"It also misses the point: rather than being one of the last avatars of a liberal order that has crumbled around our ears, Bowie prophesied the mayhem that has replaced it. In his later years, he thought that we had entered a zone of chaos and fragmentation. This is what allowed him to be so prescient about the internet not its promise, but its menace. There is no plan and no order. There is just disaster and social collapse."
"Bowie prefigured Trumpworld in countless ways. Just listen to Under the God on the much-maligned Tin Machine in 1989: Washington heads in the toilet bowl / Don't see the supremacist hate / Rightwing dicks in their boiler suits / Picking out who to annihilate. The only detail Bowie got wrong were the boiler suits. We live in a world of heathens, as Bowie hinted in the title of his brilliant 2002 album. Bowie did not want to lead a heathen existence."
"Whatever meaning God and religion might have now has to be measured against this vision of collapse. Strangely perhaps, this is exactly how Bowie saw it. Rather than running scared like a jittery liberal, he saw something else at the centre of it all, as he says repeatedly on Blackstar. This is what he called a formidable mystery: the mystery of transience, of the fact that we are dying, indeed, as he puts it in Diamond Dogs, we are the dead."
David Bowie perceived a world sliding into chaos, fragmentation, and social collapse, and he treated the internet as a menace rather than a promise. His songs repeatedly depict destruction, violence, and incineration, from Space Oddity to The Next Day and Blackstar, and name explicit political threats in lyrics such as Under the God. Bowie invoked images of genocide, heathenry, and repudiation of complacency, insisting that meaning must be measured against collapse. He identified a central, formidable mystery: transience and mortality, captured in his recurring claim that we are dying and that "we are the dead."
Read at www.theguardian.com
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