Nothing Remains: David Bowie’s Vision of Love

On the title track of “Blackstar,” the David Bowie record released just a couple of days before his death on Jan. 10, Bowie sings, “I’m not a pop star.” True, he was an attractive celebrity with hit records, great hair and a vaguely gender-bending past. But for me, and for his millions of fans, he was someone who simply made life less ordinary. Indeed, Bowie’s music made me feel alive for the first time. And if that sounds like overstatement, then perhaps you don’t get what music is about and what it can do.

For the hundreds of thousands of ordinary working-class boys and girls in England in the early 1970s, including me, Bowie incarnated something glamorous, enticing, exciting and mysterious: a world of unknown pleasures and sparkling intelligence. He offered an escape route from the suburban hellholes that we inhabited. Bowie spoke most eloquently to the disaffected, to those who didn’t feel right in their skin, the socially awkward, the alienated. He spoke to the weirdos, the freaks, the outsiders and drew us in to an extraordinary intimacy, although we knew this was total fantasy. But make no mistake, this was a love story. A love story that, in my case, has lasted about 44 years.

After hearing the news of Bowie’s death, I’m hearing him sing “nothing remains” — the opening words of “Sunday,” the languid first track on the 2001 album “Heathen.” The song seems now like a lamentation, a prayer or a psalm for the dead. Of course, it is extremely tempting to interpret these words in the light of Bowie’s death in the obvious way: Nothing remains for us after his death. All is lost.

This would be a mistake, but it would certainly be understandable.

The word “nothing” peppers and punctuates Bowie’s entire body of work, from the “hold on to nothing” of “After All,” from “The Man Who Sold the World,” through the scintillating, dystopian visions of “Diamond Dogs” and the refrain “We’re nothing and nothing can help us,” from “Heroes” and onward all the way to “Blackstar.” One could base an entire and pretty coherent interpretation of Bowie’s work simply by focusing on that one word, nothing, and tracking its valences through so many of his songs. Nothing is everywhere in Bowie.

Does that mean that Bowie was some sort of nihilist? Does it mean that his music, from the cultural disintegration of “Diamond Dogs,” through the depressive languor of “Low,” on to apparent melancholia of “Lazarus” is some sort of message of gloom and doom?

On the contrary.

Let’s take “Blackstar,” the album that Bowie reportedly planned as a message to his fans from beyond the grave, which I and so many others have been listening to compulsively over the past few days. In the final track, “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” whose title is a response to the demand for meaning Bowie’s listeners kept making over the decades, he sings,

Seeing more and feeling less
Saying no but meaning yes
This is all I ever meant
That’s the message that I sent.

Within Bowie’s negativity, beneath his apparent naysaying and gloom, one can hear a clear Yes, an absolute and unconditional affirmation of life in all of its chaotic complexity, but also its moments of transport and delight. For Bowie, I think, it is only when we clear away all the fakery of social convention, the popery and jiggery-pokery of organized religion and the compulsory happiness that plagues our culture that we can hear the Yes that resounds across his music.

At the core of Bowie’s music and his apparent negativity is a profound yearning for connection and, most of all, for love.

What was being negated by Bowie was all the nonsense, the falsity, the accrued social meanings, traditions and morass of identity that shackled us, especially in relation to gender identity and class. His songs revealed how fragile all these meanings were and gave us the capacity for reinvention. They gave us the belief that our capacity for changes, was, like his, seemingly limitless.

Of course, there are limits, obviously mortal limits, to who we are how far we can reshape ourselves — even for Bowie, who seemed eternal. But when I listen to Bowie’s songs I hear an extraordinary hope for transformation. And I don’t think I am alone in this.

The core of this hope, which gives it a visceral register that touches the deepest level of our desire, is the sense that, as he sings in “Rock and Roll Suicide,” “Oh no, love, you’re not alone,” the sense that we can be heroes, just for a day, and that we can be us just for a day, with some new sense of what it means to be us.

This also has a political meaning. Bowie was often wrongly seen, particularly back in 1970s, as some kind of right-wing nationalist (I note, with some pleasure, that Bowie, unlike Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney, turned down the offer of a knighthood from the queen in 2003). There’s another line from “Blackstar” that is particularly powerful. Bowie sings,

If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to
It’s nothing to me
It’s nothing to see

Bowie will now never see those evergreens. But this is not just wistful nostalgia on his part, for they are nothing to him and nothing to see. Concealed in Bowie’s often dystopian words is an appeal to utopia, to the possible transformation not just of who we are, but of where we are. Bowie, for me, belongs to the best of a utopian aesthetic tradition that longs for a “yes” within the cramped, petty relentless “no” of Englishness. What his music yearned for and allowed us to imagine were new forms of being together, new intensities of desire and love in keener visions and sharper sounds.

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Simon Critchley is the author of “Bowie,” and many other books, including, most recently, “Memory Theater.” He is a co-editor of “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” a collection of essays from this series.

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