73. David Bowie – Sunday (2002)

I spoke of the new wave rockers, and how they conducted themselves in this decade. I also discussed the old rockers who died during the decade. But I've yet to mention the old rockers who are still with us, still recording. They are now fated to contend with the world that they created: they are the ones who, back in the sixties, asserted that it is the youth who determines the values of pop culture, thus also directing the course of the human spirit. And so, as they now reach old age, their voice is no longer heard on the hit parade, and their music is played on the radio. Only their fans keep the flame going and keep on listening, and they in turn inform them of the questions arising from life in their advanced age, and offer answers. Every rock fan has at least one aging rocker who remains part of their life, who they still follow.

For me, it is David Bowie, the man who helped me develop my philosophy of existence, the man whose records helped me through rough times, the man whose art opened endless horizons for me, the man who sold me the world. But in the beginning of this decade I was somewhat detached from his art. In the nineties, after the commercialization of the eighties, he went back to making exceptional and groundbreaking music, but it lacked the penetrating emotion which the seventies records always had. I retained my loyalty to seventies Bowie, and kept an eye on what contemporary Bowie was doing, but my attention went more towards younger artists. When I bought his album Heathen in 2002, I didn't know what to expect, and I didn't expect much. I put the CD in the player and pushed Play, and 15 seconds into the opening track 'Sunday', he had me all the way back.

Bowie says he cried when he wrote this song. Fifty-five years old, the thought of death started to enter the mind of the man whose art was always connected to the here and now. The result was this album, which deals with the deepest questions that always troubled humankind, and stubbornly does so from the point of view of a heathen, of a man who refuses to accept any doctrine that offers consolation, but looks reality in the eyes and knows that no one can provide the final answers. It is a highly spiritual album, a sense of religious splendor resting upon it, and we here echoes of angel-singing throughout, but without any confidence that there are indeed angels that watch over us. And Bowie's voice, the voice that somehow lost some of the soul and feeling and pain over the years, gets all its depth and sonority back, flowering in an emotional range even greater than before. To most of his fans, this album is on the same level of his more famous masterpieces, and almost every track from it is considered a Bowie classic. I could choose at least seven of them, but 'Sunday' for me is above all, since it is the one that hit me first. The heart of Bowie's art has always been his struggling with the changes that we go through in our lives, and asking how we can control them to achieve happiness. Here, he talks about a total spiritual change, a metaphysical transfiguration. Again, it isn't clear is he's talking about transformation from human to angel, or about some spiritual changes that happens in your life, and it doesn't matter. The experience, anyway, is beyond words.