Ever been to a ‘sixties party’? People turn up in ‘psychedelic’ fright wigs, plastic peace medalions, chewing on a bogus spliff and saying ‘Hey Man’, and think they’ve got it nailed. The media/fashion industry makes electric sheep.
I have never heard of anyone turn up sporting a copy of Marcuse, Rimbeau, Brook, Artaud, Mc Luhan, Lang, Fuller or a Leonard Cohen poetry collection in the back pocket of their jeans. That’s all the costume you need. The flamboyance was a ploy to try and make the sheep look up. The sixties were (like the punk movement, which were the ashes of the sixties) about ideas. There was a dream to change the world.
The death of Bowie is probably the final post-script to this. He epitomized that brief shinning moment when ‘pop’ mattered. Before the academics, spin doctors, corporates and venture capitalists got hold of it, there was a brief opportunity for something world changing to occur.
Bowie’s work combined inspired music, evocative ideas and imagery and sure theatrical sense into a body of work that fed the desire for positive human transformation that was such a hunger at that time. He gave energy and purpose for those with a yearning to get out there and do stuff. John Lennon, Dylan and Neil Young were others.
Bowie made you ache. He made caterpillars dream of being butterflies. Out of the disasters of the Second World War and the dreadful neo-fascism of The Fifties stirred a desire for revolution. Bowie was one of the artists who proveded the language and imagery for such world change.
He was an artist. He was impulsive, egotistical and self destructive. He was the icon, the channel for members of my generation who got ‘it’. For the rest he was one of a continuous succession of corporate pop moments.
The passing of Bowie represents one of the last reminders of the way the world might have been…. if only… ‘Can you hear me Major Tom?’
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