David Bowie Is Alive and Well
When the Flaming Lips released a song called “Is David Bowie Dying?” in 2011, they seemed to be highlighting what was in the back of everybody’s mind. Ever since suffering a heart attack onstage in Germany in 2004, David Bowie has remained more elusive than Thomas Pynchon, cropping up only for the occasional fashion show photo or Arcade Fire concert. No tours, no new songs, no albums, no interviews. For a while he seemed to vanish into thin air. Where was he? Was he ok? Was David Bowie dying? Until very recently, the question seemed appropriate.
The Next Day, his first album of new material since 2003, finds Bowie alive and as relevant as ever. “Here I am, not quite dying,” he chants in the title track, the first of the album, picking away at the inevitability of his own mortality, and the public’s fascination with it. The Next Day is deeply rooted in Bowie’s own eclectic past, from the bizarrely re-appropriated Heroes cover to “Where Are We Now?”, a deeply moving “Five Years”-esque ballad that finds the elder statesman looking back whimsically on his mid-70s Berlin heyday. “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” doesn’t hit the same emotional high-water mark, but it works as a flashy radio single, and the Lynchian video finds Bowie and actress Tilda Swinton being stocked by celebrity vampires that look eerily familiar to Ziggy Stardust. For her part, Tilda Swinton looks like The Man Who Fell to Earth, and by the end it’s hard to tell exactly who’s who.
The Next Day has the air of a final statement, but maybe that’s because many of us had already written him off as long gone, retired, dead. In the last few weeks plenty of comparisons have been made to Bob Dylan, whose late-career resurgence seems to have no end. In addition to a new album, there’s also “David Bowie Is…“, an upcoming exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum that will run from March through August. But unlike Dylan, Bowie has no plans to tour, give interviews, or otherwise open himself up to the public. Maybe having a heart attack on stage has something to do with it, but either way it’s refreshing to see a guy who’s spent most of his life endlessly toying with the notion of celebrity identity seems content to step back from the limelight and let his work stand on its own this time around.
