The Hopeless Longing of David Bowie

Fragment from a book about a great musician

As part of the joint publishing program of the publishing house Ad Marginem and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the book “Bowie” translated by Tatyana Lukonina will soon be published - a short guide to the songs of the musician who died last year, written by the English philosopher and publicist Simon Critchley, author of “The Book of the Dead” philosophers”, “Faith of non-believers” and other works. Gorky publishes an excerpt from it.

Hopeless languor

Bowie's music is often said to have a sense of isolation, insularity, solipsistic or even autistic (as if we know what autistic music is). This point of view can be found in Hugo Wilken's nice little book about the Low album. This is most clearly expressed in “Sound and Vision”, where we again encounter several variations of “nothing”:

Pale blinds drawn all day
Nothing to do, nothing to say.

(The pale curtains are drawn all day.
Nothing to do, nothing to say.)

This electric blue mood continues in the excellently titled “Always Crashing in the Same Car.” This probably refers to a real-life disaster: Bowie crashed into a hotel garage in Switzerland. But most of all, the song is perceived as a metaphor for the repeated manifestations of destructive addictive behavior.

I'm not suggesting that this view is wrong: there is a deep sense of alienation in Bowie's work from the very beginning. But it misses the desperate desire for love that I find more characteristic of Bowie's work. It also ignores the fact that "Always Crashing in the Same Car" is followed by a song called "Be My Wife" (which we should understand not as an ironic dedication to a "happy" marriage to Angie Bowie). The beginning of the song is about loneliness: “Sometimes you feel so lonely.” But the chorus voices a desire:

Please be mine
Share my life
Stay with me
Be my wife.

(Please be mine
Share this life with me,
Stay with me
Be my wife.)

Just because Bowie's music begins with loneliness does not mean it advocates alienation. On the contrary, it is a desperate attempt to overcome it and find a soul mate. In other words, Bowie's music is largely defined by a sense of hopeless longing .

Bowie sings about love. But often phrases about love are accompanied by a question mark, they are riddled with doubts or overshadowed by regret. Even when “Station to Station” completely changes tempo around the fifth minute, and Bowie himself completely immerses himself in the magic of Aleister Crowley and the esotericism of the Kabbalah, he still hastily asks the question: “Who will connect with me in love?” me with love? And these are not the side effects of cocaine: “I think it’s love.”

“Heroes” is a ballad about the transience of love, about the need to steal time, at least for a day. And all this against the backdrop of pain and addiction (“And I, I will drink all the time”). This is a song of hopeless longing for love with the full knowledge that joy is short-lived, and we are nothing, and nothing will help us. "Let's Dance" isn't just a funky, funky track with catchy Chic-style sparse bass and drums. It's a hazy song of extreme desperation about the same two lovers Bowie sings about in "Heroes." “Let's dance,” Bowie sings, “for fear tonight is all.”

The desire for love is so strong that it can become a demand, even a threat, as in “Blackout” (and again note the careful inclusion of “nothing”):

If you don't stay tonight
I will take that train tonight
I've nothing to lose
Nothing to gain
I'll kiss you in the rain
Kiss you in the rain.

(If you don't stay today,
I'll take that train.
I have nothing [lit. "nothing"] to lose
Nothing to achieve
I'll kiss you in the rain
I'll kiss you in the rain.)

The urge to love brings to mind an impressive scene of a kiss in the rain (like a kiss at the Berlin Wall), followed by a desperate plea: “Take me to the doctor.”

In the song "5:15 The Angels Have Gone" from Heathen, Bowie again turns to the motif of a train journey to add drama to the scene of the departure of a man experiencing an unhappy love. The polyphonic chorus in this sentimental song is truly poignant:

We never talk anymore
Forever I will adore you

(We don't talk anymore.
And I will adore you forever.)

Here love is more elegiac, it is overcome by the givenness of absence, the fact that the past is unique, it is gone forever. He's gone. That's what "Where Are We Now?" is about, perhaps written as Bowie's eulogy to his devoted mid-1970s assistant and one-time lover Corinne "Coco" Schwab. But love here is tied to a specific place and time - Berlin in the late 1970s. I'm sure Bowie misses that time one way or another and would like to be twenty-nine again, go to Berlin with Iggy, go to endless drag clubs, smoke cigarettes non-stop, drink constantly and record music all night long. Sounds great. But this is not just wallowing in the past. This is a meeting with memories that peel our skin alive, making us wonder: really, where are we now?

The closest we come to pure nostalgia for Bowie is his memories of England, particularly the London of his childhood and youth, the London of the 1950s. 1986's Absolute Beginners, named after the book by Colin MacInnes, is about this period, and it is perhaps Bowie's best from the second half of the 1980s. Another love song:

But if my love is your love
We're certain to succeed.

(But if my love is your love,
We will definitely succeed.)

But there is also a love of place, a frantic longing for England, which Bowie looks at not without partiality, seeing it in decline and ruin, as in the location shooting of an abandoned and neglected city in Nicolas Roeg’s wonderful film “Performance” (1970). In an interview with Playboy magazine in 1976, Bowie, after several years away from England, said that Britain needed a fascist leader, and even suggested that he would make an excellent prime minister. Bowie later greatly regretted these statements, especially after the emergence of such an authoritarian leader as Margaret Thatcher, who did not particularly like Bowie. But Bowie understood fascism as nationalism, and this is an ambiguous attitude, it is discussed more indignantly than taken seriously. I think Bowie's greatest display of chauvinism was the Alexander McQueen Union Jack coat he wore on the cover of Earthling, gazing out over the glorious English meadows.

How can we live with memories like those in “5:15 The Angels Have Gone” without becoming hostage to the past, crushed by regret, or simply confused? This is the pathos of “Survive,” one of Bowie’s most beautifully simple songs. Addressing someone identified only as “naked eyes,” Bowie sings, “I should have kept you, I should have tried,” and concludes the first and second verses with the words “I miss you […] I loved you.” A clear realization comes: “Who said time is on my side? / In this life I have ears, eyes and nothing else / Who said time is on my side? / I've got ears and eyes and nothing in my life."

But this “nothing” is followed by an insistent statement: “I will bear your defenseless gaze,” and then: “You are a big mistake that I did not make.”

You say you'll leave me

Bowie's music is about hopeless longing. Ultimately, it is an inescapable longing for love. His longing touches ours, revealing a bittersweet melancholy—perhaps a painful and inescapable desire to be exiled. To be clear, I will say - and, if you think about it, this is almost on the verge of a miracle - that this yearning is caused simply by the sound of music and words perceived by our body. Bowie's lyrics, especially the early ones, have a narrative dynamics and closure, like the story of the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust. But after Bowie began using the cut-up method, his lyrics became much more fragmented, imagist and modernist. Bowie speaks in synecdoches, through the part he communicates about the whole, as well as about the holes in this whole.

Cutting opens up a new way of seeing. Plus, they speed things up. This method contributed to Bowie's incredible productivity in the 1970s. It makes it possible to aesthetically grasp the speed of life and its changes, its amnesia, random coincidences, creative deviations and false steps. The lyrics of “Low” (410 words on the album) and “Heroes” break with narrative, with accessibility and intelligibility. The less words say and the less obvious their meaning, the more they can express. Bowie's most powerful lyrics are his least clear. The gaps are filled with our imagination and yearning.

This technique of “indirect” construction of texts - imagistic, as in Ezra Pound - is honed by Bowie and gains strength in his later works, he uses it more and more skillfully. For example, in the song “Heathen (The Rays)” we are presented with a seemingly simple and random set of city views:

Steel on the skyline

Sky made of glass.

(Steel on the horizon,

Sky made of glass.)

Immediately after this there are several vague statements:

Waiting for someone

Looking for something

(I'm waiting for someone,

I'm looking for something.)

Then the questions arise:

Is there no reason?

Have I stayed too long?

(Maybe there is no reason?

Maybe I've been here too long?)

And then suddenly we come to an explosive climax. Bowie implores with magnificent vibrato:

You say you'll leave me

(You say you'll leave me!)

And then he returns to images filled with disappointment and a sense of loss:

And when the sun is low

And the rays high

I can see it now

I can feel it die.

(And when the sun goes down,

And the rays rise high,

Now I see it

I feel it dying).

There is perhaps an irony in Bowie's longing for love: when he does find love, the results are not the most impressive, for example - "Wedding" with "Black Tie / White Noise", which was born as wedding music for their wedding with Iman Abdulmajid in 1992. On “Reality,” he sings, “I’m the happiest, not the loneliest,” although the melancholy funeral tune that accompanies his singing creates a completely different impression. I'm honestly very glad that Bowie is happy. But, I’ll tell you a secret, I prefer the music he made in his most miserable days.

Put an end to reality

What is David Bowie's reality? I first of all remember the song of the same name from “Reality” (2003). What can you say about her? It's a very loud song, with Earl Slick's brilliant guitar work and the insistent, almost military staccato drumming of "Hello Spaceboy", but somehow it's even more claustrophobic and tense. At the beginning we meet the memory of a casual sexual encounter with a “sad young lady, which ended with her “sucking me / going down on me.” In the chorus there is a quick transition to seemingly autobiographical images:

I built a wall of sound to separate us

I hid among the junk of wretched highs

I sped from planet X to planet alpha

Struggling for reality.

(I built a wall of sound to separate us

I hid in a trash bin of crappy highs

I raced from Planet X to Planet Alpha

Fighting for reality.)

While one must be careful in identifying characters in Bowie's songs with himself, the wall of sound is both a reference to Phil Spector and an allusion to the wall of illusion that Bowie erected around himself in the early 1970s with the creation of Ziggy. He hid behind this wall, consuming cocaine in huge quantities. The continuous movement from Planet X to Planet Alpha, from "Space Oddity" to "Starman", from "Starman" to "Ashes to Ashes" is presented as a struggle for reality, and then a bitter, sarcastic mockery follows - a cold loud laugh is heard: "HA “HA-HA-HA.” This is what Samuel Beckett in Watt called “risus purus” - pure laughter, laughter that laughs at laughter, “a sign of recognition of the most exquisite joke, in a word, laughter that laughs - attention - at what is unhappy.”

The following lines of “Reality” combine reflections on aging and fading powers (“And now my sight is failing in this twilight”) with a reference to Jacques Brel’s ballad “My Death,” which Bowie performed regularly at concerts starting in 1972 (“Now my death is more than just a sad song”). But these considerations are perfectly diluted and shaded by the refrain “Da da da da da da da da da” sung twice without expression. What can we say about reality? "Ha ha"? Or maybe "Dada"? The choice is yours.

Amid the apparent amnesia, the song's themes converge in the next chorus:

I still don't remember how this happened

I still don't get the wherefores and the whys

I look for sense but I get next to nothing

Hey boy, welcome to reality!

Ha ha ha ha.

(I still don't remember how it happened,

I still don't understand why and how,

I search for meaning, but find almost nothing [lit. - “I’m getting closer to nothing”].

Hey buddy, welcome to reality!

Ha-ha-ha-ha.)

The struggle for reality—that’s how Bowie calls his creative path—unfolds before the creator. There is no underlying reality that gives meaning to this world. The more we fight, the closer we get to nothingness . Meaning dissolves into meaninglessness. In a very good article in a 2003 issue of Sound on Sound, Bowie calls reality "abstraction":

It seems to me that reality has become an abstraction for many over the past 20 years. Statements that we thought were true just seemed to evaporate, it was as if we had become post-philosophical in our thinking. There's nothing else to rely on. There is no knowledge, only interpretation of the facts that we are inundated with daily. It’s as if no one needs knowledge anymore, and we seem to be drifting on the waves. There is nothing left to hold on to, and the political situation, of course, is pushing our boat even further into the open sea.

So Bowie declares that we have apparently arrived at a post-philosophical state. Returning to Warhol's words about life turned into television: reality has become an illusion. Andy Warhol, blue screen - there's no way to tell them apart. We are constantly under pressure from the illusory reality of the media, social networks and other nonsense, because of which the walls of our prison are becoming higher and higher, and it seems that access to some true reality is hidden from us. All we can do is set one illusion against another, move from their fiction to ours, and desperately hold on to the nothingness that Bowie sang about in “After All.”

There's an interesting moment towards the end of "Reality" where the slightly oppressive, almost reckless, deafening rock sound suddenly fades away, leaving Bowie at a loss with just an acoustic guitar, like at the beginning of "Space Oddity". Returning to the beginning, Bowie comes to agnostic conclusions:

I've been right and I've been wrong

Now I'm back where I started from

I never looked over reality's shoulder

(I was right and I was wrong,

Now I'm back where I started.

I've never looked over my shoulder to reality.)

If Socrates was called the wisest man in Greece because he declared that he knew nothing, then Bowie's position on reality can be considered not so much post-philosophical as post-scientific, emerging after the collapse of the positivist concept of science. It would be hasty to identify philosophy with the pursuit of knowledge. It is more correct to understand it as the love of wisdom. Philosophy is that love of wisdom that exists before and after science.

In the press release for "Reality", Bowie wrote:

The basis [of reality] is the pervasive influence of contingencies rather than clearly structured absolutes.

From the mid-1970s, the assertion of randomness became Bowie's modus operandi when writing and recording songs. Eno's concept of "planned accidents" (which was also the album's original title, Lodger) was also influential. This largely describes Bowie’s reality, and perhaps ours too. The collapse of absolutes, the death of God - whatever it is called, there is no need to meet this phenomenon with either pessimistic nihilism or the creation of a new deity, superman or homo superior . It simply takes us back to the barbarism of the last century, which, unfortunately, is unlikely to disappear. If we replace ourselves with a dead God, we become savages, unchrists, and all that remains are “wiseguys and drums, beating madly and pagan.”