I feel very young these days because I’m only vaguely aware of who this David Bowie fellow is.
This is very gratifying.
Young
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
I feel very young these days because I’m only vaguely aware of who this David Bowie fellow is.
This is very gratifying.
Clarissa's Blog 
Well, I must be young, too, because I don’t remember much about Bowie’s career except that he wore very weird costumes and sang the tittle song to the 1982 movie “Cat People.” 🙂
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Let’s be young together, then, amidst the Bowie craze.
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I’m only aware of his music second hand. I know “Space Oddity” from Mad Men , “Under Pressure” as the bass line inside of an inferior song which hasn’t held up over time, and The Man Who Sold The World as it was covered by Nirvana
I can’t even really term it secondhand nostalgia so it doesn’t make me feel old or young. I knew nothing really of the guy’s career. 🙂
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Same here. I know that Pet Shop Boys liked him a lot, but that’s about it.
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Funny that you remember a band that has been around for 35 years but not a guy that pushed out more hits over the same period.
In the last three years Bowie put out two albums and they charted #2 and #1 in the US.
Perhaps you have grown old and lost touch with what everybody else is listening to?
It is mainly the 27-35 year olds I know that are carrying on about Bowie’s death, oldies like me have mixed feelings about him.
Any serious thought about the matter was interrupted when I found out who Rupert Murdoch is about to marry.
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Sorry I offended your idol. I was just trying to be funny.
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Maybe growing up in the Soviet Union had something to do with it? I’m pretty sure it’s hard to avoid knowing who David Bowie was at least here in the UK, eventually. And I’m pretty sure I’m younger than you.
Or what lamestllama said.
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Of course, I know who he is. But he was relevant when I was a baby and had no interest in any but nursery music.
This fellow belongs to the 1970s and early 1980s. Everybody who got into listening to pop music after that, was into fresher things.
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I must be old, then, ’cause I’ve seen a lot about him and by him growing up. 🙂 And most of it wasn’t from my parents, but my friends. Then again, maybe that just tells you more about my friends’ parents.
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Well, you are wise beyond your years, so that might be it. 🙂
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Among other things, he was maybe the first mainstream gender bender* (at the beginning of his fame). I remember it being printed in the US that he had been named “female vocalist of the year” a time or two before trying to crack the American market. I have no idea if that was true or what, but the whole “he or she” thing was a big part of his early US image.
His more androgynous persona started to be toned down by the time he started having hits in the US though though it informed a whole bunch of mid 70s glitter rock acts (around the same time early Suzi Quatro went the other way – covering “I wanna be your man” without changing the pronouns for example).
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Who?
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He was British, talked openly about books, smart, HIMSELF, and in my eyes beautiful… so of course I knew who he was, he was a very rare bird and I admire him and his work.
That said, I don’t really get the excess of grief around someone dying at the end of their life, if that makes sense – he was in his late sixties and serious ill, he was still creating and parenting, it’s sad, but he lived one heck of a life, and he wasn’t someone I knew in person. So the sadness is for the generalities – for a 15 year old losing a parent, for the possible future work that won’t happen, for the momento mori… and perhaps a LITTLE bit because it reminds me I’m not the teenager whose second record purchase was ‘Let’s Dance’ any more, or the person who drove across half of Europe playing his Greatest Hits on repeat because it was the only disc in the car the research team would all agree to listen to!
Grief is about the living, for the fact they’ll now have to live without the person who died being physically present, for the pain of facing the realities death brings with it and the possibilities it closes off – and when it’s for a celebrity I think it’s pretty psychologically interesting.
It was definitely interesting to realise how many of my colleagues were listening to Bowie this week when I was wandering around our building (it’s a no-student week so people have their music on more). Not as bad as when Freddie Mercury died and I think every lab on campus at my uni at the time was playing Queen tapes!
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