Shit man

But it looks like his Fwcebook page, Twitter account, and The Hollywood Reporter are all reporting it. Apparently an 18 month battle with cancer. Fuck.

So soon after the new album.

He was one I thought who be around till he was 100.

Very sad.

But what a career...

This is crazy news

It's being reported by just about everyone now as well. R.I.P.

█▆▇▅▇█▇▆▄▁▃
Big PEMFin H & z's
"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am 1 thing, a musician." � Miles

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

rest as only one as unique as you can rest.. with great dare.

I'm still getting up on his career, but the fact that was able to reinvent himself speaks to his talent and skill.

RIP to a legend.

Fucking gut punch.

i like some of his material and respected his talent, however
the stand he took for more Black Artists being featured of MTV and the fact he played Soul train at a time when being White you had to have the goods to be on Soul train speaks volumes to me,

prayers go out to his family, friends and fans worldwide

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2973408/

I would guess that his legacy will be his ability to re-invent himself. This movie breaks down his career and artistry into 5 distinct phases/eras. All completely unique from each other. I had no idea that he was the first to put on Luther Vandross until I watched this movie. Anyways....I'd recommend it for anyone who's familiar with him but wants to learn more.

Sounds interesting. Gotta peep it.

extremely informative

__
I don't like the beat anymore because its just a loop. ALC didn't FLIP IT ENOUGH!

Flip it enough? Flip these. Flip off. Go flip some f*cking burgers.(c)Kno

Allied State of the National Electric Beat Treaty Organization (NEBTO)

RIP.

Im a lifelong fan, this genuinely heartbreaking

Truly stunned, truly heartbroken. Not many artist/celebrity deaths have truly affected me --- this one strikes deep.

Need to spend a bit of time processing this.


-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

What's your favorite album or era?

Thinking I'll take a few days and then do an in memoriam post --- talk a bit about the music in-depth a bit. Sometimes I think the theatrics overshadowed his genuinely brilliant musical sensibilities, which is a shame --- and I love the theatrics, but for some they serve as a distraction (I think).

Shit, we could probably do a dedicated album-by-album string of posts and really dive deep...

Anyhow, I will say that the album I perhaps return to the most is Station to Station --- not always even sure why. That run of albums leading up to the Berlin trilogy has this energy that always threatens to run off the rails it's so damn frenetic, but it never does... like you are peering into some otherworld of music-making.

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

>Shit, we could probably do a dedicated album-by-album string
>of posts and really dive deep...

i miss that around here

>That run
>of albums leading up to the Berlin trilogy has this energy
>that always threatens to run off the rails it's so damn
>frenetic, but it never does... like you are peering into some
>otherworld of music-making.

http://www.citsu.ie/contentfiles/images/cocaine-300x200.jpg

your posts are always quality man

RIP to one of my favorite artists of all-time. Thank you OKP for really getting me into his music.

artists to EVER do it. The man hit the recording booth even when he knew he was dying. Bowie wasn't a rock star. He was a alien sent down to confound, astonish and entertain....

RIP.....Thin White Duke.....

This sucks, just listening to new album.. RIP

here's a quote of his from a 2002 nyt article..

"I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/09/arts/david-bowie-21st-century-entrepreneur.html?pagewanted=all

After watching him play Andy Warhol in Basquiat... in which to no surprise he was amazing.

R.I.P.


werd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tD6FayGPyw



"You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance."
—Ken Kesey

http://austinato.bandcamp.com

http://www.discogs.com/lists/Favorites-of-2016/269401

This may be a bit morbid to note, but it's eerie how similar his passing is to J Dilla's. They both released their last works on their birthday, and then died three days later.


_______________________________
gamblers and masturbators.

http://mixcloud.com/urkelmoedee

PSN: UrkelMoeDee

and seeing someone talking about Bowie as if he were dead

and then you find out he actually is

I had no idea he was sick

__
I don't like the beat anymore because its just a loop. ALC didn't FLIP IT ENOUGH!

Flip it enough? Flip these. Flip off. Go flip some f*cking burgers.(c)Kno

Allied State of the National Electric Beat Treaty Organization (NEBTO)

Man was an idol of mine for my entire life. Was the first two live shows I ever saw. What a career he left though.

so dope.

RIP to the Thin White Duke.

https://soundcloud.com/jeremysole/bowie-goldenyears-jeremysoleremix

this video is a couple years old but its still fitting and very touching.

https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats/videos/1043455372414183/

.

Dude getting at MTV and veejay Mark Goodson for not playing black artists (remember how they fronted hard on Rick James' "Superfreak"). Bowie gave NO fucks calling them out as racist....


"David Bowie: “Why are there practically no blacks on the network?”

Mark Goodman: “We seem to be doing music that fits into what we want to play on MTV. The company is thinking in terms of narrowcasting.”

David Bowie: “There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I’m surprised aren’t being used on MTV.”

Mark Goodman: “We have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or the Midwest. Pick some town in the Midwest which would be scared to death by… a string of other black faces, or black music. We have to play music we think an entire country is going to like, and certainly we’re a rock and roll station.”

David Bowie: “Don’t you think it’s a frightening predicament to be in?”

Mark Goodman:“Yeah, but no less so here than in radio.”

David Bowie: “Don’t say, ‘Well, it’s not me, it’s them.’ Is it not possible it should be a conviction of the station and of the radio stations to be fair… to make the media more integrated?”"

Video link of cringe-worthy interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssMZjic3Mzg

Dude could have kept with the status quo because the status quo had him eating very fucking well for over a decade at that point; he was still one of the biggest rock stars in the world.

That's what I love most about him; dude was flamboyant nuts crazy on stage...pure rockstar id.

Offstage, apparently a cool as fuck dude who would have a beer with anybody. By rock star standards dude's ego should have been construction truck big.

>Dude could have kept with the status quo because the status
>quo had him eating very fucking well for over a decade at that
>point; he was still one of the biggest rock stars in the
>world.
>
>That's what I love most about him; dude was flamboyant nuts
>crazy on stage...pure rockstar id.
>
>Offstage, apparently a cool as fuck dude who would have a beer
>with anybody. By rock star standards dude's ego should have
>been construction truck big.


True Dat to all this^^^^^

>
>Dude getting at MTV and veejay Mark Goodson for not playing
>black artists (remember how they fronted hard on Rick James'
>"Superfreak"). Bowie gave NO fucks calling them out as
>racist....
>
>
>"David Bowie: “Why are there practically no blacks on the
>network?”
>
>Mark Goodman: “We seem to be doing music that fits into what
>we want to play on MTV. The company is thinking in terms of
>narrowcasting.”
>
>David Bowie: “There seem to be a lot of black artists making
>very good videos that I’m surprised aren’t being used on
>MTV.”
>
>Mark Goodman: “We have to try and do what we think not only
>New York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also
>Poughkeepsie or the Midwest. Pick some town in the Midwest
>which would be scared to death by… a string of other black
>faces, or black music. We have to play music we think an
>entire country is going to like, and certainly we’re a rock
>and roll station.”
>
>David Bowie: “Don’t you think it’s a frightening
>predicament to be in?”
>
>Mark Goodman:“Yeah, but no less so here than in radio.”
>
>David Bowie: “Don’t say, ‘Well, it’s not me, it’s
>them.’ Is it not possible it should be a conviction of the
>station and of the radio stations to be fair… to make the
>media more integrated?”"
>
>Video link of cringe-worthy interview:
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssMZjic3Mzg

http://www.staugustinepics.com/black-and-white/planet-earth-blue/

if anyone wants to give it a spin (my first time posting anything like this on here..and i know there's serious djs all over this thing--be easy)

https://soundcloud.com/rldiaz75/music-to-david-bowie-to-mix

by Kendrick Lamar.

Or at least him and his camp were listening to a lot of what I assume was TPAB ....

I listened to the album for the fourth or fifth time after learning
of this piece of news and I can hear def hear little hints of influence. kinda fascinating that a 69 year old white man, who don't get it twisted... loved black music and always championed it...
and was a man who knew his limitations so when he wanted to do a Philly soul record, he went and found the best and brightest to
help craft...

so it's no surprise well maybe a little... that he was fascinated
by Kendrick's album...

just a cool little connection imo.

the most heavily influenced song on the album is Girl Loves Me. that song is just begging for a kendrick feature.

Blackstar grooves start to finish, amazing textures, hidden melodies, multi-moods, excellent production...

tip of the cap to you mr Bowie, artist through the end...
on your way to the NEXT party, you left the rest of us who are still here in THIS one with a wonderful parting gift.

http://www.mtv.com/news/2727414/brother-from-another-planet/

Brother from Another Planet
Bowie and black music
by mtv news staff 1/12/2016
4k
1
by Greg Tate

David Bowie ranks as high in our electric church’s Afrofuturist pantheon of demiurges as Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton, and Miles Davis. That’s for his outrageous aristocratic style, not-just-skin-deep soul, badass brinksmanship, and all-around Alter-Negrocity. Not to mention the Starman’s own sui generis take on The Funk. Bowie remains that rarity — a white rock artist whose appropriations of black kulcha never felt like a rip-off but more like a sharing of radical and bumptious ideations between like-minded freaks.

It seems 1975 was the first year we saw a white man get busy on Soul Train, “The Hippest Trip in America.” Memory fails us as to whom Don Cornelius chose to lob over the color line before whom: Bowie with ”Fame” or Elton John, whose ”Bennie and the Jets” had become a boom box staple on the back of the school bus that year at D.C.’s Coolidge High. That same year, Average White Band dropped ”Pick Up the Pieces” on Soul Train, too. Doesn’t really matter, because of the three, Bowie had the funkiest track and the more charismatically alien presence — simultaneously the most culturally familiar and the most outright bizarre. The unabashed Brit who fell to Mother Africa and kept on stepping in rhythm and rhyme to his own quasar.

Bowie’s Soul Train appearance offers insight into his enigmatic ability to groove with The People and levitate above the fray, somewhere way beyond the pale. That visit to the Mecca of televised urban Terpsichore came two years after the two biggest pimp-thug cats at Coolidge High, Robert Parrish and his boy, came back from the Capital Center raving about seeing the Ziggy Stardust tour. This was before we knew about the deep and abiding relationship between louche hustlers and transgendered folks in the ’hood. Not long after Bowie dropped “Fame,” George Clinton begrudgingly tossed off this riposte on Mothership Connection’s ”P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up)”: ”I was down south, heard some main ingredients like Blue Magic, Doobie Brothers, David Bowie. It was cool — but can you imagine Doobie in your funk?”’ Cite the absence of any snap on Bowie, Starchile Clinton was giving the Starman some major props. Not least because Bowie inspired all of rock and funk ’n’ roll to go more glam, glittery, and avant-haute in the ’70s.

UNITED STATES - OCTOBER 01: RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL Photo of David BOWIE, performing live onstage on Philly Dogs Tour (Photo by Steve Morley/Redferns)
Steve Morley/Redferns/Getty
All roads to Glamgnocity in that era lead back to Bowie — himself inspired by Jimi Hendrix. But Hendrix never got to realize rock theatricality as extravagantly as Bowie did — nor did the Voodoo Chile have a costume-designing wizard like Japan’s Kansai Yamamoto knitting away in his stage-couture shed.

Our ace boon Arthur Jafa likes to say that ”Andy Warhol was so white he was black.” Bowie (who played Warhol in Schnabel’s film Basquiat) was likewise so avant-garde he tipped over into the Avant-’Groid — that Afro-outré dimension where Little Richard and Sun Ra define how far out you can go and command love from the folk. Like Joni Mitchell — another unguilty pleasure of many boho blackfolk — Bowie double-crossed back over to black culture by being his own transcendently pan-everything creation. But not even Queen Mother Joni can say she provoked James Brown to copycat action twice in his career. JB was so blown away by Bowie’s ”Fame,” he cut his own carbon-copy track, ”Hot (I Need to Be Loved, Loved, Loved),” and, years later, when Bowie optioned his publishing for stock points, the Godfather of Soul got the news about how lucrative the deal proved and quickly followed suit. Bowie once said, “The secret to my success was I was always the second guy to come up with the idea.” All hip-hop junkies can relate: How you flip secondhand wisdom to make the meta go mega-pop takes genius, too. (FYI, the ”Fame” story is further complicated by the fact that Brown remembered Bowie’s co-writer Carlos Alomar playing the main riff at the Apollo years before — but chase down the long version here.

This reporter got to hang out with Bowie a few times in the aughts. Iman commissioned moi to write an essay for her cosmetics company’s catalogue. During our initial meeting, Iman leaned in with her cell phone and said, ”My husband wants to talk to you — he’s a big fan of your work.” Say WTF? It was truly the GTFOH gobsmack moment of a lifetime in music journalism. If only because, arrogant as we journos can be on the page, only an idiot thinks anyone of musical consequence actually reads our cantankerous sheet! Upshot is, because of that bizarre turnabout we got to get turnt out in person, as most were, by Bowie’s singular alchemy — utter nobility combined with an easygoing lack of pretension. Later came revelations about this highly irregular regular guy’s generosity of spirit.

During our first convo, Bowie related how he’d recently met P. Diddy — a man so impressed by Bowie’s handshake he inquired as to who Bowie’s trainer was. Whereupon the Thin White Duke informed Mr. Bad Boy, ”That grip isn’t from training, Puff. That’s from 40 years of trying to hold on to your money in the music business.” Talk about pulling a tyro’s coat tail.

Up close and personal, you also got to see how puppy-dog lovestruck Bowie’s goddess-worship of Iman was. Bowie’s curiosity also led him and Iman to truck down to CBGB one night to see this reporter’s then-wife, vocalist Tamar-Kali, rock out with her brand of Geechee Goddess Hardcore Warrior Soul. The couple also made their way to our good buddy Arthur Jafa’s very, very postmodern painting, sculpture, and performance opening in an off-the-beaten-path Soho gallery. There was nothing fake about Bowie’s passion for the people, art, and ideas that captured his imagination. If he was moved by your trip, he’d go the extra mile to show love as one of your fans, too. We also witnessed Bowie’s gangsta-husband come out at Tamar’s CBGB gig, when our 220-pound stage-diving homeboy Luqman Brown crash-landed in Iman’s lap. Bowie, sans security, turned Iceberg Slim–cold and snatched Luq off of his better half with the quickness while snapping ”Get off my wife” to our burly punk rock brother. Luq sheepishly slunk away, but we know that if it had been any other well-dressed white man courting a Somalian supermodel at CBGB back then, foul language and fisticuffs may have ensued. Even more impressive is that even after being rattled and smushed, Bowie and Iman stayed for the rest of Tamar’s set! Hardcore to the bone, yo.

Like anybody in the lily-white rock world of yon who sang, danced, and played saxophone, Bowie was beyond indebted to black culture. But much akin to Miles Davis, assimilating influences for Bowie meant he’d granted himself license to warp and mutilate those sweet inspirations in pursuit of self-renovation. This trait is abundantly evident on 1975’s Young Americans album. Bowie’s rapprochement with Philly Soul in Philly International’s home base, Sigma Sound, remains a watershed moment for our still-racialized world of American music-making. YA marked Bowie’s maiden voyage with Puerto Rican–born Apollo pit band guitarist Carlos Alomar, who’d become a studio and touring mainstay for the next decade. The album also features songwriting collaborations with emergent soul star and then-backing vocalist Luther Vandross. Shape of things to come: Who else but Bowie would later divine a crossroads for Nile Rodgers and Stevie Ray Vaughan to crew up on one of the dopest ’80s dance-floor anthems? Who else but the same man would cede the spotlight to African American bassist/singer Gail Ann Dorsey during the concert versions of ”Under Pressure”? On Young Americans, you hear a white rock star who didn’t want to be read as a mere tourist in Blackonia but as a contributor, a collaborator, and ultimately a real comrade. This latter aspect was never more clear than when Bowie sat down with MTV host Mark Goodman in 1985 and forthrightly addressed the network’s then-glaring race problem:

David Bowie: Why are there practically no blacks on the network?

Mark Goodman: We seem to be doing music that fits into what we want to play on MTV. The company is thinking in terms of narrowcasting.

David Bowie: There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I’m surprised aren’t being used on MTV.

Mark Goodman: We have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or the Midwest. Pick some town in the Midwest which would be scared to death by a string of other black faces, or black music. We have to play music we think an entire country is going to like, and certainly we’re a rock and roll station.

David Bowie: Don’t you think it’s a frightening predicament to be in?

Mark Goodman: Yeah, but no less so here than in radio.

David Bowie: Don’t say, “Well, it’s not me, it’s them.” Is it not possible it should be a conviction of the station and of the radio stations to be fair, to make the media more integrated?’

The Rolling Stones, Duran Duran, Bruce Springsteen, Talking Heads — no one, to that point, had so publicly challenged the segregated status quo at a network then offering rock artists free mass-market advertising. But from that unprompted interrogation of the race factor in MTV programming, we can infer that Bowie’s love for the most politically committed black artists — Nina Simone, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Gamble & Huff, Gil Scott-Heron, et al. — was more than lip service. Bowie got the memo that being a ride-or-die black-and-blue-eyed soul man meant putting your own career at risk in the name of cultural justice. That’s why we weren’t surprised to hear that his last album was majorly inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: ”I’m a black star / Not a rock star.'” Indubitably. And eternally. Down-by-law Bowie kept it 100 percent avant-’Groid until the wheels came off.

I wonder if that Tamar Ali show was an Afropunk branded one.

What I find fascinating is that reading the artist penned pieces over the past week dude was constantly going to shows of small acts during his hiatus in the 00's. Dude was a genuine lover of music

Awesome piece. Thanks!

>http://www.mtv.com/news/2727414/brother-from-another-planet/
>
>Brother from Another Planet
>Bowie and black music
>by mtv news staff 1/12/2016
>4k
>1
>by Greg Tate
>
>David Bowie ranks as high in our electric church’s
>Afrofuturist pantheon of demiurges as Jimi Hendrix, George
>Clinton, and Miles Davis. That’s for his outrageous
>aristocratic style, not-just-skin-deep soul, badass
>brinksmanship, and all-around Alter-Negrocity. Not to mention
>the Starman’s own sui generis take on The Funk. Bowie
>remains that rarity — a white rock artist whose
>appropriations of black kulcha never felt like a rip-off but
>more like a sharing of radical and bumptious ideations between
>like-minded freaks.
>
>It seems 1975 was the first year we saw a white man get busy
>on Soul Train, “The Hippest Trip in America.” Memory fails
>us as to whom Don Cornelius chose to lob over the color line
>before whom: Bowie with ”Fame” or Elton John, whose
>”Bennie and the Jets” had become a boom box staple on the
>back of the school bus that year at D.C.’s Coolidge High.
>That same year, Average White Band dropped ”Pick Up the
>Pieces” on Soul Train, too. Doesn’t really matter, because
>of the three, Bowie had the funkiest track and the more
>charismatically alien presence — simultaneously the most
>culturally familiar and the most outright bizarre. The
>unabashed Brit who fell to Mother Africa and kept on stepping
>in rhythm and rhyme to his own quasar.
>
>Bowie’s Soul Train appearance offers insight into his
>enigmatic ability to groove with The People and levitate above
>the fray, somewhere way beyond the pale. That visit to the
>Mecca of televised urban Terpsichore came two years after the
>two biggest pimp-thug cats at Coolidge High, Robert Parrish
>and his boy, came back from the Capital Center raving about
>seeing the Ziggy Stardust tour. This was before we knew about
>the deep and abiding relationship between louche hustlers and
>transgendered folks in the ’hood. Not long after Bowie
>dropped “Fame,” George Clinton begrudgingly tossed off
>this riposte on Mothership Connection’s ”P-Funk (Wants To
>Get Funked Up)”: ”I was down south, heard some main
>ingredients like Blue Magic, Doobie Brothers, David Bowie. It
>was cool — but can you imagine Doobie in your funk?”’
>Cite the absence of any snap on Bowie, Starchile Clinton was
>giving the Starman some major props. Not least because Bowie
>inspired all of rock and funk ’n’ roll to go more glam,
>glittery, and avant-haute in the ’70s.
>
>UNITED STATES - OCTOBER 01: RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL Photo of
>David BOWIE, performing live onstage on Philly Dogs Tour
>(Photo by Steve Morley/Redferns)
>Steve Morley/Redferns/Getty
>All roads to Glamgnocity in that era lead back to Bowie —
>himself inspired by Jimi Hendrix. But Hendrix never got to
>realize rock theatricality as extravagantly as Bowie did —
>nor did the Voodoo Chile have a costume-designing wizard like
>Japan’s Kansai Yamamoto knitting away in his stage-couture
>shed.
>
>Our ace boon Arthur Jafa likes to say that ”Andy Warhol was
>so white he was black.” Bowie (who played Warhol in
>Schnabel’s film Basquiat) was likewise so avant-garde he
>tipped over into the Avant-’Groid — that Afro-outré
>dimension where Little Richard and Sun Ra define how far out
>you can go and command love from the folk. Like Joni Mitchell
>— another unguilty pleasure of many boho blackfolk — Bowie
>double-crossed back over to black culture by being his own
>transcendently pan-everything creation. But not even Queen
>Mother Joni can say she provoked James Brown to copycat action
>twice in his career. JB was so blown away by Bowie’s
>”Fame,” he cut his own carbon-copy track, ”Hot (I Need
>to Be Loved, Loved, Loved),” and, years later, when Bowie
>optioned his publishing for stock points, the Godfather of
>Soul got the news about how lucrative the deal proved and
>quickly followed suit. Bowie once said, “The secret to my
>success was I was always the second guy to come up with the
>idea.” All hip-hop junkies can relate: How you flip
>secondhand wisdom to make the meta go mega-pop takes genius,
>too. (FYI, the ”Fame” story is further complicated by the
>fact that Brown remembered Bowie’s co-writer Carlos Alomar
>playing the main riff at the Apollo years before — but chase
>down the long version here.
>
>This reporter got to hang out with Bowie a few times in the
>aughts. Iman commissioned moi to write an essay for her
>cosmetics company’s catalogue. During our initial meeting,
>Iman leaned in with her cell phone and said, ”My husband
>wants to talk to you — he’s a big fan of your work.” Say
>WTF? It was truly the GTFOH gobsmack moment of a lifetime in
>music journalism. If only because, arrogant as we journos can
>be on the page, only an idiot thinks anyone of musical
>consequence actually reads our cantankerous sheet! Upshot is,
>because of that bizarre turnabout we got to get turnt out in
>person, as most were, by Bowie’s singular alchemy — utter
>nobility combined with an easygoing lack of pretension. Later
>came revelations about this highly irregular regular guy’s
>generosity of spirit.
>
>During our first convo, Bowie related how he’d recently met
>P. Diddy — a man so impressed by Bowie’s handshake he
>inquired as to who Bowie’s trainer was. Whereupon the Thin
>White Duke informed Mr. Bad Boy, ”That grip isn’t from
>training, Puff. That’s from 40 years of trying to hold on to
>your money in the music business.” Talk about pulling a
>tyro’s coat tail.
>
>Up close and personal, you also got to see how puppy-dog
>lovestruck Bowie’s goddess-worship of Iman was. Bowie’s
>curiosity also led him and Iman to truck down to CBGB one
>night to see this reporter’s then-wife, vocalist Tamar-Kali,
>rock out with her brand of Geechee Goddess Hardcore Warrior
>Soul. The couple also made their way to our good buddy Arthur
>Jafa’s very, very postmodern painting, sculpture, and
>performance opening in an off-the-beaten-path Soho gallery.
>There was nothing fake about Bowie’s passion for the people,
>art, and ideas that captured his imagination. If he was moved
>by your trip, he’d go the extra mile to show love as one of
>your fans, too. We also witnessed Bowie’s gangsta-husband
>come out at Tamar’s CBGB gig, when our 220-pound
>stage-diving homeboy Luqman Brown crash-landed in Iman’s
>lap. Bowie, sans security, turned Iceberg Slim–cold and
>snatched Luq off of his better half with the quickness while
>snapping ”Get off my wife” to our burly punk rock brother.
>Luq sheepishly slunk away, but we know that if it had been any
>other well-dressed white man courting a Somalian supermodel at
>CBGB back then, foul language and fisticuffs may have ensued.
>Even more impressive is that even after being rattled and
>smushed, Bowie and Iman stayed for the rest of Tamar’s set!
>Hardcore to the bone, yo.
>
>Like anybody in the lily-white rock world of yon who sang,
>danced, and played saxophone, Bowie was beyond indebted to
>black culture. But much akin to Miles Davis, assimilating
>influences for Bowie meant he’d granted himself license to
>warp and mutilate those sweet inspirations in pursuit of
>self-renovation. This trait is abundantly evident on 1975’s
>Young Americans album. Bowie’s rapprochement with Philly
>Soul in Philly International’s home base, Sigma Sound,
>remains a watershed moment for our still-racialized world of
>American music-making. YA marked Bowie’s maiden voyage with
>Puerto Rican–born Apollo pit band guitarist Carlos Alomar,
>who’d become a studio and touring mainstay for the next
>decade. The album also features songwriting collaborations
>with emergent soul star and then-backing vocalist Luther
>Vandross. Shape of things to come: Who else but Bowie would
>later divine a crossroads for Nile Rodgers and Stevie Ray
>Vaughan to crew up on one of the dopest ’80s dance-floor
>anthems? Who else but the same man would cede the spotlight to
>African American bassist/singer Gail Ann Dorsey during the
>concert versions of ”Under Pressure”? On Young Americans,
>you hear a white rock star who didn’t want to be read as a
>mere tourist in Blackonia but as a contributor, a
>collaborator, and ultimately a real comrade. This latter
>aspect was never more clear than when Bowie sat down with MTV
>host Mark Goodman in 1985 and forthrightly addressed the
>network’s then-glaring race problem:
>
>David Bowie: Why are there practically no blacks on the
>network?
>
>Mark Goodman: We seem to be doing music that fits into what we
>want to play on MTV. The company is thinking in terms of
>narrowcasting.
>
>David Bowie: There seem to be a lot of black artists making
>very good videos that I’m surprised aren’t being used on
>MTV.
>
>Mark Goodman: We have to try and do what we think not only New
>York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or
>the Midwest. Pick some town in the Midwest which would be
>scared to death by a string of other black faces, or black
>music. We have to play music we think an entire country is
>going to like, and certainly we’re a rock and roll station.
>
>David Bowie: Don’t you think it’s a frightening
>predicament to be in?
>
>Mark Goodman: Yeah, but no less so here than in radio.
>
>David Bowie: Don’t say, “Well, it’s not me, it’s
>them.” Is it not possible it should be a conviction of the
>station and of the radio stations to be fair, to make the
>media more integrated?’
>
>The Rolling Stones, Duran Duran, Bruce Springsteen, Talking
>Heads — no one, to that point, had so publicly challenged
>the segregated status quo at a network then offering rock
>artists free mass-market advertising. But from that unprompted
>interrogation of the race factor in MTV programming, we can
>infer that Bowie’s love for the most politically committed
>black artists — Nina Simone, James Brown, Stevie Wonder,
>Marvin Gaye, Gamble & Huff, Gil Scott-Heron, et al. — was
>more than lip service. Bowie got the memo that being a
>ride-or-die black-and-blue-eyed soul man meant putting your
>own career at risk in the name of cultural justice. That’s
>why we weren’t surprised to hear that his last album was
>majorly inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly:
>”I’m a black star / Not a rock star.'” Indubitably. And
>eternally. Down-by-law Bowie kept it 100 percent
>avant-’Groid until the wheels came off.

One thing about the tragedy is it made me go back thru his catalog again. I started with Space Oddity and on Station to Station now, had such a strong album run as a solo artist, maybe kept his prime going more than any other solo artist, debatable at least. A few mediocre ones but most his shit was on point up thru Let's Dance, then kinda hit or miss after that but did like 95's Outside and this new one is pretty great.