I was never a full-on fan of Bowie, but him and
his music have somehow always been there
– I remember the older girls at Grammar School discussing the lyrics to Life of
Mars and me wondering what it all meant (I may well have not been the only
one). In the past few years, through studying art, I’ve realised how Bowie and
his Glam Rock compatriots started to break down the taboo surrounding
homosexuality and how they played out gender fluidity on Top of the Pops years
before anyone else realised it existed. This particularly struck me when
visiting the exhibition “Glam : the performance of Style” at Tate Liverpool in
April 2013.
Part of the purpose of music and art, in my
opinion, is to challenge taboos. Bowie’s performance of his own death via the
song and video “Lazarus” – which I viewed on YouTube after his death along with
most of the Western World - might
hopefully start to challenge our attitude to death, which seems to me to be one
of the last taboos. I’m not trying to suggest we should spend all our time
contemplating our last breath, but this is going to happen to all of us and we
should get the most out of today – every
day. None of us know how much time we have left. We need to acknowledge
that, we need to acknowledge that we’ll deteriorate as we approach old age (if
we get there), and we need as a society to perhaps think about things such as
how we deal with ill people, introduction of bereavement leave and how we treat
colleagues who’ve lost someone. Death is
the norm, yet we pussyfoot around it like nothing else.
In the catalogue for the “Glam” exhibition, there
is a photograph of Candy Darling (who “shaved her legs then he was a she” in
Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”) evidently on her deathbed, wig askew, full
make-up, a rose thrown across the bed (Hujar, 1973). It was the first, and only
other, time I’ve seen death performed in this way. The arts give us the power
to deal with challenges creatively. Bowie’s tender and artistic depiction of
his own forthcoming demise should be an eye-opener and a wake-up call for us
all.
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