David Bowie – Fill Your Heart

When I first heard “Black Star” a few months ago, I was immediately excited. It is a long piece, it is repetitive, droning… but it also is new, fresh, complex. It, alongside David Bowie’s most recent effort, The Next Day, signaled one of rock music’s most influential minds returning to form and returning in general. It felt supremely important and it seemed to cement Bowie as a force to be reckoned with for years to come. I looked forward to its release, seeing this blog as a place to enumerate those thoughts, as if anyone wouldn’t already be saying what I was. It felt worth bringing things back for. It felt like a burst of life into music. This will not be that blog. That blog will never exist the way I envisioned it. If Scott Weiland hit me hard, David Bowie leveled me. Maybe it’s partly how much of Bowie found its way into Weiland, so it’s like a one-two punch of student and master. More likely, however, it’s the fact that, for every musician I truly love, for each one who has created music that touches me deeply and has changed my life, so few consummate artists exist like Bowie. Black Star, as an album, promised to restate the obvious in that regard, to prove that for all the precious, self-conscious cleverness of the current musical moment, it was the elder statesman, the Thin White Duke, who was truly still pushing the limits. Bowie seemed to naturally embody art in his craft. Most of us create art; he was art. The inspiration and the position at the vanguard, the effortless flow of stylized chic… that’s what Bowie felt like at his best. It’s easy to speak of the man in terms of art, of course, as he was also supremely fluent in the language. He was a patron and a part of the scene, he sang of Warhol and Picasso (the latter, of course, by way of Modern Lovers), he was indelibly attached to fashion, and again, not solely for the song he wrote. He also acted, even playing Warhol on screen (Warhol, Bowie, Silver Screen… can’t tell ‘em apart at all). His earliest work was created for small scale musical plays which perhaps mercifully never came to fruition. His best known work was about his personae. Major Tom. Ziggy Stardust. When Bowie created, he did not create small. Of course, we can also think about what that creation consisted of. “Space Oddity” and “Ashes to Ashes” still sound incredibly uncomfortable even today, as if there is something disjointed, something just slightly at odds with our musical conventions. Songs like “Fashion” and “Golden Years” continue to defy easy categorization, while even the Let’s Dance era seems to out-80s the 80s. Oh, and he sang Christmas songs with one of your grandma’s favorite crooners once. Finally, let’s not forget what Bowie meant culturally. He was not only important in the vague art way in which museum work is important to those who do not go to museums, but he was a huge influence in simply allowing for the weirding of culture. Any number of your favorite bands would not exist if Bowie hadn’t first, and this isn’t hyperbole… Madonna seemed especially broken up about his passing, and even Kanye West took a moment to define Bowie as a huge influence. This has as much to do with his musical output as his cultural. Madonna’s “Vogue” is a spiritual sister to “Fashion,” sure, but it is perhaps Bowie’s sexuality which resonated most with a woman clearly interested in the way feminine sexual desire and expression were being policed. One cannot say how much Bowie’s ambiguity and androgyny changed views on gender and sexuality, but without a doubt just his presence mattered for many. These are all things I don’t need to repeat. It’s the story everyone has already told and everyone will. My giving a recap of the man’s life is meaningless. It’s sort of like how there is no self-respecting music journalist who is going to make a cheap shot at Black Tie White Noise. Side note: I actually spent a little quality time with “Jump They Say” this morning, and it surprised me how much it brought back… watching MTV as a child and needing to switch off the video because he cursed, that was the only bit I really recalled, and yet the song flooded back as if it was as much a part of my life as “Changes.” A life is about a catalog, not a couple bum albums. David Bowie’s catalog is not flawless, but it is so overwhelmingly important, even in its lesser moments, that it seems petty to discuss all that. And so, every story will be basically the same. But other stories won’t necessarily remember the feel of vinyl in a room which, in my far-back memories, smells of warm pine trees. They won’t talk about how “Drive-In Saturday” made a young mind transport to a past they’d never seen through sound. It’s almost impossible they will share memories of “The Laughing Gnome,” and how it was able to so easily bridge the worlds of children’s music and adult music, or how hearing those first notes make me think of the exact tape it was on, a black Memorex starting with a block of Bowie. The entire Images era won’t likely be mentioned at all, but coming into music at that age, the white album with all the comic style vignettes remains burned into my mind as much as any music does, and its wacky little musical sketches appealed as much then as Bowie’s heftier work does now. Music is about how we react to it. It’s about learning to play “Panic in Detroit” and realizing what a rush it is to jam out on. It’s discovering “Quicksand” when you’re already doubting your place in the universe. It’s the bizarre sensation of singing “Queen Bitch” with your mother. Music does weird things. That’s a big part of what makes music losses hurt so much. Songs infiltrate more parts of our lives, and music is something deeply felt. We all know how we experience film or books, but music can hit us anywhere at any time. Music need not even have words to get to us. Bowie’s music, well, it was always somewhere in the ether for me since I was born, and not just because he was a rock icon. Which leads us to “Fill Your Heart.” I’m not going to say “Fill Your Heart” is my favorite Bowie song, but it was always a standout because of its style. It was positive in a way I don’t often allow for, and full of what I almost want to call baroque vocal flourishes. It was, again, a perfect gateway, not a confection per se, but sweet enough to be just what a kid needed to help bridge the gap from The Elephant Show to the Rock Show. It’s the step AFTER the Laughing Gnome. It’s theatrical Bowie through and through, and snuggled between the desperate contemplation of “Quicksand” and the spacey intro to “Andy Warhol” as if such a location made any sense for it. And right now, when we feel loss, it is the message to take. Fill your heart with love. Hear me, David Jones (though I’m now certain we won’t meet), thank you for sharing your art with us, at its best and its most troubled. Thank you for gifting us one final contribution before leaving us. Thank you for blowing our minds. It hurts because you still felt so alive. It hurts because you will only be the first of the truly iconic heroes of the 60s who will leave us in the coming years. It hurts because your music was unlike anyone else’s, and because it was so good. It hurts because everyone with a musical heart has a moment worth sharing about your music, and because you were surely an inspiration and a touchstone for many who could only feel understood through your work. It hurts because the other musicians we love are hurting too. We hope your knowledge did indeed come with death’s release. If you’ve been on Amazon today, you’d know that Bowie’s work is almost to an album Temporarily Out of Stock. That feels important. In an era where music as physical product no longer exists, people have realized how important an artist’s work is and have gone out of their way to own it. Really, David, you don’t need to keep surprising us, but thank you.

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