David Bowie died two days ago, and that was but two days after the release of his last album, Blackstar. He clearly knew he was dying when he recorded it and the song and video shown below, “Lazarus.” (Rumors have it that Bowie died of lung cancer that metastasized to his liver.) Lazarus, of course, was a figure from the Gospel of John, a man whom Jesus raised from the dead—and that’s a clue that Bowie intends this song as a way to live on.
It’s a macabre song, clearly reflecting his impending death and how he wanted to be remembered. But it makes me very discomfited, perhaps because it reminds me of my own mortality. (While watching the house finches eat seeds on my windowsill this morning, I thought to myself, “How lucky they are: they don’t know they’re going to die.”) The grimness is enhanced by the dark and squalid hospital room, Bowie’s gaunt appearance and makeup, and his puppet-like movements, as if he were already dead. Musically it’s not near his best effort, but perhaps it’s his most affecting one.
I’m not sure what Bowie is trying to say here (he notes that he’s “free like a bluebird,” but I don’t know what that means), but of course that’s characteristic of many of his songs. It may be a pure message of emotionality, ending when he closes the door to his closet-coffin.
If you don’t feel plenty weird after you watched that, you’re not sentient.
NME has its own interpretation, which sounds reasonable:
An 18-month battle with cancer that hardly anyone knew about came to tragic end yesterday (January 10), but Bowie provided bleak hints about his terminal condition for his fans and followers in what was to be the final music video of his that was to be released in his lifetime.
Released only four days ago, the video for single ‘Lazarus’ was Bowie’s parting shot, opening with a blindfolded, fragile-looking Bowie laying in bed. His first words “look up here, I’m in heaven/I’ve got scars that can’t be seen” are now obviously an admission of his ill health, rather than just a fantastical musing on mortality. It soon becomes obvious that the bed he’s in is a hospital one and Bowie begins to float above it, signifying his transmutation to the other side – whatever, or wherever that may be. Watching it now, it’s a statement as bold as it is bleak.
As Bowie writhes around on the bed, trying to break free, another Bowie then appears, a Bowie clad in black and stood upright, a Bowie who can still pose, pout, pick up a pen and create. Inspiration hits him and he scrawls at speed in a notebook, while the other Bowie continues to convulse. As he writes, we see a skull sitting ominously on his writing desk, the spectre of death looming over Bowie and his final creation, before he steps backwards into a wooden wardrobe, a fitting kind of coffin for an icon of style and fashion.
“His death was no different from his life – a work of Art,” explained Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti, in tribute. “He made ‘Blackstar’ for us, his parting gift. I knew for a year this was the way it would be. I wasn’t, however, prepared for it.” Creative to the very end, the ‘Lazarus’ video is a heartbreakingly sad way to bid farewell, but a more than appropriate one.
As Bob Harris of the BBC noted, quoting a listener, “Leave it to Bowie to not only write his own epitaph, but sing it and make a video of it as well.”
______
UPDATE: Today’s New York Times has a piece relating not only the story of “Lazarus” (also the title of a play co-written by Bowie), but also the effects of his impending death on his other work.
The music sends shivers down my spine. A masterpiece and a dark brooding farewell to th community!
Interesting lyric about the bluebird. The other David Jones, better known as Davy Jones, sang this lyric:
“I wanna be free
Like the bluebirds flying by me”
Are bluebirds a symbol of freedom? Or perhaps Bowie remembered the line from “I Wanna Be Free” and reused “bluebird”. Or more likely just a coincidence, right?
For many years a piece of the “language” used by gay men to signal to each other as strangers was a tattoo of a blue bird (or swallow, to taste) tattooed at the base of the thumb.
Which may or may not be relevant. But Bowie was by all accounts flexible in his tastes.
I still see youths too young to have needed this signalling with the blue bird tattoo, and wonder if they know what it means. Or meant. It’s past history now, but Bowie is older than I am.
There’ll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.
There’ll be love and laughter
And peace ever after.
Tomorrow, when the world is free
Powerful and disquieting with many double entendres I think. Maybe these feelings are more deeply felt amongst we folk in our late 60’s who don’t want to look too closely over our shoulders at what is gaining on us.
Bowie seemed rather immortal, so the idea he wasn’t is discomforting in itself.
Subscribe
I refuse to believe Bowie died. I simply think he returned to his home planet.
I think Bowie would be pleased with that comment.
cr
His lives and his death were all works of art. Amazing.
Very artsy and symbolic I suppose but it’s over my head. When dead also means free, maybe life was not so good.
Life with terminal lung/liver cancer probably isn’t. He most likely was receiving palliative care as the cancer was already at its late stage.
I would sing something about the benefits of assisted end of life and get on with it.
You really don’t know what you will do when faced with a prolonged illness and death. Maybe you would but who knows until you are there.
I felt very different than I thought I would but maybe it will be different next time since things turned out well in the end.
But remember the house finches don’t know they’re alive either… I rather take Dawkins’ view that instead of dreading your end just reflect on how unlikely and amazing it was that you were ever here in the first place!
Very moving. I liked it. One thing to note is that his voice really held up well with age. One immediately recognizes it as from the same larynx of the person who sang Ziggy Stardust, and so on. This has not been the case for many other singers.
I quite like the sax in that. But, his torturous writhings looked like a not very successful imitation of Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective.
Thought The Sun said today it was pancreatic cancer that had metastasised to his liver. Things may have changed since this morning. Lots of cancers metastacise to the liver though.
Yeah, everything ends up there. It’s interesting though in that you can tell if it is a primary liver cancer or a metastasised liver cancer because the cancer cells will be pancreas, breast, lung, whatever.
Bowie was quoted in an interview back in 2003(available online if you search Google) that he was “almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.” His persona in the song “Lazarus” strikes me as a man feverishly fighting to the end to work, create art, reinvent himself if not one last time, and yet realizing that his time has come and he needs to put down the pen and abandon his many personas and his artistic vision(s) and embrace the reality of death. Whatever that means to him.
If I may indulge with a link to a YouTube video of Warren Zevon, another accomplished and respected rock artist, who also wrote and sang his own epitaph only weeks before his death in 2003 of lung cancer. A less enigmatic one than Bowie left us, and a reflection of the human desire to be remembered and loved by those we knew and loved in return.
https://youtu.be/1KjRLq4uF4A
My mother died of lung cancer which metastasized to her liver and her brains. She died a peaceful death, though, which was both amazing and a great relief.
It seems he is casting a glance over his career – the fame, money, etc. He seems to be struggling mightily with the task of writing, which I take as the pain of creativity, his song writing and perhaps his struggle to stay relevant as an artist. This struggle is now coming to an end, so he is free as a bluebird.
That’s one hell of a way to go out. Damn!
I just came across a chilling and hypnotic a cappella version of “Under Pressure.”
http://www.mindblowingvideos.com/how-under-pressure-sounds-without-music-freddie-mercury-and-david-bowie-a-cappella.html
I am obviously un-human as I find it hard to live in anything other than the present. I wonder if the fact that I have trouble keeping memories of my own past means that I am less threatened by my impending demise… life is something we all get over!
I don’t think I can be sentient. Well, I certainly thought the video weird, but the weirdness didn’t rub off on my feelings. I didn’t personally feel ‘plenty weird’ or weird in the slightest. I don’t know Bowie’s work at all, and have now listened to a two or three other songs of his, but did not find them all that impressive – I don’t find them musically interesting, as some of the Beatles’ songs are, say, or as some of Fairport Convention’s are. It struck me as merely manipulative and intended to make people’s flesh creep – but, as I said, I seem not be sentient in that way. For truly harrowing songs, one should listen to Dowland’s ‘In Darkness Let Me Dwell’ or Schubert’s setting of Heine’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’, which is the most harrowing song I know, and written in the year of Schubert’s death – especially as sung by Heinrich Schlusnus, a very great singer, particularly of lieder, and a very great fool politically.