By Matt Lowe
Legendary musician and oftentimes actor David Bowie has passed away from cancer today at age 69.
A statement issued by his publicist through his social media reads:
“David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer.
“While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family’s privacy during their time of grief.”
Bowie’s passing comes as a great surprise, after having celebrated his birthday only last week with the release of his 28th album Blackstar. Since being released just over a month ago, the title song has rapped over 6 million hits on Youtube.
In his storied chameleon career, Bowie’s recordings have ranged from psych-folk, heavy metal, glam rock, dance and electronica. Bowie himself, who studied mime under Lindsay Kemp and whose initial ambitions leant in the direction of jazz, was often viewed as less a person than a series of disparate personae.
While there are more esoteric preambles that could be made about Bowie’s gnostic fragmentation, more simply we could look to the fact he that was an actor.
For a decade or so, Bowie’s screen ambitions ran roughly parallel to his musical career, during which he delivered memorable turns in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983), Tony Scott’s The Hunger, and most famously, Jim Henson’s The Labyrinth in 1986. Among his other roles were appearances in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and Basquiat (1996.)
If his death is shocking, it is because for the length of his career he defied age. For the same reason, after a decade’s absence between 2004 and 2013, it was disarming to see him having become finally old.
He leaves behind him a rich body of work, frequently brilliant, often frustrating, utterly fascinating. While he may have struggled to regain the heights of his epochal 1970s, his failures were basically honest ones, imbued by the ambition to push forwards, by the search for mortal meaning, by being conceptually intelligent.
Bowie, who to so many for so long resembled the Nietzschean Superman about which he once sang, was, finally, merely human like the rest of us, but his presence was and is an exalted form of potential.
Bowie’s in space now. Wham bam thank you mam. Let’s dance. Magic dance. Etc.
It was a brilliant career.
