It’s Been a Year Without Bowie, and Planet Earth Is Still Blue
He was the man who scarred the world by leaving it behind without so much as five days’ notice, let alone the five years we might all have agreed was appropriate. A year after David Bowie’s passing, for fans, to quote another song from Ziggy Stardust, “It ain’t easy.”
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But this week, as both Bowie’s 70th birthday (Jan. 8) and the one-year anniversary of his tragic death (Jan. 10) usher in a whole new wave of modern love for the man, there has been legitimate cause for celebration. First came the new BBC2 documentary David Bowie: The Last Five Years, and then, out of nowhere, dropped the posthumous EP No Plan (featuring three of Bowie’s final recordings — “No Plan,” “Killing a Little Time,” and “When I Met You”) plus a mysterious new music video for the title track.
Photos: David Bowie Through the Years
But even though there’s comfort food to be had in No Plan, it’s the looming specter of Bowie’s full-length swan song, Blackstar (released last year on Bowie’s 69th birthday), that drew fans in all year long, in all its dark mystery and majesty. A few days into 2017, Spin ran a piece on all the Easter eggs fans continue to find in the album artwork, as if finding hidden clues in a CD booklet might help us make better sense of a death that seemed all too sudden. The idea that Bowie planned for Blackstar to be his farewell statement is shot down in David Bowie: The Last Five Years, which revealed that Bowie didn’t learn his condition was terminal until three months before his death — after he’d completed Blackstar, and while he was in the middle of shooting the “Lazarus” video, the bedridden motifs of which were completely coincidental, according to the director.
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In the end, the one-year anniversary of Blackstar was a landmark just as worthy of commemoration as the year mark of his death, two days later, on Jan. 10. It was brooding, ambitious, uncommercial, sprawling, deeply musical, deeply mysterious, and, for all its coolly cryptic qualities, unmistakably the stuff of honest flesh and blood. Here was someone working at the absolute peak of his powers in his late 60s, an honorific you’d be hard pressed to place on just about any other rock artist, with the possible exceptions of Leonard Cohen (gulp) or Bob Dylan.
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Thank your lucky stars, so to speak, that we had that two-day window between Blackstar’s release and Bowie’s death, so that we could be sure we knew it was a landmark work in his five-decade career before there was any posthumous sentimental attachment to tar our subjectivity, and before we got bogged down in the premonitory questions of “What did he know and when did he know it?” The great thing about Blackstar (which came in at No. 1 on Yahoo Music’s top 10 list for 2016) is that it didn’t have to be a death knell to be the bomb.
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And Blackstar wasn’t the only mind-bogglingly brilliant Bowie release of the past year. Retrospectively, there was Who Can I Be Now? 1974-1976, a multidisc boxed set that covered Bowie shape-shifting relentlessly in just a three-year period, from the last vestiges of Stardust-ian glam on Diamond Dogs to becoming an unexpectedly warm, Don Cornelius-approved soul man on Young Americans to the icier emerging Kraut-rocker of Station to Station. It was the second of a series of chronological boxes that was already in motion well ahead of Bowie’s illness, but there could be no more trenchant testament to just how alive he was — alive enough to be three different men, almost at once — than this particular collection. Its greatness could make you weep for 2016 in more ways than one.
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And then, there were the many tributes, a parade of musicians continually reviving Bowie’s ’70s classics. Even the New Year’s Eve that just passed seemed like Bowie Anniversary’s Eve. In Sydney, the first time zone to ring in 2017, the city shot off star-shaped fireworks to the tune of “Space Oddity.” Back in the States, there were homages from coast to coast. As midnight beckoned in New York, Gov’t Mule covered “All the Young Dudes” at the Beacon; in San Francisco, Sleater-Kinney played “Rebel Rebel” to usher out a year without Ziggy; on a big outdoor stage in Nashville, Tenn., Keith Urban was joined by guest vocalist Nicole Kidman for “Heroes.” Our lamenting this hero is not just for one day … or even one year.
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Of course, against the dazzle that was Bowie himself, interpretations could only come up paler than the Thin White Duke himself. Yet, if you were a fan, you welcomed every one, inspired, tacky, or reverentially somewhere in-between. A rundown of some of the most memorable tributes…
Most polarizing: Lady Gaga at the Grammys
“She’s a shape-shifter too,” the thinking obviously went when this booking went down. But some fans wanted her to hold one of Bowie’s shapes for just one minute, rather than take a Glam Stars on 45 approach to saluting every phase of his career in the short window a telecast allowed. Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones, was not impressed. Others found heart enough in her homage. At least when it came to the face paint, we could all agree she wore it well.
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Most unusual setting: Keith Urban, Dierks Bentley, and Little Big Town at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium
One of the few things Bowie never remotely morphed into over his five decades in show business was an Americana artist. But that didn’t stop three of country’s biggest stars from joining together for “Heroes” during an ACM Honors awards telecast from Music City in August.
Best short-form recorded homage: Trey Songz’s ‘Life on Mars?’
The R&B star recorded this favorite in simple piano ballad mode as a one-off that appeared on the soundtrack for Martin Scorsese’s HBO series Vinyl, a wholly unexpected marriage of the interstellar and inter-genre.
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Best longer-form recorded homage: Amanda Palmer
The similarly avant-leaning singer solicited a string quartet to cut an entire EP’s worth of Bowie material for Strung Out in Heaven. The digital release (later issued on vinyl for Black Friday Record Store Day) was rush-released in February, but not so much so that Palmer didn’t take time to learn and record the title track of Blackstar alongside the classics.
Best battle of the tribute bands: Holy Holy vs. Celebrating David Bowie
Two separate groups of former Bowie sidemen and collaborators emerged. Last spring, it was Holy Holy, featuring longtime producer Tony Visconti and Woody Woodmansey, the original drummer from the Spiders From Mars, concentrating only on early-’70s material. Their tour had been in the works before the death, since Visconti figured that Bowie himself would never tour any of this material again, and somebody ought to. Late in the year came an announcement for a separate minitour titled “Celebrating David Bowie,” which will reach New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, and Tokyo in early 2017 with a lineup that includes Earl Slick, Adrian Belew, Gail Ann Dorsey, Mike Garson, and other familiar names from Bowie’s liner notes and tour programs.
Related: David Bowie Producer Tony Visconti Recalls ‘Holy’ Career Highlights
Most un-funereal funeral tribute: Arcade Fire in New Orleans
Not very many bands or cities thought of basically throwing a parade in Bowie’s honor. But Arcade Fire hooked up with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band to lead a second line through the streets of the French Quarter.
Biggest cluster: the Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall shows
These tributes were actually conceived before the star’s death, but, naturally, more stars signed on once the shows became a Mecca for Bowie grievers. Michael Stipe gave a national audience a taste of what New Yorkers got by “The Man Who Sold the World” on The Tonight Show. Others taking part in NYC included the Pixies, Mumford & Sons, Blondie, Rickie Lee Jones, Ann Wilson, Perry Farrell … and, least reverentially, the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne singing “Life on Mars?” while riding on the shoulders of someone in a Chewbacca costume. In a dispute over equipment-sharing, the Roots pulled out of these shows, but went on to do their own tribute at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in tandem with David Byrne and Kimbra.
The one-offs
Bruce Springsteen broke with the River theme of his tour to sing “Rebel Rebel” on opening night, and Madonna performed the same song in Houston two days after Bowie’s death. Lorde performed “Life on Mars?” at the Brit Awards. Sinead O’Connor stunned with both “Life on Mars?” and “Sorrow” at the Metro in Chicago. Beck was joined by the remnants of Nirvana to cover Kurt Cobain’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” at Clive Davis’s annual Grammy gala, where Adam Lambert also joined fun.’s Jack Antonoff to cover “Let’s Dance.” The Red Hot Chili Peppers covered “Cracked Actor” and “Starman” in concert. Shooter Jennings and Marilyn Manson collaborated on a recording of “Cat People.” Coldplay’s Chris Martin explored “Life on Mars?” on late-night TV with an assist from Jimmy Fallon (obviously Martin wasn’t bitter that Bowie had once denied Coldplay’s collaboration request.) Five American Idol winners performed a Bowie medley on the Idol series finale. Duran Duran mashed up their own 1981 hit “Planet Earth” with 1969’s “Space Oddity” while on tour. Sharon Needles, the winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 4, also covered “Space Oddity” in her drag revues. The Weeknd named his latest album Starboy in honor of Bowie. Actual Bowie pal Iggy Pop was not to be left out, singing “The Jean Genie” and “Tonight” with Patti Smith at a Tibet House benefit and playing his favorite songs on a two-hour BBC6 radio show. And there were two celebrated solo keyboard renditions of “Life on Mars?” that tickled the web — one by the organist at St. Albans Cathedral, and another solo piano rendition Yes’s Rick Wakeman, who’d laid down the ivory on Bowie’s original recording.
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Most inevitable visual appropriation: Apple’s Aladdin Sane emoji
Late last year came news that the iOS 10.2 update would allow you to send your friends a little face with the zigzag face paint lifted from Bowie’s most iconic album cover.
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Weirdest musical appropriation: Moana
You could hear Bowie’s imprint, if you opened your ears wide enough, in the Disney movie that closed out the year, despite his distinct lack of Hawaiian influence or impact over the years. As a piece of ’70s-style Britpop that is the outlier of the score, the song “Shiny” makes its outsize crab into a character who seems to have come from across the Atlantic Ocean, not deep under the Pacific. The singer who voiced the crab confirmed that the distinctly British inflections were intended by composer Lin-Manuel Miranda as a nod to Bowie.
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As much fun as most of these homages might have been, though, there was a reductive quality to trying to fit Bowie into the same affectionate, almost cuddly box of mourning into which we squeeze other passing legends. That’s why Blackstar remains the greatest memorial of all: In contrast to the more accessible days of his ’80s stardom, it turned him back into something closer to the more elusive character we fell in love with in the ’70s, with but some of the old theatrical flair removed to allow us to see, if not always warmly embrace, the difficult human being at its heart. Just as surely as Thomas Jerome Newton, the antihero of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bowie was fully alien and fully mortal — one of us, and a one-man species unto himself. It’s a DNA we know we’ll never see again.
