STAR REVUE
JANUARY 2021 INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM
FREE
Photo montage by Monica White
the red hook
SENIOR CENTER CRUCIAL DURING COVID, PAGE 2
Five Years Hence (David Bowie remixed and remembered)
W
hen my first sister told me that her adolescent son had discovered David Bowie, something powerful struck me. My nephew, I realized, had joined the legion of outsiders. He had recognized (on some level) that the world was a complicated place, that in the inescapable realms of majority rule, you usually don’t get to choose to be on the winning team, and that often times the winning team isn’t even one you’d want to join. Watch any vintage news feature on Bowie fans— they’re not hard to find, the media has long loved teen freak shows—and you’ll see a parade of young people celebrating their outcast status. For many, most, (all?) of us, insecurity comes with the territory of adolescence, and there are different ways of dealing with it, from bullying on the one end to seeking remote solace on the other. For me at my nephew’s age, as for so many, David Bowie offered solace. He represented the possibility of realizing potential. His music was sex and drugs and rock and roll to be sure—and seemingly any sex and any drugs would do—but it wasn’t just that. It was about, seemingly literally, reaching for the stars. What went hand in hand with reaching for the stars was Bowie’s preaching to the perverted.
by Kurt Gottschalk Bowie fans were outsiders. It didn’t matter if it was sexual preference, gender identification, addiction, skepticism or just feeling smarter than the other kids in class, Bowie fans fell and fall outside the norm. He spoke to kids who felt like they didn’t fit in. He was, as he suggested on his career-defining The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, their leper messiah. Bookending that album are songs that proclaim “Your face, your race, the way that you talk / I kiss you, you’re beautiful, I want you to walk” and “Just turn on with me, and you’re not alone / Gimme your hands, ‘cause you’re wonderful.” The “you” was both collective and singular. It was a direct invitation to the anointed listener. When Bowie embraced mainstream success in the ‘80s, it was with more than a decade of loving the alienated behind him. I heard what may have been the first public announcement of Bowie’s death, up late listening to BBC radio news in the early hours of January 11, 2016. Among my first thoughts were to text my sister so that she could break it to her son, then 15, before he heard it on the news the next morning. I did so, then poured another drink and put on Bowie’s Blacktar, the album I’d had on rotation in the two days since its release, and thought of my
own early days discovering the work and worlds of David Bowie.
u u u Lodger was the first Bowie album I bought, foisted upon me by a record store clerk whom I held in idolized reverence, at around the same age my nephew was when he discovered David Bowie. It’s also the first album (of three, so far) that producer/ bassist Visconti has remixed since Bowie’s death. It was initially included in the 2017 A New Career in a New Town, the third in a series of career retrospective series box sets, part of a steady stream of new product in his wake; this month sees the release of a 7” single with never before released Bowie covers of Bob Dylan and John Lennon, limited for some reason to 8,147 copies. I had avoided the box sets and it was the new Visconti mix that pushed me over the edge, dropping something over $100 for a copy of my own. While I relished in the packaging and the perks designed to materialize and thus monetize nostalgia, I was not a fan of the new mix. It was too pushy, I thought, too amped up. It didn’t have the sound of that paper-
(continued on page 17)