The Wisdom of David Bowie: On Art, Religion, Technology and More

It does­n’t quite ring true to call David Bowie a rock star. Zig­gy Star­dust, the neon syn­thet­ic-clad alien alter ego he both cre­at­ed and retired in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, was, of course, rock star­dom out­landish­ly per­son­i­fied. But then, that was the con­cept of what turned out to be just one of many per­son­ae he delib­er­ate­ly craft­ed through­out the course of his career. That career was in music, pri­mar­i­ly, but look­ing back on it today, more than a decade after Bowie’s death, it looks more like his medi­um was cul­ture itself. That’s under­scored by his inter­views, clips from a vari­ety of which appear in the new video above from YouTube chan­nel T&H Inspi­ra­tion.

Most of T&H’s most pop­u­lar videos add visu­als to speech­es by the pop­u­lar­iz­er of East­ern phi­los­o­phy Alan Watts, who’s been fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture before. He and Bowie had more in com­mon than it may seem at first, begin­ning with an Eng­lish­ness that remained thor­ough­go­ing no mat­ter how far out they ven­tured into the world.

Though Watts’ inter­est in Bud­dhism hard­ly needs stat­ing, it’s worth remem­ber­ing that he chose to be ordained as an Epis­co­palian priest rather than as a Bud­dhist monk. The young Bowie, for his part, very near­ly took the lat­ter path, study­ing under the late Lama Chime Rin­poche, who even­tu­al­ly told him he’d be bet­ter off going into the music busi­ness.

Bowie did so, of course, but with a new “sense of tran­sience and change, which actu­al­ly became fun­da­men­tal to my life and my approach to it,” as he put it decades lat­er. That sense man­i­fests even in his ear­ly work, but embrac­ing and even pur­su­ing imper­ma­nence — the imper­ma­nence of sounds, of fash­ions, of hit records, of life itself — also kept him from get­ting mired in the irrel­e­vance or auto-kitsch that threat­ens every super­star. Giv­en the belief that noth­ing lasts for­ev­er, “look­ing for the source of one’s own being becomes much more impor­tant,” as does attempt­ing artis­tic or intel­lec­tu­al chal­lenges at the very edge of one’s abil­i­ties. Alan Watts would prob­a­bly have agreed. The big­ger ques­tion is, did he ever hear “Changes”?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie Offers Advice for Aspir­ing Artists: “Go a Lit­tle Out of Your Depth,” “Nev­er Ful­fill Oth­er People’s Expec­ta­tions”

David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art — and We Do It Any­way (1998)

The Art Col­lec­tion of David Bowie: An Intro­duc­tion

David Bowie Pre­dicts the Good & Bad of the Inter­net in 1999: “We’re on the Cusp of Some­thing Exhil­a­rat­ing and Ter­ri­fy­ing”

How Leonard Cohen & David Bowie Faced Death Through Their Art: A Look at Their Final Albums

Stream David Bowie’s Com­plete Discog­ra­phy in a 19-Hour Playlist: From His Very First Record­ings to His Last

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.