That other giant of mystique, Bob Dylan, had quite a body count on his 2012 album, Tempest, but, crucially, these were the passings of others. But he’s got a new girlfriend now.Ī few years back, around the time of Old Ideas, Leonard Cohen was candid about his eagerness to say all he could before his own final deadline. Around the time of his brain aneurysm a decade ago, Neil Young probably was. Mortality? Johnny Cash’s last album, American IV, in which the country singer did explicitly explore his own looming mortality, leads us to assume they are all at it. We’re at a point in the life cycle of an art form where its founders are hitting the final buffers. It would have been presumptuous, alarmist and intellectually lazy to assume he was pondering his own demise He may have been 69, but it would have been presumptuous, alarmist and intellectually lazy to assume he was pondering his own death. Although no one can truly avoid writing about themselves, Bowie was an artist in the fullest sense, one whose career was littered with aliases, performance, experiment and a hugely learned set of reference points. Mainly, I recoiled from writing about what now are obvious references to dying and finality, because I was keen to avoid cliche, and ageism, and the ghastly literalism common to more confessional singer-songwriters. Watch the video for David Bowie’s Sue (Or In a Season of Crime) I saw no reason at the time to belabour Bowie’s 70s interest in the occult. I didn’t know then about the unreleased Elvis song Black Star I hadn’t seen the Villa of Ormen Tumblr yet. Lazarus had all sorts of enticing paths to follow, other than the tomb. The biblical Lazarus, of course, didn’t actually stay dead Bowie’s musical of the same name was a sequel of sorts to The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which an alien thoroughly fails to assimilate on Earth. Of all the conspiracy theories and occultists having a field day in Bowie’s symbolism, no one has quite explained what’s going on in Sue. I assumed that Lazarus was written in character, like other Blackstar songs, not least Sue (Or in a Season of Crime), in which the ailing Sue seems to be tended, then perhaps murdered, by the protagonist. “Pennies for the boatman,” I thought, when I first saw the video for Lazarus, set in a sanatorium, in which Bowie’s eyes are wrapped in bandages, with what look like buttons on top.
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