Joe Coscarelli wrote in the New York Times four days after Bowie's death:
"Like most children of the 1950s, David Bowie considered Elvis a mythic figure. The pair, who would go on to share a record label, RCA, in the 1970s, also happened to be born on the same day. 'I couldn’t believe it,' Mr. Bowie said. 'He was a major hero of mine. And I was probably stupid enough to believe that having the same birthday as him actually meant something.'
Following Mr. Bowie’s death on Sunday, the search for meaning in his own final works — the album 'Blackstar,' which arrived on Friday, his 69th birthday, and the musical 'Lazarus' — has led back to Elvis. On this week’s New York Times Popcast, the philosopher Simon Critchley, whose book 'Bowie' was released in 2014, points to the rare Elvis song “Black Star,” an alternate version of 'Flaming Star' from the 1960 Western of the same name.
The lyrics speak for themselves:
Every man has a black star/A black star over his shoulder/And when a man sees his black star/He knows his time, his time has come/Black star don’t shine on me, black star/Black star keep behind me, black star/There’s a lot of livin’ I gotta do/Give me time to make a few dreams come true, black star
'It must be a clue,' Mr. Critchley said. 'At the very least, it’s a fitting cosmic coincidence.'"
There is little to say or write about David Bowie that hasn't already been said or written, including this: I am still processing a world without David Bowie. I listened to *Blackstar* in its entirety only after Bowie left this world, though the provocative long video "Blackstar", with its Kenneth Anger imagery and eerie jazz--something music very much haunted my psyche: I was not sure what I had just seen or heard, but I was enthralled. I couldn't stop thinking about it. The melody is utterly possessive.
A few days later, I found the above Coscarelli piece, and found myself utterly fascinated, turning the connection over and over again. A relatively obscure Elvis song about Death chasing a Cowboy, the "Black Star over his shoulder" becomes a reference to the Bhagavad Gita "I am a *Blackstar*" as "I become Death". But Bowie, who apparently recorded this thinking he had beat the cancer (some have interpreted the title as a reference to Bowie's own cancer lesion), must have been the Cowboy as well, with "a lot of living to do".
I remember reading somewhere that Bowie had written "Golden Years" for Elvis, so there's that.
The other day, while continuing to ponder these things--Bowie, Death, Elvis, Death, Bowie, Elvis, Death--I thought about the unknowable nature of both Bowie and Elvis. Elvis became unknowable because the man receded, and then succumbed, to the celebrity. What ever Elvis thought or felt authentically, even as we feel connected to him, through is music, is not there for us to access and understand, and likely, had not been there for the man for too many years. All we have, he had, was E-L-V-I-S.
Bowie seemed to grasp intuitively at first, and later compulsively, the illusory and elusive nature of celebrity and stardom, creating himself as an enigma, leaving fans and writers flummoxed, grasping for something authentic. Bowie wasn't interested in being "authentic" in any way aside from a compelling, challenging artist. He once said in an interview that there is no "real" David Bowie. Certainly, someone as well read as he understood that his authorship was negated through the interpretation of his music by his fans. Roland Barthes, in his "The Death of the Author", denies the personhood of the Author as a knowable, asserting instead that the idea of the Author is a historical construct. Bowie knew that who he was is who his fans thought he was, and his various personae were zeitgeist, performance and meaning making on the part of his fans, attempting to grasp a "theological meaning" that simply did not exist. Bowie, as fan of music, also knew how important the illusion of "knowability" is because music is so profound in changing moods, changing lives, that we need it, and the artists who produce it, to be "real". Perhaps the teenaged David Jones felt this, as so many did, with Elvis. To quote Barthes:
David Bowie must have died a long, a long long time ago. Now, I understand that was the point...
There is little to say or write about David Bowie that hasn't already been said or written, including this: I am still processing a world without David Bowie. I listened to *Blackstar* in its entirety only after Bowie left this world, though the provocative long video "Blackstar", with its Kenneth Anger imagery and eerie jazz--something music very much haunted my psyche: I was not sure what I had just seen or heard, but I was enthralled. I couldn't stop thinking about it. The melody is utterly possessive.
A few days later, I found the above Coscarelli piece, and found myself utterly fascinated, turning the connection over and over again. A relatively obscure Elvis song about Death chasing a Cowboy, the "Black Star over his shoulder" becomes a reference to the Bhagavad Gita "I am a *Blackstar*" as "I become Death". But Bowie, who apparently recorded this thinking he had beat the cancer (some have interpreted the title as a reference to Bowie's own cancer lesion), must have been the Cowboy as well, with "a lot of living to do".
I remember reading somewhere that Bowie had written "Golden Years" for Elvis, so there's that.
The other day, while continuing to ponder these things--Bowie, Death, Elvis, Death, Bowie, Elvis, Death--I thought about the unknowable nature of both Bowie and Elvis. Elvis became unknowable because the man receded, and then succumbed, to the celebrity. What ever Elvis thought or felt authentically, even as we feel connected to him, through is music, is not there for us to access and understand, and likely, had not been there for the man for too many years. All we have, he had, was E-L-V-I-S.
Bowie seemed to grasp intuitively at first, and later compulsively, the illusory and elusive nature of celebrity and stardom, creating himself as an enigma, leaving fans and writers flummoxed, grasping for something authentic. Bowie wasn't interested in being "authentic" in any way aside from a compelling, challenging artist. He once said in an interview that there is no "real" David Bowie. Certainly, someone as well read as he understood that his authorship was negated through the interpretation of his music by his fans. Roland Barthes, in his "The Death of the Author", denies the personhood of the Author as a knowable, asserting instead that the idea of the Author is a historical construct. Bowie knew that who he was is who his fans thought he was, and his various personae were zeitgeist, performance and meaning making on the part of his fans, attempting to grasp a "theological meaning" that simply did not exist. Bowie, as fan of music, also knew how important the illusion of "knowability" is because music is so profound in changing moods, changing lives, that we need it, and the artists who produce it, to be "real". Perhaps the teenaged David Jones felt this, as so many did, with Elvis. To quote Barthes:
To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing [...] [However] by refusing to assign a 'secret,' an ultimate meaning, to the text (and the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law...*Blackstar* is...a summation of a career? A self-conscious last word. Self-Eulogy? Finnegans Wake? A limitless text, refusing neat meaning. All of the above/None of the above...
David Bowie must have died a long, a long long time ago. Now, I understand that was the point...
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