A small first line, I started writing this roughly 20 minutes after the news David Bowie had passed away, the story remains the same, but I added a few things, so at times the timeline reads a little awkward, my apologies for that!
We can take a look at so many things, first there is ‘Making a murderer’, the Netflix show that is creating larger and larger waves. In addition, we see that the State of Wisconsin is keeping access hard. Even though court records should be available, even as today’s world allows for instant creation of PDF files, one Australian woman who requested all documents can do so for the mere $6000. Yes, six thousand dollars. The Wisconsin office has one person full time assigned to this. Can anyone explain why those records are so hard to be gotten at?
It only fuels organisations like the innocence project and this mess is not going away any day soon.
We could take a look at how the UK Watchdog is going soft on banks, which is not even close to the truth. The fact that PwC seems to have been granted support in keeping its tainted name out of nearly all publications and was allowed to keep a low profile is a mystery that will not be solved any day soon. In addition, http://www.accountancyage.com/ has just diminished the 3 billion value loss from Tesco in a mere statement regarding James Chalmers “The last year has not been without its challenges for PwC’s head of assurance. The firm lost the audit of Tesco after 32 years with the embattled grocer following an accounting scandal of its overstated half-yearly results. But that appeared a blip in a year which saw assurance fees rise 9% to £1.1bn, while the firm continues to dominate the FTSE 100 with 40 clients, almost double the number of nearest rival KPMG at 24“, greed is eternal, nothing else seem to matter, making Tesco mere collateral damage in all this. I admit that the former high ranking heads of Tesco started this, yet someone at PwC has been signing off on it whilst the accountancy firm has been charging millions for the years that these events played. The prosecution parties at large do not seem to care, PwC is too large and too powerful. This would imply that nowadays being a mere tool for organised crime might grant a person more integrity.
There are a few more things playing, places like Greece, but for me none of that matters. I just heard that David Bowie died. That is the only news that matters today. I heard it 30 minutes ago and my world stopped. I remember it all. It was 1975, I was in High School and ‘Fame’ was released. It was my first Bowie record (in those days a black disk that you had to rotate ¾ of a turn per second to hear the music correctly. One of those hits that changes things. I had to look it up, but that song got as high as 4th position in the Dutch charts in those days. After that I got to the Album Low, Heroes, Stage (which was on yellow Vinyl), Lodger and the list went on, it was only after Black Tie White Noise that I started to look at the earlier albums I had missed out on (they were re-released on CD). For a while things went a little silent, there were of course other performers. It was ‘Heathen’ that re-sparked his music in me. In the end, his music never stopped amazing me, for 40 years his music rocked my world without fail. There have been other makers of music, and more will come in the future, yet at this moment, I lost a music giant who remained original until the very end. Not many can achieve this, the bulk will not even make the two decade mark, which does not reflect badly on them, it only shows how remarkable David Bowie was.
So perhaps we will see a new Space Shuttle named the ‘Major Tom’ be launched, perhaps we will see the life that was Bowie on the Silver Screen and we will see an explosion of his hits soon enough, I think back to those naughty evenings on a beach with a topless woman, trying to find out what else fits and listening to the hit Cat People, or going to the ‘the Glass Spider tour’ in Rotterdam.
So as we see another giant exit the stage, we realise that his music remains. I also just realised that I lost a bet with a friend, I wagered the equivalent of $2 that Both Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) and Iggy Pop, would be long dead and forgotten by the time David Bowie would shed his mortality, a bet I made in the early 80’s, it turns out that I am wrong on both counts and weirdly enough all three became legends in their own rights and even as John Lydon is no longer the ‘performer’, he did end up moving into another venue of the arts as he published ‘Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored’ in 2014, it is not impossible that the music gene will hit him once more, I wonder if performers like that can truly stop being musicians, just my thoughts on that. In that regard Iggy Pop has not shed his performance gene, so as one of the legends of a previous generation, Iggy can proudly raise his torch of achievement showing us all who failed to see his strength and stamina. The fact that he created a few hits together with David Bowie only strengthens him as a person and signifies in addition my bad call on his early ‘demise’.
Even as Bowie fought a long battle with cancer, he remained active and he was still with us when his last album Blackstar was released on January 8th, with this David Bowie redefines the old expression ‘he died with his boots on’. He did that, whilst leaving pretty much all his fans breathless with the power of the song Lazarus, many saw it and only two days later the song would hit most of us like a sledgehammer, surpassing the impact of many of his musical milestones. Our idol bestowed one more gem on us.
I feel no sadness, other than for the family and friends he leaves behind, I feel no negativity; I just stare at the massive list of albums he created the dozens of albums he left us and the many dozens of hours of music they represent. Today that is the news that truly matters, we do not mourn what we lost, we rejoice for the music he left us. I admit, it sounds selfish, but it is not, for the simple reason that whenever I saw of him, I saw him celebrating life. We should honour that, so listen to a song or album, watch him in a movie where he played a role in (bonus points for those who watch Labyrinth) and remember that whomever gets to do a mere 20% of what he did will end up having a pretty stellar life.
So tomorrow, more likely one day later I will look at the issues many ignore, but for today it is about saying farewell to a person whose musical presence I thoroughly enjoyed.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 