Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, Aladdin Sane … they all died ten years ago this week.
How can we go on? It seemed as though maybe the pain of his absence would lessen as the years went by, as it does with most public figures (do we still miss Franklin Roosevelt, for example?) but instead, with each passing year, that Bowie-size hole gets bigger and bigger.
The world really has gotten a lot worse since that day in January 2016. We won’t list the ways; you already know. We cannot prove that this happened as a result of Bowie’s death; but we cannot prove that it did not.
We’ve thought a lot about him in the last decade. Here are some things to read, to remember what he was and what he meant to you and to everyone.
First, begin with this tribute to him from family members who knew him best, published two days ago on what would have been his seventy-ninth birthday, and the tenth anniversary of his final studio album.
Then, this recollection, published a few years ago in the once-excellent Audere Magazine, which surveyed various articles published across the media to mark that terrible fifth-year anniversary. “In a way, it seems like yesterday,” Audere Magazine wrote then, “waking up to that horrible news, just one day after waking up to his new recording on our phones. A new record, ‘Blackstar,’ came out on his birthday, and the next day he was gone. But it also seems like a lifetime ago, because of all the horrible things that have happened since.”
Next, read the three-year remembrance, also in the once-excellent Audere Magazine, For David Bowie, On The Anniversary Of His Death And Birth. “David Bowie’s death was not just any death,” they wrote. “[H]e’d always seemed somehow above mundane things like dying. It didn’t seem worth his time.”
To remind yourself that David Bowie was (unbelievably) just a human being, read A Few Thoughts On The Remix Of David Bowie’s “Never Let Me Down” Album, in which Steven S. Drachman reviews the bumpy journey of what some think was Bowie’s worst album. “Sometimes things don’t work out,” Drachman wrote, “and everyone looks for someone to blame.”
Finally, in Catchy Songs We Can Listen To Over And Over Again, our Oblivioni columnists explain why Bowie’s “Everyone Says Hi” is a repeatable ditty that just may (or may not) be profound.
How could he leave us? We will never get over this.