{"id":44079,"date":"2016-01-11T15:22:44","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T15:22:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/?p=44079"},"modified":"2018-05-07T08:38:49","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T08:38:49","slug":"bowie-saved-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/bowie-saved-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Bowie Saved Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

The teenager in the bedroom, listening to records, maybe crying, maybe drunk, ears stinging from the shouts of parents and teachers, dreaming of a girl or a boy, hoping to someday escape\u2014has anyone, ever, in the history of music or art, ever spoken as urgently or beautifully or intelligently or life-savingly to him or her as David Bowie?<\/p>\n

\u201cGive me your hands, \u2019cause you\u2019re wonderful,\u201d Bowie insists at the magnificent ending of Ziggy Stardust<\/i> (the quiet opening of the last song, \u201cRock \u2019n\u2019 Roll Suicide,\u201d that leads to the deafening, insistent crescendo, strings and horns over raw acoustic guitar). \u201cIf the homework brings you down\/Then we\u2019ll throw it on the fire and take the car downtown,\u201d he reassured me slyly on Hunky Dory<\/i>, where he also sang about Warhol and Dylan. I\u2019m moved to tears as I remember my first cup of black coffee, my first cigarette, my last cigarette, my life described as a road that began in a small room with posters and parents outside and music that saved me from despair, from being alone, and that music was Bowie\u2019s. I \u201cran away from home\u201d in high school after smashing some crockery and showed up at a girl\u2019s house and cried and we listened to Bowie while my father prowled the New York streets on a bicycle asking doormen if they\u2019d seen me\u2014that time it was Aladdin Sane<\/i>; Robert Christgau wrote, \u201cThis music can help you through the harshest realities,\u201d and he was right.<\/p>\n

I came late to Bowie\u2019s career, or, it seemed like that at the time: Let\u2019s Dance<\/i>, those baffling songs with the horns and gunshot-drums of the 1980s, the angular pastel graphics from the Reagan years; the suits and suspenders and bleached hair that were mercilessly ridiculed in Velvet Goldmine<\/i>, decades later, the beautiful, studied mindlessness of that record (and the Cat People<\/i> song that, it turned out, Tarantino remembered too, superimposing it over his WWII fantasy, which, I think, Bowie probably liked) that dismayed his long-time fans and ignited our bloodstreams on MTV, and the Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar lines\u2014so different from the Jackson-Pollack slashing guitar of Robert Fripp (on Scary Monsters<\/i>), whose solos give you paper-cuts on your heart. \u201cBlue Jean,\u201d later, in college, and Tin Machine and the remaining two decades of crazy brilliance that we didn\u2019t know lay in wait; the Somalian supermodel wife, the movie roles (he has a knife fight with Carl Perkins in John Landis\u2019 forgotten, charming Into the Night<\/i> in 1982). Discovering the older records, learning from Bowie about Jean Genet (the \u201cJean Genie\u201d) and William Burroughs and Orwell, about love and death and strangeness and the certainty of not being alone even when it seemed irrefutable that nobody understood you at all and nobody ever would.<\/p>\n

Throughout all of it there\u2019s the incredible artistry, that operatic, sandy, infinitely wise and sensitive voice on track after track, a voice that could move like Olivier\u2019s or Pavarotti\u2019s and whisper like Lou Reed (whom he produced, and wrote for, and loved as a brother) or like Leonard Cohen, but which was always unmistakable; always his. The young lovers collide by chance, reach for each other, nearly blow it all, but are saved by the strength of their minds and their hearts. \u201cWe\u2019re absolute beginners, but we\u2019re absolutely sane,\u201d Bowie sang, through the voice of another of his fragile, lost, damaged but ultimately tough-as-nails teenagers. In his greatest song, a man and a woman share a kiss beneath the shadow of the Berlin wall: \u201cthe shade” is “on the other side,\u201d but they can be heroes just for one day.<\/p>\n

Berlin was where Bowie found his deepest inspiration, his strongest muse, retreating there in the miasma of the late seventies, bringing Brian Eno with him in his escape from the white cloud of cocaine he\u2019d become mired in during his Los Angeles years, the years he made records like Diamond Dogs<\/i> that he didn\u2019t even remember writing or recording. Bruegel went to Italy and made four paintings that changed the course of Western art; Bowie made three records in Berlin (and a fourth, two years ago) that changed rock\u2019n\u2019roll. That constant movement forward, all those \u201cChanges,\u201d that perpetual dissatisfaction that\u2019s the secret to art, was Bowie\u2019s great strength (I\u2019m sure the Internet is filled with the word \u201cchameleon\u201d this sad morning, as well as clever wordplay about \u201cfalling to Earth\u201d). But it was his endurance, his fierce refusal to abandon the vital essence of his music, his perpetual understanding of the fundamental youthful spirit of rock\u2019n\u2019roll as he aged, that makes him timeless, that makes him immortal. In Bowie\u2019s hands, rock\u2019n\u2019roll became sublime, elevated among the highest arts; I am alive, I am quite sure, because of his music and the despair he saved me from in those years, and somewhere right now an angry teenager is listening to Bowie and the pain is receding. (\u201cBecause you\u2019re young,\u201d Bowie sang in 1980, \u201cyou\u2019ll meet a stranger some night.\u201d) May his voice live on, for years and decades to come; may his records be blasted from bedroom speakers wherever or whenever a lonely soul needs comforting, whenever or wherever a strange boy or girl needs to feel, not ashamed, but proud and defiant in the face of life\u2019s pain. We won\u2019t see his like again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"