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It has become a tired cliche among fans to say that everything went wrong in the world after Bowie died in 2016. 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. Those looking for reassurance should not listen to Bowie (please listen to something, anything, else). His world, from Space Oddity through to the background violence of The Next Day and Blackstar, was always drowned or destroyed or incinerated: “This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide” as he exclaims at the beginning of Diamond Dogs.
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.
Which brings me to Ormerod’s book. I was wrong about it. Because I have loved Bowie with an unwaning passion for 54 years, I’ve read too much about him and grown rather blase about his biography. Thus, when I began reading, it all felt a tad familiar. Ormerod tells the story of Bowie’s life and music through the lens of religion, which is absolutely terrific as a central theme, as Bowie was essentially a religious artist.
Beginning with the Anglicanism of St Mary’s Church in Bromley, where Bowie sang in the choir, continuing with his immersion in Tibetan Buddhism in the late 1960s and on to the occultism of Aleister Crowley, Ormerod unpacks the religious preoccupations of Bowie’s art in compelling prose. But still, it all seems rather straightforward and the little stabs at philosophy (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and so on) feel a tiny bit Wiki.
But the book takes on a growing velocity when analysing Bowie’s later work, particularly in the chapter on Heathen (I’ve not read anything as good on that album). This momentum develops into fine, detailed discussions of The Next Day and Blackstar, and also Lazarus, his stunning final experiment with musical theatre. What makes these sections so good is that Ormerod deals with Bowie as text; as the occasion for close reading, which I think is what his work, like all good art, deserves.
By the end Ormerod had me singing in the choir with him. The book closes with the compelling argument that what drives Bowie’s work – and Ormerod is very good on the centrality of the concept of drive – flows from two essential sources: life and love. When asked whether he had a devotional practice, Bowie answered, “Life. I love life very much indeed”.
For much of that life, his work was counterpointed, indeed contradicted, by a certain incapacity to love. This was expressed in his music as an incredibly painful yearning and the experience of isolation which is perhaps the most common theme of his work. Happily, he found love both in the simplicity of family life and in the distension of existence that can, if you are lucky, coincide with ageing and dying.
As Ormerod points out, there is an apophaticism to Bowie’s art – that is, a persistent tendency to negate any proposition (not this, not that, and not that either). This can be heard all over his work, but listen to his final song, the last track on Blackstar, I Can’t Give Everything Away, which is subtly devastating in its merging of deep emotion with refusal: “Saying no but meaning yes / This is all I ever meant / That’s the message that I sent.” This tendency to negation, to what Simone Weil called “decreation”, puts him in the company of medieval Christian mystics, like Marguerite Porete.
And there is an odd neo-medievalism to Bowie fandom. He was not some messiah rock god (although he played that role in the persona of Ziggy). But he did function as a kind of saint, and it is irresistibly tempting to see his extraordinary archive at the V&A East as a vast reliquary that inspires that most medieval of practices: pilgrimage. Ormerod, like me, is a convert (1996 for him, 1972 for me) and listening to Bowie is church. Religion does not just influence Bowie’s music. It is the music. It is its moving essence. It is at the centre of it all.
