‘I have often thought that writers don’t necessarily write their books in their real order. Empire of the Sun may well be my first novel, which I just happened to write when I was fifty-four. It may well be that Vermilion Sands [1971] is my last book.'
J.G. Ballard
Chris O'Leary posited Ashes To Ashes as Bowie's designated Last Song, 'the climax that comes in the middle of the book', which I think is right. Artists can't all be as lucky (?) as Phil Ochs, whose last song on his last album (itself facetiously titled Greatest Hits) was called No More Songs, which was almost literally a six-years-early suicide note
ReplyDeleteRobert Haigh ended the final Omni Trio with a track called "Suicide Loop' but he was terminating that artistic identity and reverted to releasing under his own name like he did in the '80s a slew of piano-only albums.
ReplyDelete"Ashes To Ashes" does make for a great bookend with "Space Oddity", a self-mythology loop. I could also see a case for as the Last (Truly Great) Song he did. But then there's "Fashion" and "Up the Hill Backwards" and even "Let's Dance" . After that I'd say he was a burn out case and there's nothing even slightly memorable or cherishable, not even "Loving the Alien" . Then he only goes and wrecks that idea with the title track of Blackstar. "Where Are We Now", also quite touching, makes another kind of loop with his work.
ReplyDeleteI feel I pegged something in S+A when I said that's the dearth of "humanly useful" songs in the Bowie uuurv. You can dance and you can singalong, and you can be fascinated by him and his journey - but how many can you actually relate to your own life? It's a very self-involved corpus really, dependent on how invested you are in David Bowie in the first place. An editor I once had claimed to have minimal time for popular music but averred that DB was self-evidently the most interesting man in pop. But what if you simply don't share that feeling? What songs are there that are like "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" or "Jump" or "More Than A Feeling"? There's "Heroes" maybe, for some spurious coat of grandeur around whatever you're doing (that's why it's big in weddings), and maybe "Life On Mars", if you're feeling crushed by mundanity. And "Rebel Rebel" if you fancy yourself a bit. But an awful lot of it about being David Bowie. And few of us indeed are in the same boat as David Bowie.
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