As I’m sitting here, I’m listening to the glorious gift that David Bowie left us before departing this world, ★ (Blackstar).
Normally, if recent times are anything to go by - as well as the never-ending revival of the 70s and early 80s, I tend to rock to some healthy Funk, Motown, Soul. When, of course, I’m not being the metalhead I am.
There’s something about soul and Motown, funk too, which has always interested me. And no, it isn’t that warm Marvin Gaye or Barry White voice many associate things white.
Yet, here I am listening once again to ★.
Probably for at least the 69th time, the age of Bowie when the album was released.
I’m not too sensitive a soul. Emotions are not too present in my life, that’s not too say there’s none but as someone pursuing stoicism, they are rather strange to me. Aside from that, I know since long that there’s one specific emotion I don’t have, don’t master, or at least so I thought. Until January 10th, 2016.
The day for the first time in life I was struck with experiencing loss.
Not merely experiencing it but actually feeling it.
R.I.P., David Robert Jones.
I come from a “simple” family. Leisure, mostly due to my parent’s rather busy and tiring twin-earner life with what for then a respectable commute of 40 minutes each morning and evening, was limited to mainstream TV series with twice or thrice each week a movie. It was the era of cable television and there weren’t many channels yet.
It was a golden era to be honest. A time without TV shopping and the seemingly compulsory “cougars”.
Dad, he loved his super cops who could solve anything within 45 minutes. He loved his James Bond’s even more. And when, when he had a nostalgic moment he would listen to Elvis Presley.
That glorious crackling vinyl sound.
Except that our Hi-Fi system wasn’t that sophisticated to truly enjoy the warm crackling of vinyl. Other than that, he loved his crime books and his easy thrillers. With the off Jackie Collins thrown in. Anything else in the library was merely to show off.
Culturally we weren’t a truly sophisticated family. Or sophisticated at all. Easy-going was what what it was about and few TV channels defined what “entertainment” was for us.
Except for the hidden talent in the family. The unrecognized genius. The liberal progressive of the family.
A simple government employee who tended to read the Flemish equivalent of Mills & Boon romance books. Who loved Elvis just as much. A clerk who barely graduated K12 and mimediately started to work as an office drone, and later a mother and office drone.
We are the goon squad
And we’re coming to town
Beep-beep
Beep-beep
Yet, it may have been one of the most modern and progressive, most liberal people I’ve ever known. The reason I now listen to David Bowie. The reason why David Bowie’s passing away hit me that hard.
It took until Bowie’s passing away for me to truly understand the influence of my mother on my cultural development. The woman who introduced me to Freddie Mercury, via Queen’s Radio GaGa clip - the first song I truly remember. Later, she would introduce me to David Bowie. Rather offhandedly because my father was slightly... bigoted to be honest.
I can not recall that we listened a lot to Bowie, not more than when a hit played on the public radio or when I had changed the channel to Studio Brussels later.
Via Bowie, I would eventually discover Salvador Dali, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, and everything else I eventually explored culturally. She was also the person who pushed me to read “Knack”, rather than “Het Laatste Nieuws”. Pretty much the entire opposite spectrum of what I would have evolved around had my father not married this amazing culturally sophisticated woman.
It all started with a gay icon and somebody without any issues sharing his deepest emotional explorations.
Without it I would never have found joy in “androgynous” styles in funk, Motown, or soul.
Even though, for the first time in life, I experienced “grief” and it took me more than half a year to get over Bowie’s death, I’m the richer person for it.
Thanks, mom.