficult for a lot of us. To me, Bowie never really seemed to be from this world. But, it kind of feels normal to think of him that way as well. I've read pieces about how Bowie got by in the industry by being weird. He was a bit of androgynous figure who created weird, off-beat, yet, fascinating music. Who else would perfectly embody the role known as The Goblin King and completely own up to it while still have everybody love him?



Maybe we just all started to believe that he was some sort of alien after he made an album about sort of being one. Who else could do a whole album like The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars, a rock opera involving a messenger travelling through space with space lasers and space invaders? Out of context, this all seems weird and very out there. But, within the context of David Bowie, it's all very awesome.

And that's not even including the other great albums and songs he did. I only really having a passing familiarity with his albums, but there are quite a few songs I liked by him. So much so that this what I wrote about him a year ago when I talked about my top five favorite artists.

"No matter what this guy does, it's at least always interesting. He branches off into a lot of different kinds of sounds and a lot of them are just winners. Even his more pop sounding stuff is immensely listenable compared to other artists. His songs you probably hear on the radio like Modern Love and Let's Dance are honestly quite great, but his quieter and even more "quirky" songs are what really stand out for me."

 This was the song I used to represent him.

It's not quite something I can fully describe or comprehend. I could probably tell you how this song was constructed and why it works really well. But how someone could conceive anything like that? It would already take someone special like David Bowie.

Don't ask me to rank my favorite songs of his or my favorite album(I already feel too critical of The Beatles just by having a favorite album by them[Rubber Soul]); it's really hard to have to rank an artist's work when each of his pieces are already great in their own unique way.

So very special. So very unique. What else could he be besides an alien?

And I think that's what makes it difficult for a lot of us. If anybody were immortal, it would have to be David Bowie.  Someone we could call God and kind of be sincere about it. Someone we could call an awesome space alien from Mars and we wouldn't even have to think twice about it.

Why?

Because there was no one else like David Bowie.

The only thing that would humanize Bowie is if something happened to him that every human has to face eventually. Death...

David Bowie was just as human as the rest of us, something that most of us probably forgot or refused to even realize.

David Bowie wasn't the immortal we all secretly thought he was, but...well, I don't know what else I can add to that sentence. I've tried finishing that sentence before, but I can't. I'm not sure how to finish it without sounding maudlin. Losing David Bowie is a loss I don't think we can ever recover from.

I don't think I can say it better than Todd in the Shadows can



Or Carrie Brownstein


Or Jen Kirkman


Or, really, a lot of people.




Now...I guess the only thing we secretly hope for now is that David Bowie didn't die, he just went back home. Because I know I'll never be able to accept the truth.


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