So we’re a few days removed now from David Bowies passing and I’m still in a state of disorientation. I’ve spent countless hours reading tweets, blog posts, and articles about the life and times of Bowie and it still seems a little too surreal.
Let’s roll the clock back to Friday, January 8th. I start my morning, reaching for my smartphone to check in on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook feeds while having my morning constitution. Much to my surprise, a small number of people went out of their way to acknowledge/celebrate Bowie’s birthday. I found this a little odd… because I can’t ever remember his birthday being recognized by friends on social media.
Nonetheless, here’s something I saw on my Instagram feed on Friday by a local artist here in San Antonio.
Fast forward to the Monday morning, January 10th and I noticed a number of my Facebook friends changed their profile picture of David Bowie. The radio show I listen to in the morning spends all but 4 seconds on his passing before segueing to the topic of the Golden Globes and I found myself in the kitchen completely unsure of what the fuck was going on.
I double backed over to Facebook and confirmations of his death began to spill into all of my social media feeds. I walked over to my music collection and snagged all of my Bowie albums so that I could reflect privately on his passing.
On my drive to work, I thought about Lemmy’s passing a few weeks ago and then thought about the last time we lost a pop culture star that was of Bowie’s magnitude. Michael Jackson came to mind… but I was in a remote location with no internets when that happened, so I was one of the last people on earth to hear about his passing.
My mind then drifted a little further back to Kurt Cobain and thought about how I spent a good part of my evening tuned into that channel – to hear Kurt Loader and David Fricke talk about his passing. MTV in essence was my pop-culture CNN and they seemed like the logical place for me to kinda get dedicated and centralized details about what happened in Seattle that day. If Grantland were still in existence, I knew I would be able to count on an entry or two and maybe a podcast in the afternoon to digest what occurred over the course of the first day of knowing that David Fucking Bowie was dead.
72+ hours have passed and I still can’t believe that someone could dig up Kurt Loader to interview Cameron Crowe on any of the fucking 500 channels I currently have on my AT&T UVerse.
I mean, whose dick do I have to suck to get Chris Connelly and Chuck Klosterman in front of a Microphone to wax poetically on nearly 50 years of artistic output we just lost out on?
I’m 38 years old and its a little hard to justify my appreciation of David Bowie. I’m not genuinely old enough to appreciate the entire breath of his artistic career…
One of my earliest memories of David Bowie, was seeing him sing “Drummer Boy” with Bing Crosby. I technically recognized Bing before I recognized Bowie and that was due largely in part to Bowie rarely breaking kayfabe from whatever persona he was in. It didn’t quite fit into the Bowie I knew from the “Modern Love” video… his performance in the movie Labyrinth or his “Dancing in the Streets” video with Mick Jagger. He also didn’t seem to appear as the alter ego he abandoned in the early 70’s… I simply couldn’t figure out who or what David Bowie was.
So now he’s gone and I find myself in a familiar place with David Bowie. Disoriented, but still captivated as ever….