I have little to add to the tidal wave of remembrances and tributes in the wake of David Bowie’s death. Seems nearly everyone has a story about how his music, his persistence, his generosity, his genius, his unabashed weirdness changed their lives. What he taught me as a young teenager was that the phrase “just be yourself” can just as well mean “be whoever you can dream up,” and damn the predetermined roles and meaningless stigma. Harder than it sounds, but Bowie pulled it off like no one before or since.
Bowie was, writes Sara Benincasa, the “patron saint of… weirdos of all stripes, and that most dangerous creature of all: the artist.” He did not shy away from pretense; he embraced it as his special métier. In 1999, Bowie delivered the commencement address at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he received an honorary doctorate along with Wayne Shorter. In his speech, he says, he learned early on that “authenticity and the natural form of expression wasn’t going to be my forte.”
In fact, what I found that I was good at doing, and what I really enjoyed the most, was the game of “what if?” What if you combined Brecht-Weill musical drama with rhythm and blues? What happens if you transplant the French chanson with the Philly sound? Will Schoenberg lie comfortably with Little Richard? Can you put haggis and snails on the same plate? Well, no, but some of the ideas did work out very well.
Thus began his experiments with identity that first took shape in the fantastic creature, Ziggy Stardust, his “crusade,” as he calls it, “to change the kind of information that rock music contained.” Speaking of Ziggy, Bowie tells a story about playing “grotty… workingman’s clubs” in “full, battle finery of Tokyo-spaceboy and a pair of shoes high enough that it induced nose bleeds.”
Informed by the promoter at one such bar that the only bathroom was a filthy sink at the end of the hall, Bowie balked. “Listen son,” said the promoter, “If its good enough for Shirley Bassey, it’s good enough for you.” From this experience, he says, he learned that “mixing elements of bad taste with good would often produce the most interesting results.”
The speech is packed with witty anecdotes like this and self-deprecating asides. Most of the stories, as you can hear in the video excerpt at the top of the post, are about Bowie’s “greatest mentor,” John Lennon. Lennon, says Bowie, “defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fabric of pop and imbue it with elements from other artforms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful and imbued with strangeness.” Indulging his love for high and low culture, Bowie undercuts his elevated talk of art-pop by describing his and Lennon’s conversations as “Beavis and Butthead on ‘Crossfire.’”
Bowie ends his speech with a heartfelt, and dare I say, authentic summary of his life in music. His only piece of advice, writes Boston.com: he urges the Berklee graduates to “pursue their musical passion as if it were a sickness.”
Music has given me over 40 years of extraordinary experiences. I can’t say that life’s pains or more tragic episodes have been diminished because of it. But it’s allowed me so many moments of companionship when I’ve been lonely and a sublime means of communication when I wanted to touch people. It’s been both my doorway of perception and the house that I live in.
I only hope that it embraces you with the same lusty life force that it graciously offered me. Thank you very much and remember, if it itches, play it.
Read the full transcript of the speech here, or below the jump:
