The Speed of Life David Bowie Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again

David Bowie

Each Tuesday in Music Matters, Matthew Linder explores the intersections of music, culture and faith.

"All clichés are true. The years really do speed past. Life actually is as curt as they tell you it is. And there really is a God–so practice I purchase that one? If all the other clichés are true…" David Bowie

Terminal week, Jimi Hendrix reigned in the number two spot on the Billboard 200 and this week that position is filled by David Bowie's new albumThe Next Day. It is merely fitting that one of Bowie's songs on the new album ("The Stars (Are Out This night)") contains the line,"Stars are never sleeping/ Expressionless ones and the living," in light of this surprising takeover of the charts past two classic rockers, one expressionless and one living. Unlike Hendrix who saw his music as religion, Bowie has explored a pantheon of religious beliefs as he noted in a 2004Elleninterview: "I was young, fancy costless and Tibetan Buddhism appealed to me at that time. I thought, 'There's salvation.' Information technology didn't really work. Then I went through Nietzsche, Satanism, Christianity… pottery, and ended up singing. It's been a long road."

In his darkest cocaine fueled days he turned towards Christianity and wrote "Station to Station" every bit his contemplation of the stations of the cross. In a February 1997Q Magazine interview Bowie stated, "The 'Station to Station' track itself is very much concerned with the stations of the cross… I've never read a review that really sussed it. Information technology's an extremely dark album. Miserable time to live through, I must say."

His foray into Christianity didn't stick and e'er since he has been tottering between belief and disbelief. When Bowie'southward previous anthologyReality came out in 2003 he gave an interview toBeliefnet where he explained his current spiritual state:

I honestly believe that my initial questions haven't inverse at all. There are far fewer of them these days, but they're actually important. Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. E'er. Information technology's because I'm non quite an atheist and it worries me. There's that little bit that holds on: Well, I'mwell-nighan atheist. Give me a couple of months...

That'due south the shock: All clichés are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell yous it is. And there really is a God–and so exercise I buy that 1? If all the other clichés are true… Hell, don't pose me that one.

OnThe Next Day, Bowie vacillates between these two modes of thought, a world with God and a world without. Questions on the existence of a higher being are further heightened past death and a promise that life does affair in the one thousand scheme of the universe. We get self-referential Bowie, looking back at his musical by to navigate the present minus his many personas. The pb single "Where Are We Now?" typifies Bowie's reflective tone with many references to his Berlin years (whereHeroes was written and recorded) which becomes more apparent in the accompanying music video.

Twenty thousand people
Cross Bose Brucke
Fingers are crossed
Just in instance
Walking the dead

Where are we at present?
Where are nosotros now?
The moment you lot know
You lot know, y'all know

The song recognizes that all are heading towards decease, questions "Where are we now?" in that process but ends with hope of something more:

As long as there's lord's day
As long as there's sun
As long equally there'due south rain
As long equally there'due south rain
As long as at that place'south burn
As long as there's burn
As long as there'due south me
As long as in that location's you

Bowie explores that question throughout the album as he gauges his spirituality. Championship track "The Next Day" full of anomalous guitar bends and Bowie's vocals somewhere betwixt speech and singing, sees himself near a gruesome death while attacking the hypocrisy of  religious figures and revealing their true god, namely Satan:

Here I am, not quite dying
My torso left to rot in a hollow tree
Its branches throwing shadows on the gallows for me
And the adjacent day,
And the next,
And another mean solar day…

They live upon their feet and they die upon their knees
They tin work with Satan while they dress like the saints
They know god exists for the devil told them so
They scream my proper noun aloud down into the well below

"I'd Rather Exist Loftier" finds Bowie washing his hands of the diplomacy of this globe, even his own expiry, and finding solace in existence high instead. The blues-inspired track moves into that classic 70's Bowie sound in the chorus with layered vocal harmonies.

I stumble to the graveyard and I lay downward by my parents,
Whisper "Just remember duckies
Everybody gets got"

I'd rather be loftier
I'd rather be flying
I'd rather be dead or out of my head
Than preparation these guns of those men in the sand

Once again Bowie returns to the theme of death in "You Feel So Solitary Y'all Could Die" and this fourth dimension he explores suicide as he explains flippantly, "Oh, see if I care/ Oh, please, delight make it shortly." Though these lines are gear up against an over-dramatized ballad similar to Meatloaf's grand rock opera audio, so one wonders how sincere Bowie is in this sentiment.

I tin see yous every bit a corpse hanging from a beam
I could read you like a book
I tin feel y'all falling
I hear you moaning in your room
Oh, see if I care
Oh, delight, delight make it presently

Walls have got you cornered
You lot've got the blues, my friend
And people don't like you
But you lot will get out without a sound, without an cease
Hopefully it'll shine on yous
Expiry lone shall dearest y'all
I hope you lot feel and then lonely y'all could dice
Experience and then alone you could die
You experience then lone you could die

After a minute of silence "If You lot Can See Me" appears ex nihlo with Bowie's harshest words for religion taking on a militant role, fifty-fifty more farthermost than the approach pioneered past Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

Children swarm similar thousands of bugs
Towards the lights the beacons in a higher place the hill
The stars to the West, the South, the North and to the East…

I take seen these bairns wave their fists at God
Swear to destroy the beasts, stamping the ground
In their excitement for tomorrow…

I will slaughter your kind who descend from belief
I am the spirit of greed, a lord of theft
I'll burn all your books and the problems they make

Then finally, the feedback and synthesizer driven "How Does The Grass Abound?" resurrects Bowie'southward 80's sound with playful whining "ya's". Bowie finding no other selection, stuck in the neutral zone between organized religion and irreligion, here reduces life's meaning to animate some other day:

I gaze in defeat
At the stars in the night
The low-cal in my life burnt away
At that place will be no tomorrow
And so yous sigh in your sleep
And meaning returns with the day

And this is where more and more than people reside in a civilisation where the "nones" are rising, avoiding religion altogether or making their ain amalgamation of several. Meaning, though, is not merely confided to breathing and living another day but plant in the God who breathed life into man (Gen. ii:vii). As Bowie enters the last years of his life, I pray he will be able to come up dorsum from the edge of atheism, returning to the cantankerous which comforted him through a nighttime and tumultuous menstruum. So on the concluding mean solar day, as ane of the dead in Christ, God will breathe on him (and all believers, meet Ezekiel 37) giving Bowie significant for more one day but all of eternity.

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Matthew Linder

Matt earned his MM in Music History and Literature from Sacramento Country. When he's not dancing to pop music with his girl, he teaches in the Music Department at National Academy.

norrisaisce2001.blogspot.com

Source: https://christandpopculture.com/music-matters-david-bowie-still-not-quite-an-atheist/

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