{"id":10375,"date":"2016-02-09T00:39:20","date_gmt":"2016-02-09T03:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/culturedarm.com\/?p=10375"},"modified":"2016-02-09T00:39:20","modified_gmt":"2016-02-09T03:39:20","slug":"david-bowie-top-ten-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culturedarm.com\/staging\/5793\/david-bowie-top-ten-songs\/","title":{"rendered":"David Bowie Top Ten Songs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"David<\/p>\n

David Bowie’s death on Sunday in New York transmitted\u00a0the rarest of shocks, its announcement rudely waking those of us in the UK, disrupting sleep patterns\u00a0across the US, and disorienting admirers the world over. After suffering a heart attack midway through the Reality<\/em> tour in 2004, he had\u00a0stepped back from public life<\/a>: his last live performance<\/a>, alongside Alicia Keys at the KCA Black Ball benefit concert in New York, and his last major film role, as Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige<\/em>, both came in 2006,\u00a0and while\u00a0he provided a couple of cameos and several backing vocals thereafter, he remained largely quiet until his return with The Next Day<\/em> in 2013.<\/p>\n

His cocaine addiction in the middle of the 1970s\u00a0left him, in his own words, ‘totally crazed’ and fearing an early demise, compelling him to leave L.A. for continental Europe in order to get clean. It worked – apparently Berlin’s preference for heroin was not to his taste – but Bowie continued to smoke heavily until the birth of his daughter in 2000. The heart attack made plain his imperfect health, his relative absence made space for rumours to spread, and\u00a0some\u00a0reviews of Blackstar\u00a0<\/em>– the album released just two days before his passing –\u00a0even without the benefit of hindsight read strangely like obituaries<\/a>. Yet Bowie kept\u00a0a\u00a0cancer diagnosis secret for eighteen months, and if the manner of his death in the face of his creative resurgence makes it harder to bear, it demonstrates an almost implausible commitment to personal privacy while raising his art to a life-encompassing sublimity that seems like a treatise on aesthetics.<\/p>\n

From my earliest hearing,\u00a0Bowie was always connected with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, who in the 1970s became known as the ‘Holy Trinity’ of rock, Bowie producing Lou’s Transformer<\/em>, mixing The Stooges’ Raw Power<\/em>, and then later in the decade, now in Berlin, producing Iggy’s The Idiot<\/em> and Lust for Life<\/em>. In contrast to the other two artists, Bowie and his music always felt more guarded, more mysterious, and in some ways more melancholic too, and I played\u00a0it less often, but gradually came to love him all the same in a different way. Like many listeners, I began with Hunky Dory<\/em> and Ziggy Stardust<\/em>, but like many fans my favourites came to reside in the\u00a0second half of the 1970s, with Station to Station<\/em>, Low<\/em>, and “Heroes”<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Bowie once defined his perennial subject matter as ‘isolation, abandonment, fear and anxiety – all of the high points of one’s life’<\/a>. His music encompassed all of these things,\u00a0but what really set him apart as a singer was his ability to weave and tread the line between a maudlin sentimentality and an impassioned sincerity, breathtakingly pristine, full of ardor, cutting through the\u00a0enveloping alarums\u00a0with the quality of a bell chime.\u00a0Take for instance the fifth verse to ‘Five Years’, a part Bowie would sometimes perform with overzealous scorn, at\u00a0other times with\u00a0an open-chested clarity: on a scene of impending apocalypse, we flicker to a youngster smiling and waving and drinking milkshakes filled with ice cream. The lines\u00a0on paper might read like a throwaway or worse, a send up of smug complacency in the face of our impending doom, but with Bowie’s original delivery they become the heart of the song, an ode to the everyday, a revelation of the peculiar and imperishable triumph of life.<\/p>\n

Beyond his family, friends, and frequent collaborators, for so many people Bowie’s death will be an overwhelming loss, the passing of an inexplicable part of their personality. From glam rock to plastic soul, to his Berlin-era, Krautrock-inspired melding of electronic and funk, to his\u00a0experiments in the 1990s\u00a0with industrial and drum and bass – through Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thine White Duke, and Pierrot, the mimetic aspect on which his art pivoted – everyone will have a sound and a sensibility that feels like their own.\u00a0Tony Visconti has suggested that until the week of his death, Bowie was working on new material, while with Brian Eno he intended to revisit the recording sessions for 1995’s Outside<\/em>. But with his final flourish, Bowie placed at the forefront a body of music which remains more vital than ever.<\/p>\n

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