FREE TO BE YOU
In the days after David Bowie died, some recalled his accomplishments as a singer-songwriter, and many recalled his bold sense of style, his facile gender-fluidity, and his position as a heroic outsider. He’s a music icon but what captivates is his identity.
Bowie was fine-boned and fragile-looking, and possessed, in addition, an uncanny photographic intelligence. He knew fashion and makeup, but even more he knew his angles, and how to project a potent image for the camera. As a schoolboy it was his movement instructor who first identified his star quality, not his music teacher or choir master. As a performer he adopted a series of fictional identities, all convincing and also, somehow, deeply felt. Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke are remembered as real people, more so than any of Madonna’s fashion-savvy reincarnations or Lady Gaga’s self-obscuring personae.
Bowie himself remained, to the public, mostly unknown. As a follow up to his obituary the New York Times ran a pleasing, gossipy piece
about how the pop star built an anonymous, bourgeois, (mostly)
paparazzi-free life for himself and his family in an apartment building on a busy shopping street in SoHo. For formal events he put on a tuxedo and fixed his hair. At other times he walked his neighborhood alone, unshaven, wearing jeans,
sneakers and baseball caps, (mostly) undetected. He bough fruit at the deli and magazines at the newsstand.
Years ago, on a summer afternoon, I saw Bruce Springsteen walking through Union Square. He was wearing an ankle-length black leather trenchcoat and motorcycle boots, and had his wife beside him and a scrum of bodyguards trailing six steps behind. He was a blue collar rock star playing Blue Collar Rock Star. Maybe this is why Bowie was so remarkable. He crafted a series of images for himself that were so indelible, so intoxicating, that they allowed his own self, unmoored, to move freely behind.