If this seems late, it's only because I've desperately been avoiding pressing "publish" on a post that requires me to choose both the David Bowie and RIP tags. It still doesn't quite compute. [And since then, Alan Rickman too?? WTF.]
I've been listening to Blackstar on repeat this week. It's a fitting last album: defiant, haunting, and strangely beautiful. I'd seen the video for the title track about a month ago, and my first impression was that it was extremely unsettling. Although, now that we all know he was aware of his illness while making the album, it starts to make a little more sense. Death, too, is unsettling, and an artist can approach it in so many different ways. George Harrison's last album was painted with spirituality, Johnny Cash's was intimate and nostalgic, and David Bowie's was simply out of this world.
It was really only in the last two years that I really started to appreciate Bowie's vast, eclectic catalog. His music got me through my first NaNoWriMo (and also helped my main character through some pretty tough times), so I can't help but carve a special place for him in my heart. To paraphrase that one tweet (paraphrasing a tweet, really?), how lucky we are to have occupied the earth at the same time as such an incredible artist. He was a musical icon, a cultural revolutionary, and probably the only person in history who ever made a mullet look fabulous.
There are so many ways to commemorate David Bowie in a humble digital corner such as this: a playlist, a pictorial tribute, a compilation of his best collabs, and on and on. But I'll end with a single video. I read that this song became his most played on Spotify following news of his death, and welp, I'm no exception. I love the song, obviously, but I'm posting this because the video is so simple and lovely it makes me cry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXgkuM2NhYI
Farewell, David. We love you.