Our Favourite Extraterrestrial
If you’re a fan of David Bowie like myself, this is a particularly poignant time of year for you. A few days ago, on January 8th, it was his birthday. He would have been 74 years old, a reminder that he was taken from us much sooner than the world would have allowed if it were up to us. In all honesty, our world could use a little more Bowie in it right now.
Today, January 10th, it’s the fifth anniversary of his passing. It was cancer of the liver that took him, and his final years were spent as far away from the public eye as possible, so much so that information about his illness was only made public after the news of his death broke.
David Bowie is an inspiration to the masses for many reasons. Sure, he was a rock legend. Songs such as “Ziggy Stardust," “Diamond Dogs," "Heroes," "Changes," “Suffragette City," and “Let’s Dance” will all be remembered as undying anthems in the pantheon of rock and roll history. More importantly, though, he was an inspiration to an entire generation of gay, lesbian, and transgender people looking to find their voice in the world. To queer kids in every corner of the globe who grew up listening and watching him perform, David Bowie did more than provide a voice. David Bowie was a liberator.
To me, he was an addictively enigmatic soul from the moment I discovered him. I remember the first time I ever heard a Bowie song. I must have been ten or eleven years old. It was “Space Oddity.” For anyone, let alone a child, that’s a hell of an introduction to a new artist with a massive red lightning bolt draped across his face. I must have listened to that song on repeat fifty times that day. It was so different. I’d never heard a rock song like that before. It made me want to learn more about this mysterious figure called Bowie and expand what I thought I knew about rock music, much like Major Tom sought to explore the outer reaches of space.
Maybe what I loved most about David, though, was his ardent advocacy for the disenfranchised. My understanding of his activism came later in life, but for me, it peeled back yet another layer of the Bowie mystique. Behind Ziggy Stardust was a man from Brixton, David, who saw injustices all around him and wanted to use his moment of fame to bring them to light. I remember seeing a video of an interview he did with MTV in 1983. He brings up criticisms that he has of the network’s reluctance to include black artists on their platform and presses the interviewer for answers. These are discussions we are still having today in our society and within the music industry, but Bowie was using his voice decades ago to support underrepresented artists who were being overlooked due to systemic racism.
Then there is the famous clip from his interview in 1999 with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman. In another example of how forward-thinking Bowie was, he describes the impact he believed the internet would have on every aspect of our lives in the future. And as if he’d just hopped out of his time machine and into the offices of the BBC, he was frighteningly bang on.
In his death, much like in his life, he surprised us. Even many of his fellow musicians that he worked on his final album with didn’t know he was sick until he’d left us. That was his method, though. He was atypical, refusing to conform. He possessed a tenacious level of progressive awareness, which perhaps explains why he seemed to always be years ahead of everyone else. He was cutting-edge, like a futuristic piece of finely tuned alien machinery that fortuitously plummeted into our laps from outer space. There really isn’t a box you can put him in, because he wasn’t made to be kept in a box in the first place. He was just Bowie.