Filmmaker Brett Morgen (with biopics of Kurt Cobain and Jane Goodall to his name) has made a highly impactful sound and vision spectacle in which he lets deceased rockstar David Bowie (1947-2016) talk about himself, and sometimes hush, as when he aimlessly walks the streets of Singapore on his 1983 Serious Moonlight tour, the one that got him worldwide popstar status. Moonage Daydream (2022) is an onslaught on the senses, a high-density query into the mind and soul of the self-invented artist David Bowie. Interestingly, we learn a lot about the figure behind the scenes, known as David Robert Jones, but Bowie the inventor, the one that mesmerised a percentile of 70s rock lovers into idolising every move he made, remains as aloof as he always was.
Times have changed. Back in the golden years, we fans marvelled at the future visions of a tortured performer who had read his Orwell, Huxley and Nietzsche (so that we wouldn’t have to), and a whole lot more. Bowie was weird intellect, let your mind freak out and see what the fruits are. He totally fitted and encumbered the mood of the days which since have widely been recognised as the best decade to grow up in ever. Bowie the freak, of course, was on the money. We would be owned, for sure, our children were to be of a different race (so to speak), our societies as corrupted as depicted in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Punk’s no future brand had already been well explored by Mr B and his contemporaries. Doors had been opened that would never close again. So, yeah, we knew what was coming. The truth being the future, it was equally conceivable not all of us would live to see the day. It was the one thing that gave us hope. Much of this has now changed dramatically.
The onset of covid and the dictatorial policies that followed in its wake have left us with a concept of reality that is eerily close to the one described by Bowie over the course of the nineteen seventies. See quotes above. This leaves us with the question: how could Bowie be so prescient? Was he that smart, or did he receive help from certain sources? It is well-known by now that the Beatles were mostly fake. Wherever their honest musical talents took them, they wouldn’t have got anywhere without the consent of the powers that controlled the impact of their marketability. And they knew it. So did the Rolling Stones, Hendrix, and others. It’s how the system works. Hit songs have always been considered effective purveyors of useful information, even before the onset of rock ‘n’ roll. The sixties heroes were still mostly implicit about the despair awaiting us, our seventies idols already a lot more opener and truer. But when Bowie started singing about Kether and Malkuth in his European Vision song Station to Station, he deliberately chose to chastise us with an overdose of bad news.
David Bowie’s remarkable insights could have easily been handed down to him, code words and messages that he would have to find a place for in his writing, appeasing the masters who run the popstar business with iron logic, while trying to maintain as much distance to the topic as possible. Bowie having a way with words, he usually succeeded. Oh! You Pretty Things is perhaps his most blatant cry for the present revolution, with our children belonging to the coming race: look out, you rock ‘n’ rollers. He sounds like he really means it. Time, on the other hand, is desperate enough in tone to make the one-liner we should be owned by now sound like a warning rather than a recommendation.
Bowie certainly wasn’t the first one. Mick Jagger famously wrote about the devil in Sympathy, or did he? He never gets closer than once mentioning the name Lucifer. Either way, the masters don’t care. They want their magic words to be spoken, the mantras supposedly brainwashing the public into preferring debauchery over decency. The artists may do as they like as long as the public can be convinced they should buy their product. And then there is the small business of one-eyed things and triple 6 signs. Could one please show them regularly? It’s kind of important to us, see. Bowie showed off his elegance with the upturned sixes finger mask (or spectacles). His eye-patched appearance on Dutch TV’s Toppop, which has become the preferred performance of Rebel Rebel on You Tube, had likely little to do with a minor eye infection, as B’s clarification went. There were gestures going on during live shows, at least from Ziggy’s farewell concert onwards, but it never became more than a silly nuisance. In those days few people were aware this was happening, and I wasn’t one of them. Nevertheless, the truth is out there. If you go looking for it, you’ll see it everywhere. All of them. Some managed to bail out and live independently on a sufficient fanbase from their popular days.
Lou Reed was one of those. After crashing out from the Bowie caravan in 1974, he returned to being an honest storyteller who moved people deeply with his gut-wrenching songs. Yet, when retirement loomed, his health betraying him (back in the seventies he had been number one on the first to die hitlist for a cool 33 months) Reed was forced into a declaration of Jewish power on his collaboration with Metallica, the hard rocking and sensationalist Lulu. Check what he screams (he can’t sing anymore) about revenge in The View, turning himself into a rather vicious and vitriolic promotor of Jewish primacy. The former he never was and the latter he used to reserve for worthier causes, such as asking attention for the many abandoned people in his city. Being a Reed fan, I bought the record, but stopped listening to it soon. A similar sensation captured me with Bowie’s last album Blackstar, as beautifully made as it is. Bowie’s expressed fear of death doesn’t suit him at all, to my mind. Or rather, it never suited David Robert Jones, the one who had created it all, the David Bowie character and its many fanciful disguises. Jones would never seek death, as he loved life too much, yet he neither seemed the cowardly type to me. Apparently, David Bowie was supposed to have a different point of view.
Amidst the chaos of Moonage Daydream’s audio-visual presentation, Mr Jones offers a coherent and insightful portrait of his inner sufferings. And suffer he did, in his own words. They are taken out of only a handful of interviews among the many hundreds Bowie must have given. We see a solitary man, a loner living in awe of his own exceptional abilities, as they constitute a fortune coming with the duty to make a difference. Jones was unable to maintain friendships and commitments as long as he hadn’t found untraceable peace with himself. Whether it was the fear he might be as crazy as his brother Terry, or he actually was, or he was mentally abused into accepting his role of, as he himself once phrased it when asked by another father at the posh boarding school he sent his son Duncan to about his line of business: (I’m) a rock god, David Bowie for a long while seemed pretty out of it. He was in fact much weirder than most of his characters, who were merely indulging in the latest future fancy.
I liked Moonage Daydream. It’s over the top, but it offers an interesting perspective on the boy from Brixton who grew up in Bromley and hung out in Swinging London until he had made it and then conquered America and the world, feeling ever lonelier along the way. Or so we are led to believe. And then he met Iman and got happy. He left all his vices behind him and became hooked on his wife. It’s a story we don’t get to know much about (who wants to hear about happy couples?), though his final musings, a handful of wisdoms spoken by an older Bowie, attest of his acquired ability to see himself with pity and love. That’s what life is all about for exceptional people: stop hating themselves. One does get the feeling Brett Morgen was working from a playbook handed down to him.
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