Technically, of course, he has already risen from the dead once. After all, open heart surgery (2004) shuts down your heart. Before, you were then dead. Now you come back from anaesthesia with a new life. Not surprising, then, that 69-year-old pop culture phenomenon David Bowie hangs his current life on Lazarus: a musical theatre piece, a song, named after the biblical wanderer raised from the dead by Jesus. A trick that usually only works once. Something the elderly singer takes note of on the album Blackstar. An album that has already been hailed by the gathered world press as the best thing that could happen to pop music.
There are those who think Bowie gets too much attention. Even here at Culture Press. I won't deny that I am a 'fan' of the man. But the story of David Bowie's career is about more than whether you are a fan or not, and is certainly not about which album, which song, which film you think is the best. Or Blackstar better than Scary Monsters? I think so, but that doesn't really matter at all. What does matter is how Bowie teaches us to grow old gracefully. Not really a 'poppy' thing, but that's actually also the fun part.
As eighteen-year-olds, we used to talk among friends about what it would be like if Bowie lived to be as old as Frank Sinatra looked at the time. I feared we would then find Bowie as a crooner back in a Las Vegas casino, unable to belt out the high notes in 'Heroes', but the room full of drunken would-be millionaires no longer cared. It was the time when 'Celine Dion' became established as a swear word.
When you are young you mirror getting older by what you see other people getting old. In the 1970s and 1980s, we took terrible drugs to avoid growing old. Live fast, die young, with the help of an overdose of one thing or another: enough guarantee not to be caught in a trench coat behind a walker in 40 years' time. We were convinced then that a person has only a limited amount of creative energy. After you turn 35, it's pretty much exhausted. Then all that is left is slow ruminating, continuing to play that one hit song, writing that one book over and over again. After 50, you can't think of anything, we thought. Just as we then thought that after meno- and possibly penopause, it was over and done with physical pleasures.
Many pop stars fit that image perfectly. They carry on, but don't ask how. Sour old men they often are, and even though it is remarkably the very women like Patty Smith and Debbie Harry who manage to maintain an inner youth, they haven't really been innovative for a while.
Bowie has already shattered that image of the stagnant senior with his penultimate album. With Blackstar he adds. What turns out? Age releases a whole new kind of creative energy. An energy not driven by a sacred need or a sublimated sexual drive to become the alpha male or female of the local dung heap. The 69-year-old survivor's creative energy is no longer accountable to anything. It can flow freely. We can all take an example from that.
The only driving force behind that energy is the awareness that you are living on borrowed time. Especially if you have already been dead once. That awareness is the great power of Blackstar, but also the great doom that makes the album so haunting, especially in the last two songs. Just pick up the lyrics.
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