Requiescat in Pace

Prince (1958 – 2016)

Jim Dedman Requiescat in Pace

Prince_logo.svgPrince, the resplendent, bizarre, and extraordinarily talented musician, died this past Thursday of as of yet unconfirmed causes. The cruelest of recent years, 2016 continues to rob us of our most beloved artists and performers. What words are left for us to express our bewilderment and grief when we’ve been forced to use them so many times before in just the past few months? In the past several days, we’ve seen multitudes of eulogies and tributes, and I too feel compelled to write about this devastating loss to popular culture.

As a child in the early 1980’s, when MTV first introduced him to me, Prince seemed to be some type of phantasmagorical oddity. He, along with Michael Jackson, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, and Boy George, defined the popular culture of that era. Taken together, that curious coterie of artists reigned over MTV in its early days. His singles permeated the airwaves, and I have vivid memories of listening to them in the car as my parents drove me to and fro in suburban Houston all those years ago. Then came the summer of 1989. Thirteen years old that year, I greatly anticipated Tim Burton’s Batman for which, of course, Prince authored the vibrant and daring soundtrack. My favorite moment of the film remains that electric sequence during which The Joker vandalizes the priceless works of art in the Gotham City museum as Prince’s “Partyman” echoes throughout the building. It was as if the song became its own character in the film.

His music served as the soundtrack to countless moments of my life. Each time I hear the mad genius of “Let’s Go Crazy,” a song released more than thirty years ago, it’s as if I’m experiencing it again for the very first time. In the early 1990’s, as a high school student, I often drove around Houston listening to the anthemic “7” (after spending the entirety of an afternoon searching for its compact disc single at various local record stores). Music fans of all stripes once quested for the mysterious, unreleased Black Album, which for many years existed only as an elusive bootleg. I never found it, although the album ultimately saw its commercial release in late 1994. In December of 1998, and of course, at the end of the following year, Prince’s “1999” was inescapable, despite the fact that the song had been released more than a decade and a half beforehand. In 2004, the cast and crew of Pleadings, the independent film I wrote and produced, joined together to sing “Purple Rain” at a Houston karaoke bar to celebrate the end of principal photography.

Culturally omnipotent, he worked with or otherwise influenced throngs of other musicians, and references to Prince’s work would often crop up in the work of other artists. He wrote “Manic Monday,” which became a hit for The Bangles in 1986. Sinead O’Connor’s 1990 cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” still haunts listeners 26 years later. Known for their catchy 1990 single “Pure,” the members of The Lightning Seeds chose their name after mishearing the lyrics to “Raspberry Beret.” In 1996, a group of Austin bands, including Spoon, contributed tracks to Do Me Baby! Austin Does Prince, a tribute compilation. In 2002’s “The Real Slim Shady,” Eminem revealed that he had “been suspenseful with a pencil ever since Prince turned himself into a symbol.” In 2009, The Fruit Bats released “Singing Joy To The World,” a wonderfully melancholy song which tells the story of a love which germinated, in part, due to Prince’s “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man.” His influence abounds, and without a doubt, it will continue to do so.

In early 1978, when Prince released his first album, I was a mere toddler, meaning that until this week the only world I knew was one which included him. Upon hearing the news of his death, my mind leapt again to the sense of loss we communally felt upon the passing of another great, David Bowie. In January, just a week after Bowie’s death, I wrote:

Now we find ourselves a part of a popular culture absent David Bowie, once its ubiquitous fixture. For many, including myself, there was never until this week a cultural landscape that existed without Bowie thriving therein. As Jemaine Clement, a member of New Zealand’s Flight of the Conchords musical duo, remarked on behalf of that group, “Both born in the ’70s, we hadn’t witnessed a world without Bowie.” To fans and followers of popular music, Bowie remained omnipresent in both his output and influence, and we always anticipated that he would soon release something intriguing and new.

…

We are, as one Twitter user recently observed, “losing the unloseable.” Like intrepid concert photographer Ben Stas, I now marvel at “the degree to which the man has been omnipresent in my life since I first took a serious interest in music.”

The same is true of Prince, the cool and cryptic crooner, the guitarist, the producer, the actor, the enigma. Unlike so many makers of music in those halcyon days of the early 1980’s, he endured, becoming one of the artists whose work nearly all of us knew. He continued to experiment with both his art and its delivery to his fans. To toy with his listeners, he once released a 45 minute album featuring nine songs combined into a single track on the compact disc. When fans purchased a ticket to a Prince concert, they would often discover that they had also bought a copy of his latest album as a part of the transaction. However, his notorious hostility to the streaming services made it rather difficult to revisit his oeuvre in our bereavement. As one writer noted, “[i]t was a strange mourning, to be at work and wanting to listen to the songs that we all knew but knowing that they wouldn’t be available to illustrate the shared grief.” Despite his reluctance to embrace the Internet, he remained omnipresent in the culture, prompting the great manifestation of adoration we beheld on that sad, sad day.

Requiescat in pace, Prince (June 7, 1958 – April 21, 2016).

David Bowie (1947 – 2016)

Jim Dedman Requiescat in Pace

David-Bowie-Blackstar-640x640

David Bowie now belongs to the ages. In the seven days since the world learned the sad news of his passing, much has been written about the man and his majestic oeuvre. Our communal bereavement compels us to compose online eulogies and assemble playlists of cherished songs which once served as the soundtrack for both recent and distant moments. Mike Doub, writing at 33⅓’s blog, puts it well when he notes that our “degree of collective mourning has been beneficial to [his] own grieving.” Just as so many other admirers have done, I too must share my thoughts on David Bowie.

Although I didn’t appreciate his place in the cultural realm at the time, I first encountered Bowie by way of 1978’s David Bowie Narrates Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. I’m not certain when my parents purchased that record for me, but I do remember listening to it during my very early years. As a child of the 1980’s, I came to know his hits from that glorious decade, including “Let’s Dance,” “Dancing in the Street,” and, of course, “Under Pressure,” his magnificent collaboration with Queen. The soundtrack to the 1986 film Labyrinth, which starred Bowie as the Goblin King, offered us “Magic Dance,” which to this day still provokes a genuinely wonderful joy.  As the late 1980’s fell to the early 1990’s, I found myself listening to classic rock radio and learning a bit of his fine work from the 1970’s (although the disc jockeys of that era rarely strayed beyond a limited set of Bowie’s popular singles). If memory serves, it was about that time that I came to own Changesbowie, the 1990 compilation album, and “Fame ’90,” a remix single released that same year in conjunction with that hits package.

1992 saw the release of Cool World, the curious live action/animated film starring Gabriel Byrne and Kim Basinger. Its soundtrack introduced me to a new version of Bowie, who contributed to that effort “Real Cool World,” a work of what was then called techno. That same year, he briefly appeared in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a film based on the “Twin Peaks” television series, an obsession of mine at the time. Shortly thereafter, I was taken aback upon first hearing “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” the vibrant first single from Bowie’s 1995 concept album, Outside. In the following years, I collected what I could of his sizable discography. When I moved to South Carolina from Texas in 2006, the instrumental track “A New Career in a New Town,” from 1977’s Low, became the unofficial theme song of my journey. Just last year, when I created a playlist composed of one song from each year I’ve lived on the occasion of my fortieth birthday, I chose Bowie’s epic anthem “Heroes,” his finest moment, as my selection for 1977.

The epic concerts we miss haunt us for many years to come. Though I’ve seen many artists perform live, I never beheld David Bowie in concert. I am the poorer for it. He released Outside in September of 1995 in the dawn of my sophomore year at The University of Texas at Austin. Only a few weeks later, on October 14, 1995, Bowie brought The Outside Tour to South Park Meadows, a now defunct Austin live music venue I frequented in those days. My old friend Ryan Steans, an indefatigable blogger who now writes at The Signal Watch, recently recounted that Bowie’s 1995 Austin show served as his first date with Jamie, his wife of now 16 years. Looking back, I’m not certain what occupied my attention that night, but I negligently failed to attend that show (a grievous error, especially since I had just seen Radiohead open for R.E.M. and the Ramones perform with Pearl Jam on consecutive nights at that venue just a few weeks earlier). In 2004, I lived in Beaumont, Texas, 100 or so miles from Houston, where David Bowie stopped at The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in April of that year. Unaware of the show, I missed it, as well.

Now we find ourselves a part of a popular culture absent David Bowie, once its ubiquitous fixture. For many, including myself, there was never until this week a cultural landscape that existed without Bowie thriving therein. As Jemaine Clement, a member of New Zealand’s Flight of the Conchords musical duo, remarked on behalf of that group, “Both born in the ’70s, we hadn’t witnessed a world without Bowie.” To fans and followers of popular music, Bowie remained omnipresent in both his output and influence, and we always anticipated that he would soon release something intriguing and new. Unlike many of his contemporaries who long ago lost whatever edge they once maintained, Bowie never halted his quest to experiment and reinvent himself. One need only listen to Blackstar, his haunting final album released just a few days before his death, to confirm that fact. Its stark album cover, appended at the top of this post, now seems especially foreboding in light of what we would soon learn about the state of his health.

We are, as one Twitter user recently observed, “losing the unloseable.” Like intrepid concert photographer Ben Stas, I now marvel at “the degree to which the man has been omnipresent in my life since I first took a serious interest in music.” Upon learning of his death, I could react only by creating a Spotify playlist of my 50 favorite David Bowie tracks. For how many artists could one assemble a list of 50 beloved songs? His vast body of work, coupled with his ostensible permanency in the world of music and film, explains why his death affects so many who never personally knew him. We never thought it would come to an end because we could not conceptualize a world without him. But now he is gone.

Requiescat in pace, David Bowie (January 8, 1947 – January 10, 2016).