In his slim book on David Bowie — simply titled “Bowie” and published by OR Books in 2014 — the philosopher Simon Critchley admits on the first page, “no person has given me greater pleasure throughout my life than David Bowie.” In the days following the musician’s death on January 10, it was clear that this was a shared feeling. The outpouring of love, critical thought, and riveting fandom has been remarkable. In New York City, Bowie’s adopted home, there has not been such an overwhelming collective mourning over a pop star since the death of Michael Jackson.When I heard that Bowie passed away I went back to Critchley’s book. This time around I found something different in its pages — the experience of reading it felt similar to that of listening to Bowie’s music these past few days, in the wake of his death. It is still intelligent and engaging. But now it’s a memorial, emotionally moving and deeply relatable in a way it hadn’t been before. It doesn’t read like a book written by a biographer, or a historian, or a critic, but — and this can’t be stressed enough — by a fan.I spoke to Critchley, who teaches philosophy at the New School for Social Research, about Bowie’s impact, the need for a stronger discourse surrounding pop music, and how, following his death, we might finally be able to assess the musician’s large body of work.What was your reaction when Bowie passed away? Had you already been listening to “Blackstar,” his new album?It was strange — I preordered the album, so it download or uploaded, whatever the right term is, on to my phone, on January 8. I listened to it obsessively throughout Friday and Saturday. On Saturday I had to do a radio show about Bowie. Then I listened to it again on Sunday, and played it for a friend of mine on Sunday evening. Then I woke up on Monday morning with five text messages on my phone saying, “Bowie is dead.” Then I tried to drink coffee and face the day. It was a blur. Then when the fog had cleared I wrote something, and last night I just stayed in and listened to “Blackstar” again, over and over again. It seems like a very different album now. It’s the first time I’ve ever had an experience that — it wasn’t a huge surprise, I was very impressed with it — the arrangements and instrumentation. But after he’s dead you hear this is a message he’s sending. The message now seems crystal clear.The idea that Bowie was leaving people a message through the album is complicated. In the piece you wrote for the New York Times, you talk about the last song on the new album as a response to his fans’ constant demand for meaning from his work, letting them know he was keeping some things to himself. But at the same time, the conversation around Bowie since he passed away has been dominated by an almost feverish search for meaning in his final songs. A really strange thing happened this morning. My old friend Keith, who is an even bigger Bowie fan than me…You mention him in your book. Yeah. He sent me this Youtube link of an unreleased Elvis Presley song called “Black Star.” It’s the first version of a song that was later recorded as “Flaming Star,” in a movie called “Flaming Star” from 1960. But the first version is called “Black Star,” and the lyric is, “every man lives under a black star, and the black star is death.” It’s really strange that Bowie was an Elvis fan and this is another level of illusion, another level of that message.In the book, you mention first seeing Bowie during his appearance on “Tops of the Pops” in 1972, which was watched by more than a quarter of the British population. I was thinking about this in relationship to the amount of people who have come out talking about how much they love Bowie over the last day. It’s amazing, isn’t it?It’s almost overwhelming. I heard two people on the street earlier today, randomly, arguing about what their favorite Bowie album was. It was amazing just hearing this kind of thing on the street. But what I wanted to ask was if you think Bowie emerged at a time in pop culture that allowed this kind of connection? It’s unrepeatable, in the sense that there aren’t really stars in that way anymore. There are Miley Cyruses or whatever, and the hundreds and thousands of bands chugging along doing good stuff. But in this case, where everybody sat down and watched one television show — which never existed in the States; the closest would be “Soul Train,” but never as big. People watched it religiously. The next day in school after Bowie’s appearance we were talking about the way he looked, what he was, what we made of it. It was an immediate collective discussion. The extraordinary thing about Bowie was the ability he had, which was unique about him, the unique power to connect. To feel like he was speaking directly to you. In that “Top of the Pops” appearance, there is a moment when he puts his arm around [guitarist] Mick Ronson’s shoulder. Then he sings, “I had to phone someone so I picked on you,” and points quite limply at the camera and looks into it. At that point, as a 12 year old, he was talking directly to me. And there were many “mes,” there were hundreds of thousands of us. But there was that feeling of this not being a mass phenomenon, but an incredibly intimate phenomenon. He was someone who understood how we felt, and who was speaking to us and trying to connect with us. What you find with a lot of Bowie fans is that intimacy. Everybody felt they had an intimate connection with this man. And everybody knew this was fantasy; this wasn’t real. But that’s what he was able to generate through pop songs, somehow.Talking about Bowie pointing directly at “you” through the camera makes me think of his connection to Warhol, which you mention in the book. (Bowie would write a song about Warhol, and would play him in Julian Schnabel’s biopic of Jean-Michel Basquaiat.) There is a collapsing of reality and fantasy, what’s on screen and what’s happening in your living room. There’s a completely Warholian aesthetic at work. “Andy Warhol, silver screen, can’t tell them apart.” Or Warhol saying, “Before I was shot, I suspected that instead of living I’m just watching TV. Since being shot I’m certain of it.” Bowie was an artist who was completely self-conscious of the artifice of what he was doing; everything was meta-fiction from the very beginning. Yet it wasn’t cold, it wasn’t ironic, and it wasn’t detached. It was intimate, it was full of desire, and it was full of yearning and love. That’s the thing about Bowie — his ability to celebrate artifice and at the same time establish this deep emotional connection.Beyond Warhol, Bowie had a growing connection to the world of visual art. He collected works of art, he wrote about artists, he even served on the editorial board of Modern Painters. He was giving, at one point, a lot of money to art schools in London.I didn’t realize that. Liam Gillick told me that Bowie would anonymously give money to art schools. So it was actual material transactions as well. He bought a lot of art, and he painted — whatever one thinks about his paintings, it was something he did for a very long time.I think it’s fascinating that Bowie seemed like he made a conscious effort to engage in what was happening in contemporary art — and, when you think about it, film, and theater, and even fashion — beyond the vanity project or the simple reference in his work. I want to say something contradictory here. On the one hand Bowie has to be understood in a tradition of musical theater, which I think is Brechtian, and has to be understood in a tradition of contemporary art. I think Bowie should be spoken of in the same breath as Marcel Duchamp. And he worked in all these different media, and his influence is incalculable across all these domains. All of this is true. But if all of that existed, if all of that artifice existed without the songs, we wouldn’t be talking about him now. He was good at all these different things, but he was really, really good at making songs. And it’s those songs that stand up, and they form a coherent body of work for a number of reasons. But maybe it’s just because they’re really good [laughs]. They’re able to register with people in this incredibly powerful way. His fate was to be a pop star because that was the medium in which he could work in that particular historical period. If he was around now who knows what he might be.So it should always come back to David Bowie being a pop star?Yeah. This is something I complain about, that we don’t have an adequate discourse around pop music, an incredibly impoverished conceptual framework that it’s discussed in terms of. We have music journalism, which is fine, there are biographies of artists, which is fine. But what there needs to be is something that is analogous to some of the discussion of modern and contemporary art for pop artists like Bowie, to give them the respect they deserve. So I think one good thing about his death is that the work is over. I’m sure all sorts of things will be released, stuff in the back catalog. But we now have a sense of the limits of Bowie’s production. We can assess that in the way we assess the work of a great artist and not have to keep up with a running man.
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