Lazarus let Bowie present himself in one of his favorite outfits - Thomas Newton, the protagonist of The Man Who Fell to Earth - without being present. Hold it next to Blackstar: two bottles, two messages, written at roughly the same time. A few weeks ago, we got the cast recording of Lazarus, the musical Bowie co-wrote, which started a run at the New York Theatre Workshop in December of 2015 that ended a week after his death in January of 2016. Even if fear and dread have blanketed us, we can still hear these songs.īowie knew he was going, and kept going. David Bowie, Nick Cave, and Leonard Cohen faced death and found different versions of grace. In a year of medium, small, and large deaths, three artists gave us reliable guidance. This is a good time to admit that, sometimes, the spirits in our art are stubbornly practical.
What we have now is the Judas bullet of emotional defeat, a sense that we can no longer even predict the magnitude or method of our next predation, of what we are capable of doing to ourselves and to our neighbors. Maybe it’s that the fear common to the twentieth century hasn’t been replaced it’s merged with dread, fear’s distilled essence. Look back and you’ll find the same bastards in different hats, the same structures under old paint. What’s made 2016 a different order of shitty? Imbalance, hidden wars, and open ignorance are known knowns.
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