A decade without David Bowie |
David Bowie personally appears on the cover of 24 of his solo albums, depicting himself as a bowl-cut heartthrob, an androgynous blond, a space alien in human disguise, a cigarette-smoking lounge creature, a sideways pair of legs, and an oddly undersized boxer. On the front of his 25th album, released two days before his death at the age of 69 a decade ago this week, the English musician appeared by negation, represented as a five-pointed black star against a white background above an asymmetric row of glyphs that seem like pieces of the star but that don’t clearly combine into anything. Bowie learned his liver cancer was terminal right around the time he was filming the music video for “Lazarus,” the final statement of his four decades as a pop visionary. “Look up here — I’m in heaven,” he croons from a hospital bed, clutching a blanket to his face. His eyes are wrapped in gauze, and his hair is the grey of a sunless afternoon.
Dead David Bowie, debuted and retired on 2016’s Blackstar, was the last of Bowie’s great personas, a lineage that included Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and the Thin White Duke, a few of whom had notable deaths themselves. As a younger man, Bowie had explored the end with unusual wisdom, albeit from the safe remove of a fictional proxy. “The clock waits so patiently on your song/You walk past the cafe/But you don’t eat when you’ve lived too long,” he sang on “Rock N’ Roll Suicide,” closing number on 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. Bowie has eyes shut behind pink shadow and corpse-like marble skin on the cover of Aladdin Sane, from 1973. “He’s waiting in the wings … he speaks of you and me, boy” Bowie-as-Aladdin warns over the music hall piano jangle of album standout “Time.” On........