Estimated Prophet (Bob Weir 1947-2026)

The Grateful Dead, Cornell 77 (Rhino/Grateful Dead Records, 2017)

---. Dave's Picks Volume 55 [Le Zenith, Paris 10/28/90] (Rhino/Grateful Dead Records, 2025).

Bob Weir, Ace (WB, 1972).

---, Heaven Help The Fool (Arista, 1978).

---, Bobby & the Midnights (Arista, 1981).

I've wanted to write something about the Grateful Dead for a while, I started something after Phil Lesh's death but never got anywhere with it, but have a hard time finding a way into talking about their music. Perhaps it's because I got into the Dead late in life and don't have a retrospective desire to unpack what I was thinking and doing while getting into them in the halcyon days of 2009. If anything, getting into the Dead was about making peace with the elements of the music that I didn't like and didn't want to like, which seems like the opposite procedure when getting into music you'll spend a decent amount of time listening to and collecting over the next decade and a half. 

A number of people have already written about the significant re-evaluation the band has undergone in the last decade and a half. It hit its zenith culturally around 2015-2016 with the 50th anniversary of the band's founding. The remaining members of the band played three massive concerts not in the Bay Area, but in Chicago at Soldier Field. Trey Anastasio from the band Phish sat in for Jerry Garcia, cementing Phish's reputation (finally) as the heir apparent to the Dead. Bruce Hornsby, long-time substitute keyboardist for the band in its early 90s incarnation, played there as well. 

The following year independent institution 4AD records released a multi-disc tribute to the Grateful Dead, Day of the Dead, produced by the Dessner brothers from the National. Most important bigger independent musicians making music in 2016 are on the record (from the worlds of jazz, international, jam and rock music among other genres) and it conferred upon the Dead a kind of coolness that they hadn't really experienced since the early 1970s. To say you were a Deadhead in the late 2010s elicited a very different response than at any other point during the previous couple of decades. As each member of the Dead have left this plane of existence (Phil Lesh and now Bobby Weir) musicians from every musical genre became a little more comfortable praising the Dead to the point where it's almost more unusual now to find someone who doesn't enjoy their music on some level. 

The world I grew up in was very different. The New Rolling Stone Record Guide from 1982, my bible for assessing what was and was not worthy of exploration, referred to the band as a "pox upon the face of pop." "Truthfully," Dave Marsh writes in their entry, "there simply isn't very much about this group that's impressive, except the devotion of its fans to a mythology created in Haight-Ashbury and now sustained in junior high schools across America." The last sentence particularly resonated with me. Marsh wrote that in the early 80s, when the Dead were at a commercial low. By the time I discovered the record guide, as well as heard of the Dead, they were in heavy rotation on MTV and, yes, much beloved by a certain cohort in my junior high. The people in my hometown who listened to the Dead were less hippies, more the chuds in backwards baseball caps who populated the parking lots outside of Dead shows trying to score drugs. This shouldn't be confused with the burnouts and drunks at my school who mostly listened to things like Sonic Youth and the Pogues. The people who listened to the Dead remind me of every guy who now comments on CNBC with a backdrop of vintage Dead posters and expensive guitars. They were the least cool people you could imagine, and in my teenage imagination I imagined them listening to the Dead while getting drunk and singing in front of a bonfire with other chuds, eventually sloppily fucking their girlfriends after.

A bit harsh, I know. By the time I got to college Deadheads had morphed into skinny white guys with dreads and thirty year old burnouts who hung around 18 year old students. Inevitably, if you wanted to get high, you had to endure sitting in someone's dorm room listening to indistinct guitar noodling playing in the background while some guy pointed out how Jerry started a guitar solo on this bootleg recording from 1978 that would eventually be finished by this other guitar solo recorded at a show in 1981. It was clear to me that the reason someone could make this absurd claim was that it all sounded exactly the same and was boring as hell. But, but! Even in the middle of my Dead aversion I did hear a song that I really liked. One day while getting high and playing chess with my friend Allan he put on "Unbroken Chain" from the album From Mars Hotel. I loved that song: the guitar tones, the vocals, the synthesizer that bubbled up in the background. It didn't sound like "Casey Jones" or "Touch of Grey" or any of the other big Dead songs that I had heard. I made a mental note and filed it away.

Honestly, between college graduation in 1995 (I remember hearing the news about Jerry Garcia's death but it didn't really register) and 2009 my life was pretty Dead free. My musical taste veered (or so I thought) far from the Dead into more abstract and electronic music. My favorite music related reading material was no longer the New Rolling Stone Record Guide was the magazine the Wire out of the UK. So I was pretty surprised when Biba Kopf, the pen name of writer and musician Chris Bohn, wrote a piece about the joy of listening to then new box set concert runs of the Dead in 1969 and 1973 (https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/3807/page/52). He ends the piece by writing "The six hours occupied by different versions of 'Playing In The Band' on my MP3 machine feel like nowhere near enough, but they'll do for a start." 

At that time, I had a newborn and spent most of my days holding them in a comfy chair while on my computer. As evidence by Kopf's piece, it was the age of the MP3 and I would often download torrents of music to my laptop to listen to while sitting with my newborn. So, given the praise Kopf was heaping on these Grateful Dead box sets I decided to seek them out and download them. If they sucked, no harm no foul and I could go back to not thinking about the Dead again. I did make the condition that I had to listen to the box set all the way through (10 CDs worth of music) before deciding if I liked the Dead or not. 

The set begins with "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" sung by their keyboardist Pigpen, and here already some doubts started to set in. If you haven't listened to Pigpen sing old rhythm and blues songs, I will say that the every bar band trying to sound authentically "blues-y" sounds like this; I don't mean it as a compliment. Pigpen would often improvise asides in his cover, including, unfortunately, the fact that he didn't care if she were underage. Anyways, this opening performance was far from auspicious. The next track "Doin' That Rag" was slightly better, although, again, the hokeyness of some 60s band talking about "doin' a rag" wasn't really expanding my mind the way I had been told it would and starting thinking that perhaps the Rolling Stone Record Guide and my teenage prejudices were correct. 

Things really didn't start to pick up until the "Mountains of the Moon->Dark Star" later on the first disc. In fact, the two "Mountains of the Moon->Dark Stars" on the set are still the highlights for me. They definitely were my gateways into the Dead: the former a gentile, mysterious psychedelic ballad the later being, well, Dark Star. Of course I had heard of Dark Star before hearing it on the box set: in fact, I had more than once been tempted to pick up Grayfolded, the John Oswald plunder-phonic "mash up" of 25 or so years of recorded Dark Stars. When it was released in 1994, music publications that generally avoid discussing the Dead were pretty universal in their praise. Oswald had been an important figure in tape collage and the sounds of the Dead were seen as further material for Oswald's plunder-phonic aesthetic Within the improvisation of each version of Dark Star I understood what people liked about it. It wasn't so much the "stoner" aspect--some of my favorite Dead listening experiences have been soberly cleaning my house on the first Saturday morning in upstate NY when you can open your windows after a long winter--rather it was music for thinking, for a having a pleasant feeling which, in turn, opens up a space for thinking. I realize that sounds like a stoner thought but it's not so different from some of the ambient projects Brian Eno has done over the years. 

After listening to the 1969 box set and deciding I wanted to explore further, I moved on to the other box set mentioned in Biba Kopf's original piece in the Wire: Winterland 73. I knew that the Dead of 1973 was going to be different than the Dead of 1969. I also had a similar rule to the 69 box set: I would listen to it all the way through and then make up my mind, If I needed to overcome Pig Pen's blues numbers on the 1969 set, then the 1973 concerts would present a new problem up top: a bunch of cowboy songs, songs that sound like they could be cowboy songs and Chuck Berry covers. As someone who had already enjoyed songs like "Dupree's Diamond Blues" on the 69 set, I didn't mind when Jerry performed these songs, but whenever Bob Weir would belt out "El Paso" or "Mexicali Blues" or "Promised Land" I really had to resist the urge to end my exploration of the Dead right there. Weir doesn't have an unpleasant voice but he sounds like someone's science teacher's bar band playing at the local bar on a Saturday night. And that, of course, is conversely why he became kind of endearing to me after a while. Pig Pen became endearing to me after a while because I'm always fascinated by the outsider in a group of outsiders. Bob Weir became endearing to me because he always seemed excited at the idea that he was playing music on stage for people. Just like that fictional science teacher I was thinking about earlier. 

Which is why it's perfect that the song he will be most remembered for is entitled "Playing in the Band?" That song originally came off his 1972 solo record Ace, but it was quickly absorbed by the Dead and turned into one of their many exploratory jams. Ace, the album from which "Playing in the Band" comes, is a very good album, with a number of well-written concise songs that would find their way into Dead sets well into the 21st century. "Cassidy," a song about Bob's relationship with the writer Neal Cassidy, is the highlight for me: one of the loveliest melodies in the Dead catalogue. Even before I became a genuine Deadhead, I always enjoyed the song from Suzanne Vega's version on the Dedicated tribute album, an album I owned because of the overlap with a number of artists I liked (Elvis Costello, Warren Zevon, Vega) despite the fact that at the time I was baffled by their love of the Dead. 

My favorite Weir song, however, isn't from Ace but from the Dead's 1977 album Terrapin Station, "Estimated Prophet." The best version of the song is actually on the now officially released Cornell 77 concert. I've always thought of "Estimated Prophet" as the Dead's attempt to make a Steely Dan song. It has the shuffle, the horns and the sun soaked burned out vibe that the Dan would skewer as their jaundiced eye moved towards the west coast as the seventies moved on. Yet, what also reminds me of the Dan is a eschatological menace that's found in Dan songs like "King of the World," "Don't Take Me Alive" and "Third World Man." I have no idea if Weir thought of "Estimated Prophet" this way, but there's something about the narrator's insistence that the listener shouldn't "worry about [him]," the repetition of the "no's" and the "voices" the narrator hears in his head telling him where to go. It's a reminder that the merry prankster ethos was always adjacent to the more violent cultish aspects of communal life in the late 60s. Again, Weir seemed to believe in the utopian aspects of the Dead's dream caravan until his death, but "Estimated Prophet" suggests that something haunted the fire wheels burning in the sky in California. 

In the late 70s someone realized that Bob Weir was a good looking guy with an okay voice and maybe he could break out as a solo star. Look at the Fool is the yacht-rock record he made with studio musicians during that time. What people failed to understand was that as good looking and charming as Bob Weir was, he also reveled in the slop. The Dead were never about perfectionism the way that Steely Dan (or the Doobie Brothers or any other late 70s studio band you could name) were: the Dead were about the feelings that emerge from "playing in the band," more often than not that meant playing live (something Steely Dan hadn't done since 1974). This is where the (somewhat erroneous IMO) idea came about that the Dead didn't put much thought into their studio albums (certainly post Blues for Allah). Weir was too weird for Yacht Rock: just listen to any version of "Looks Like Rain," wherein Bob's yelping rage against the rain evolves or devolves into parody and excess. Bob followed up Look at the Fool with an album of competent bar rock blues tinged numbers credited to Bobby and the Midnites, but after that he pretty much just stuck to playing with the Dead.

As the brilliant Rob Mitchum pointed out on Steven Hyden's great substack Evil Speakers (https://stevenhyden.substack.com/p/the-36ftv-bob-weir-tribute-special) the series Dave's Picks offered a lovely unintentional tribute to Weir in their 55th volume (released shortly before Weir's death). The second disc opens with one of the more bizarre Weir songs "Victim or the Crime," from the final Dead studio album Built to Last. In this live version Weir theatrical vocals are surrounded by very late 80s MIDI sounds, easily some of the more experimental stuff the band was doing at the time. There's also a strong "Estimated Prophet' two songs later and, given how fatigued Jerry sounds on this recording and how checked out Phil Lesh had been sounding for most of the 80s, you could make the argument (as Mitchum does) that Weir had finally become the de facto leader of the band. 

This would only become more pronounced after Garcia's death in 1995 and the formation of the touring juggernaut Dead & Co after the Fair Thee Well shows in 2015. Weir would release one more solo record in 2016, Blue Mountain, which opens with one of his best songs "Only a River." But don't take my word for it, in 2023 while touring Japan Bob Dylan, one of Weir's heroes, covered the song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJMV0-RMAKw&list=RDwJMV0-RMAKw&start_radio=1) Weir may forever be known as "the other one," but if you live long enough, with all due respect to Bill Kreuzman and Mickey Heart, you may find yourself "the only one" left. 

Under the Sign of the Blackstar: Ten Years of David Bowie's "Blackstar" (Part Two)

Brexit

What did Bowie’s death and the release of “Blackstar” unleash, through their respective spacetime-warping force? If we play along with this speculative fiction, Brexit is the most relevant geographic, historical and political effect. I’ll begin with two quotations from novelist Hanif Kureishi after Bowie’s death: 

“Bowie attended the same school as me, Bromley technical high school in Keston, but 10 years earlier. It is important to note what a shit-hole it was: bullying, violent, with incompetent teachers. Education, in those days, for working- and lower-middle-class children, was hardly considered essential or even necessary. We were being trained to be clerks for the civil service…[t]he more imaginative boys, or the ones who could draw, went into advertising, which Bowie did after school, working on a campaign for a slimming biscuit called Ayds.”

“British pop had always been lower middle class and came out of the art schools rather than universities, which is where all the other British culture – theatre, movies, the novel – came from. Pop was always more lively: the music-mad kids were rebellious, angry and ornery. They always had a chip on their shoulders when it came to class and education. Social disadvantage has always been essential to pop: the hilarious incongruity of kids brought up in small houses without central heating and eating Spam for tea suddenly finding themselves living in mansions after writing a song.”

This narrative is repeated again and again. Let’s use two additional examples from post-war British pop: John Lennon and Brian Eno. Lennon, a child of a single mother in Liverpool, attended art school in Liverpool after failing out of high school (his O-levels). Without the ability of a child from a single-parent household to go to art school with poor grades and less money, the history of pop music would be quite different. Eno, the child of postman, went to two different art schools—one associated with the technical college in Ipswich, the other the Winchester School of Art—neither of which were in the university system at the time. While a postal worker’s son might have opportunities not afforded to the child of a single mother, nevertheless, both biographies suggest a social safety net allowing for children of the working and service class to transform art (in this case music) in significant ways. And, yes, advertising was quick to snag these aspiring artists, but it was a time when advertising, whether we like it or not, often spurred their creativity rather than stifling it (Andy Warhol, favorite of Bowie's, would be an American example of this). 

What also marks this generation of pop artists is a willingness to experiment as well as an openness to other cultures and musics. Again, both Lennon and Bowie flirted more than once with the uglier aspects of dominant British culture (misogyny and colonialism in Lennon’s case, White Nationalism and Crowly-ish “homo superiority” in Bowie’s case); and Eno has always been guilty of a type of paternalistic, professorial quality, often deflecting his own role in the creation and continuance of the dominant neoliberal culture through conceptual obfuscation.  Yet, at least in Lennon and Eno’s examples, the type of materialist critique has never been far from their public personas: Lennon’s deep, to the point of self-parody, commitment to U.S. leftist politics of the late 1960s during the early 70s;  Eno’s outspoken views in the last several years on Palestine, war crimes, debt and, yes, Brexit (I write more about Eno's politics here: https://sevendeadlyfinns.blogspot.com/2016/06/brian-eno-ship.html). 

The relationship of Bowie’s art to history and politics is more complicated. Shortly after his death, the philosopher Simon Critchley gave an interview explicitly about Bowie’s politics: 

“You can’t really identify Bowie with an obvious, normal political position—he didn’t support the Conservative Party or Labour Party as far as I am aware, but I think the way he saw it was that there was something about art, and particularly pop music, that had insurrectionary quality and could question and bring down authority. For him, music was a political tool or could be used as a political tool to question forms of political and theological authority.”

I think that’s true, but it is often this open-ended, repressive hypothesis, that popular music is a tool for questioning authority and is therefore, in itself, political, has led to its cooption into a dominant consumerist culture at least since the 1960s. Mark Fisher writes about this in Capitalist Realism: 

“The protest impulse of the 60s posited a malevolent Father, the harbinger of a reality principle that (supposedly) cruelly and arbitrarily denies the ‘right’ to total enjoyment. This Father has unlimited access to resources, but he selfishly—and senselessly—hoards them. Yet it is not capitalism but protest itself which depends upon this figuration of the Father; and one of the successes of the current global elite has been their avoidance of identification with the figure of the hoarding Father, even though the ‘reality’ they impose on the young is substantially harsher than the conditions they protested against in the 60s.”

In a world where the authority figures Critchley cites have been supplanted by the likes of David Bowie, it becomes harder to ascribe Bowie’s critique of authority any political weight. As the chiding subheading of the interview with Critchley mentions, proving the pointlessness and toothlessness of Bowie’s insurrection : “Though there was that attack on the Crusades.” 

For Critchley, Bowie’s political intervention lies is in the politics of gender and sexuality: 

"The cool thing about Bowie is why working-class heterosexual boys like me found in Bowie a new landscape of possibility in relation to identity. We were dying our hair red and wearing mascara. And women were doing the same. What Bowie brought about was a kind of plasticity, or malleability, around questions of gender and gender identity. For him, there was something absurd about the standard heterosexual understanding of sexuality, and sexuality required a larger field of possibility and imagination. I think the liberating effects of that were felt by his fans.”

I think this political dimension to Bowie’s work cannot be overstated, and can be connected back to his time in art school. Though the gender and sexual critique can still be viewed through the lens of Fisher’s larger critique of capitalism and rebellion (it’s worth remembering that Bowie would later “out” himself as a “closeted heterosexual”), as someone who is neither gay nor transgender (but am happily raising a transgender child), I cannot imagine what Bowie’s permission must have felt like on a corporeal level. Yes, from the larger system of ideological critique, it’s important to be critical of this type of liberation politics, but, as Michel Foucault teaches us, there are multiple ideologies being played out on the body each and every day. In a sense, the idea of being able to imagine oneself, one’s sexuality and one’s gender as an aesthetically mutable costume, and having that mutable costume available to working class kids, many of whom are gay and transgender, really is a revolution of the self. 

The following are quotations from Theresa May’s speech to the Tory party October, 2016:

“[I]f you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means [….]  Just listen to the way a lot of politicians and commentators talk about the public.  They find your patriotism distasteful, your concerns about immigration parochial, your views about crime illiberal, your attachment to your job security inconvenient.”

Brexit is a cultural-political event, as much, if not more so, than an economic event. Part of the reason that the aftermath of the Brexit referendum has been so chaotic is that there never was an economic plan to put into effect, but was always about cultural politics. The Brexit campaign was about resentment: 

“On June 16 the Farage wing of the Brexit campaign unveiled its most dramatic poster. Entitled ‘Breaking Point,’ it featured a bedraggled column of Syrian refugees marching toward what was, in fact, the Slovenian border. It had little to do with Brexit as such, but it gave new meaning to the slogan of taking back control” (Crash, Adam Tooze 553). 

Brexit is about a cultural politics that would reassert the prominence of the British once again on the world stage, while shrinking the experience British citizens would have of foreigners and the world outside of the UK. It’s as if they all listened to the Kink’s Village Green Preservation Society and imagined themselves as the narrator of the title track listing all of the things he “missed” about the local village green:

“They [the Brexiteers], in fact, imagined that leaving Europe was a way to restore Britain’s greatness and freedom” (554).

Someone once sang that the film, this film, is a saddening bore, because we’ve seen it ten times or more. That generation of “rebellious,” “angry,” and “ornery” working class kids had already pointed out the vacuousness of this form of cultural parochialism. Here’s the second verse of Bowie’s “Life on Mars?”

"It's on America's tortured brow

That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow

Now the workers have struck for fame

Because Lennon's on sale again

See the mice in their million hordes

From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads

Rule Britannia is out of bounds

To my mother, my dog, and clowns"

Part of what makes Bowie’s politics difficult to pin down is his unwillingness to give us a coherent point of view with an articulated political statement. Even Eno, notorious for ascribing little meaning to his often random lyrics, entitled a B-side after the Red Army Faction in West Germany, concluding with the voice of Judy Nylon screaming “No sacrifice!” There’s little politics to be easily discerned from the “girl with the mousy hair.” Even so, the provincialism of “rule Britannia,” as well as the sneering use of mummy and daddy at the beginning of the song, demonstrates a longing outside of the world constructed by capitalism (“America” “Mickey Mouse” growing up to be big as a cow, workers striking because their favorite pop hero “Lennon” is on sale again) and the exclusionary nature of nationalism (if America’s metaphor is “Mickey Mouse,” England’s synecdoche is “Rule Britiania!”).

In that sense, the constant reference to the titular question “Life on Mars?” suggests a desire to escape a world constricted by the binaries of American capitalism and British nationalism (and Soviet communism filtered through the homonym Lenin/Lennon). The possibility of this outside was opened up to working and lower middle-class kids through outlets such as a robust Arts Council (which was founded by the economist John Maynard Keynes). The decline of art and aesthetics being a possibility of escaping the life one was leading as a working class or lower-middle class youth has been replaced with ossifying the either or choice between global capital or provincial nationalism:

“Sixty percent of Labour voters turned out for Remain. But that went only to show that in much of the country, the Labour Party was largely divorced from poorer and less-well-educated voters. Apart from education, the other socioeconomic variable that weighted heavily in the balance was the pain inflicted by austerity since 2010, and that hurt worst where decline was a long-term phenomenon” (Tooze 553).

The program of austerity that the UK had enacted during the financial crisis of 2010-2012 has inflicted such acute damage to the poor and working class of England, that even outside observers are beginning to have grave concern about the country’s ability to properly care for the most vulnerable members of society: the poor and the young.  On a less urgent, but no less damaging, level, funding for education, arts and cultural programs have been devastated since the beginning of the decade. 

This is all to say that when we all collectively agree that there will never be another David Bowie, that we don’t fall into the trap of the genius that has cursed aesthetics at least since the eighteenth century. Yes, David Bowie was amazingly talented and creative. Yet, that talent and creativity does not exist in a vacuum. He was a living breathing being in a society that afforded him the opportunity to be “rebellious, angry and ornery.” Having the space and material support to experiment through those feelings, though one might have grown up eating Spam, must also be seen as part of Bowie’s genius. 

I’m reminded of a quotation from one of my father’s (who also passed away in 2016) favorite authors, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. In 1979 Gould concluded his essay on the shape and size of Einstein’s brain with the following: 

“The physical structure of the brain must record intelligence in some way, but gross size and external shape are not likely to capture anything of value. I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” 

This is the true “blackstar” opened with Bowie’s death and Brexit: the feeling post-89 that the narrative we had held onto for a long time in which thought, freedom and subjectivity cannot be conditioned by history, politics and economics is false. Bowie in life seemed to embody this very walking fiction, and we all enjoyed it. A genius who had the means and talent to teach the world how to be, at times, in the best and freest sense possible. But those fictions must be put to rest, Bowie tells us with "Blackstar," , even if it means violently ripping the mask off our own spacetime to reveal the world we inhabit. A world undergoing a sixth extinction, in which the fate of the human is not so certain. 

Under the Sign of the Blackstar: Ten Years of David Bowie's "Blackstar" (Part One)

I started this blog ten years ago as a place to collect all my (very) occasional music writing. I've published twenty pieces in the ten years I've been keeping up with it. Some years, like 2020 (understandably) I've published a number of pieces. Others, like last year, I only published one. In honor of the tenth anniversary of keeping a regular music blog, I would like to update it on a more regular basis. 

I thought that a piece on the tenth anniversary of David Bowie's death as well as the release of his final album Blackstar I would publish some writing I did a while back. I had the idea of writing a book length essay with an SAT-like title "Bowie:Brexit::Prince:Trump." This book would be about 2016, the deaths of Bowie, Prince and my father, the passing of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. As you can see, the Bowie part was pretty much finished, but I had a hard time writing the Prince section. I might go back to it at some point (maybe the tenth anniversary of his death in April), but I wanted to share the Bowie section as its own separate essay. 

Additionally, the essay has become a tribute to Joshua Clover, the poet and essayist, who passed away last year. His book on the music of 1989, which I have admired since its publication in 2009, is a significant influence on how I frame the discussion of 2016, both the year and the music of that year (specifically, here, the music of David Bowie). The essay is also a tribute to the late Mark Fisher, whose work Capitalist Realism has become short-hand for describing the aesthetics of whatever stage of late capitalism we have been dealing with in the 21st century. Both Clover and Fisher died tragically young, with those left behind wondering what their essential work could have contributed to our ongoing discourse about art, capital and protest. 

David Bowie, Blackstar (Columbia Records, 2016)

---, The Next Day (Columbia Records, 2013)

Joshua Clover, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This To Sing About (University of CAP, 2009)

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There Really No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009)

Edward Said, On Late Style (Penguin/Random House, 2007)

Bowie—Brexit

“In the history of art late works are the catastrophes”—Theodor Adorno “Late Style in Beethoven” 

In the middle of 2016, after the deaths of both David Bowie and Prince Rogers Nelson, memes started popping up all over social media essentially echoing the same sentiment: “I’m not saying David Bowie and Prince held the universe together, but…(looks around).” Assuming the posters of said memes don’t literally believe that Prince and Bowie were omniscient beings that held the fabric of spacetime together (honestly, verdict’s still out), what was it about their deaths that resonated so much with the state of the world in  2016? Certainly, Bowie and Prince were much beloved both for who they were and the music they made. The melancholia people felt after their sudden deaths transferred onto a political terrain that seemed to slip further into darkness. Another brilliant musician who died later that year, yet whose death seemed less metaphysically shattering to the world at large, Leonard Cohen, would ask: “do you want it darker?” 

However, I argue that Bowie and Prince’s deaths resonate not only because of their proximity to both Brexit and Trump, but because their deaths, maybe more than any pop star deaths in recent memory, appear as evidence of a foreclosure of historical possibility. Brexit was an attempt to reinstate a provincial, conservative governance and culture in the UK, against the cosmopolitanism of the common market (a problematic assertion, to be sure). It was also an attempt to close off the UK from outside cultural influence, while stripping domestic cultural institutions for capital. In many respects, the culture and politics espoused by the architects and supporters of Brexit are antithetical to the culture and politics (even if only tacitly expressed) of David Bowie’s life and aesthetics. 

There are years in which every event that happens seems nominally connected to the other events in the year. There are other years that imbue meaning to every event within its otherwise sidereal temporality: 1939, 1945, 1968, 1989. 2016 will be, if it has not already become, one of those years. All of the events of 2016 seem like a catastrophe piling up on top of one another until it was impossible to breathe. Joshua Clover explains this phenomenon with regard to 1989:

"These events all belong to 1989, the category—and just as well to ‘1989,’ the concept. One, a container into which can be tossed songs and images and newspaper articles and punctual happenings, anything with a date on it […] And the other, a shorthand for what happened, for the experiential dimension of a capacious swath of history: an index that becomes more impacted, more challenging to unpack, with each passing year" (Joshua Clover, 1989 5). 

So if we are going to ask the question of “what happened,” and then accept the challenge to unpack it, we have to start at the beginning of the year: January 2016. On January 10, 2016 David Bowie died of liver cancer. His final album, Blackstar, was released two days earlier on January 8, though the title track and video had been released at the end of 2015.  A “Black Star” in physics is a theoretical body similar to a black hole that captures light and warps spacetime. A CD single version of the title track released in France represents the phenomenon. 

The song itself is very much in keeping with the thematics and musical ambition of Bowie’s best work. Yet, there is also something very different here. If we link the song to its obvious precedents, “Space Oddity” and “Ashes to Ashes,” we note the difference. Even if the former is about suicide, it is a sublime suicide, a willingness to give oneself over to the space/oceanic feeling antithetical to the ego. The latter is also about killing off something, but here it’s Bowie killing off a persona that brought him fame but destroyed his body. In both instances there is the hope of something greater than the character: a childlike wonder at metamorphosis, a grown up realization that there is a cost extracted to that sense of wonder. “Blackstar” could easily be read as the conclusion of this trilogy: an artist, at the end of his life, announcing the symbolic and literal death of his greatest creation as well as the creator. However, this time the titular symbol has to do with that which sucks in all light, all meaning. We see something receding along the horizon, but, to the viewer, it will recede forever, even if the star, here Bowie, will be gone before we notice. Within the aesthetics of his career it’s a masterful move, a sublime ending to the narrative.

In a ridiculous literal manifestation of this phenomenon, Elon Musk launched a car into space playing “Space Oddity” after Bowie died. I hope that Bowie would have seen such an action as tacky and obvious.

In that sense, Bowie’s “Blackstar” is very much in line with Adorno’s discussion of Beethoven’s late style. Here’s a representative example that could apply to Bowie’s song and video: 

“He lights it with rays from the fire that is ignited by subjectivity, which breaks out and throws itself against the walls of the work, true to the idea of its dynamism. His late work still remains process, but not as development; rather as a catching fire between the extremes, which no longer allow for any secure middle ground or harmony of spontaneity. Between extremes in the most precise technical sense” (Adorno, Essays on Music 567). 

This describes the music of “Blackstar,” which has been described as everything from art rock, to hip-hop influenced, to free jazz influenced as well as Krautrock among other musical genres. It swings back and forth between the skittering drum and bass of the opening section to the more melodic and Bowie-like middle section, to the darker turn in the later parts of the song to the final wordless moaning vocals of the end (not too dissimilar to the vocals at the end of “the Man Who Sold the World”). It’s easy to hear late style in what is Bowie’s final album, since death was immanent. But Adorno wants the late style to be something more than merely “subjective.” 

“If, in the face of death's reality, art's rights lose their force, then the former will certainly not be able to be absorbed directly into the work in the guise of its ‘subject.’ Death is imposed only on created beings, not on works of art, and thus it has appeared in art only in a refracted mode, as allegory. The psychological interpretation misses this. By declaring mortal subjectivity to be the substance of the late work, it hopes to be able to perceive death in unbroken form in the work of art. This is the deceptive crown of its metaphysics. True, it recognizes the explosive force of subjectivity in the late work. But it looks for it in the opposite direction from that in which the work itself is striving; in the expression of subjectivity itself” (Adorno, 566).

In this interpretation, Bowie’s death is not the most significant aspect of the song’s lateness. Yes, his death informs the lateness of the music (and the lyrics), but both the music and lyrics are some of the most dynamic Bowie has ever done. Even the length of “Blackstar,” matched only by “Station to Station” in Bowie’s catalogue, suggests that Bowie has a lot to say and show. That Bowie was recording demos for new songs weeks before his death suggests that his immanent death made him create more, and more dynamically, not less.

Adorno brilliantly, formally presents why late works may not represent an artist in decline, but is elusive on the why of the lateness outside of subjective considerations. Edward Said, writing in 2003 near his own death, adds this to our understanding of late style: 

“With death and senescence before him, with a promising start years behind him, Adorno uses the model of late Beethoven to enduring ending in the form of lateness but for itself, for its own sake, not as a preparation for or obliteration of something else. Lateness is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present” (Said, 14). 

Said’s necessary admixture of Adorno’s politics with his aesthetic concept of lateness applies to Bowie’s “Blackstar.” It haunts us not just as one of Bowie’s final songs, “Lazarus,” is far less oblique about its death references, but because it does seem to musically figure death in the present as such.

"To work through the silences and fissures is to avoid packaging and administration and is in fact to accept and perform the lateness of his position” (Said, 15 emphasis mine).

“Lateness therefore is akin of self-imposed exile from what is generally acceptable, coming after it, and surviving beyond it” (Said, 16). 

“There is therefore an inherent tension in late style that abjures mere bourgeois aging and that insists on the increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism, which late style expresses and, more important, uses to formally sustain itself” (Said, 17)

Bowie’s last two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar are perfect illustrations of this difference. The former was a self described “rock album,” which often looked retrospectively at Bowie’s career. The first single of that album was “Where Are We Now?,” a song that thematically reflects on memory and mortality more than anything lyrically on Blackstar.  Listening to “Where Are We Now?” The listener might be forgiven for thinking that Bowie was facing his own mortality, something he is literally doing on “Blackstar:”

"In the villa of Ormen, in the villa of Ormen

Stands a solitary candle, ah-ah, ah-ah

In the center of it all, in the center of it all

Your eyes"

“Villa” is an odd word to chose, regardless if we believe that “Ormen” here means a physical space or a Crowleyan invocation of the serpent. If we go with Bowie’s original quasi-homonym “all men,” then the villa is a metaphor for the self, albeit one with a specific linguistic and historical meaning. The notion of a physical space one inhabits as a metaphor for one’s own subjectivity was not invented by David Bowie in 2016. Yet the choice of word is interesting: villa’s have always been associated with land ownership and wealth. At the center of this estate, the estate that stands in for “all men,” stands a candle. Again, we can find any number of cross-cultural references to the flame of life that burns inside each person throughout history, with the eyes being yet another way to center subjectivity. The music is some of the most experimental of his career, and the song “Blackstar” is one of the longest. The only other song in Bowie’s catalog that tops 10 minutes is the title track of “Station to Station”, another Crowley influenced album that has something to say about subjectivity and experience. Yet that song is about striving, either fueled by cocaine or love, for something that, even so, the narrator of that song acknowledges is “too late.”

At this point into Bowie’s song comes a great dialectic: the cosmic being that we’ve been following for Bowie’s entire career becomes his opposite, growling like a horny devil, revealing himself to be not just a black star but “the Great I AM!” This is the general translation of the original name for the Hebrew God YWEH:

"Exodus 3:13 And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?

Exodus 3:14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”

This moment is understood as the creation of the edict against representing God: how can you represent that which has no quality of being other than that which is? Bowie’s YWEH is the opposite, immediately he gets you into all sorts of trouble: you’re going on a trip where you’ll need your passports and sedatives. At this point the “hopeful” melody returns, but it’s mixed up with the new, material concerns of the great I AM: "I'm a blackstar, way up, on money, I've got game," and if he’s going to take you “home,” its not the same home where the spirits will be rising. At this point we have a repeat of that ascension, but it’s embedded within the darker, sarcastic monolog of “the great I AM.” 

What’s left behind after the “spirit” rises a “meter” and “steps aside,” is a life without meaning, but also without the necessary pleasantries of the burning candle in your villa. Maybe the candle tipped over and burnt the villa to the ground: 

"I can't answer why (I'm not a gangstar)

But I can tell you how (I'm not a flam star)

We were born upside-down (I'm a star's star)

Born the wrong way 'round (I’m not a white star)"

This loss of meaning is a career-long concern. The first mention of Crowley in a Bowie song is “Quicksand,” a song, the stirring chorus of which goes: 

"Don't believe in yourself

Don't deceive with belief

Knowledge comes with death's release"

What knowledge comes with death’s release? That it’s all meaningless? Sure. Young people figure that out early on. I don’t think he’s talking about transcendence after death here, as some seem to think he is. But, within the type of nihilism that Crowley profited off of most of his life, there’s a certain power and struggle that comes to the person who feels as if he’s thrown off the shackles to declare “I’m destiny!” (Bowie was a so-so reader of Nietzsche at this time). And certainly the earthly “bullshit faith” and the knowledge that comes with death’s release stand on opposite ends of this subjective actualization. 

Not the black star of Bowie’s late work: He knows our spirit is only going to rise a meter before the person who takes his place is going to give you the knowledge the young Bowie could never imagine. Even he, the Blackstar, the one who is to receive this knowledge upon death, doesn’t have a “why,” he only has a “how:” “we were born upside down/ born the wrong way ‘round.” It’s significant to think of this why/how dichotomy in terms of Adorno/Said’s “late style” descriptions: this Bowie/Blackstar figure can only stand apart (“spirit rose/ and then stepped aside”) and explain how this all works. “It is in, but oddly apart from the present,” as Said remarks.

So what is this present, from which Bowie’s “Blackstar” is both in and oddly apart? If we return to our initial discussion of the interrelatedness of “Blackstar,” “Ashes to Ashes” and “Space Oddity,” we can trace Bowie’s lyrical position vis a vis history and politics: “Space Oddity” remains closely tied to the year 1969 with its post-2001 visualization of space, the sense of wonder that comes with the moon landing, and the utopian ideals that were always masking the military-industrial undertaking that was the “space race;”  “Ashes to Ashes,” from our perspective, anticipates the Regan-Thatcher 1980s sense that the experimentation and radical change which occurred in the previous two decades is the antithesis of work and productivity (“my momma said/ to get things done/ you better not mess with major Tom”). If one were to take a purely negative view of what came after “Ashes to Ashes,” just think of Todd Haynes’ bloated, blonde, Let’s Dance-era caricature at the end of Velvet Goldmine: tan, healthy and utterly vacuous (to be fair, I like some of Bowie's 80s music, but as both an aesthetic and aspirational body of work it purposely reproduces the sheen of MTV's ultimately reactionary surfaceness). 

If those two songs cannot be divorced from the historical and political context of their release, then what of “Blackstar?” If we return to the idea offered at the outset that certain years suck all events into a vortex of meaning, then certainly the song/album’s ultimate release in the year 2016 must also submit to this. To do that, however, I want to lay out both what I see as the most fruitful path of analyzing music politically and historically after 1989, and what the current political historical moment means with regard to popular music.

Two quotations from Joshua Cohen: 

“‘Pop music’ is always at least two facts: the cultural artifact of the song and all that it communicates; and its popularity, its having been claimed by enough people to enter into mass culture. A song may communicate historical experience—including the experience of the end of history—in several different ways” (Joshua Cohen 1989 2).

“And yet, confronted with the impossibility of representing the historical situation while within that situation’s thronged core, pop music still manages to register at once the foreclosure of historical experience, and to develop forms, affects, and cultural schemas that cache within themselves the knowledge of what had been lost in that foreclosure, and how history might be again reanimated.” 

I’ve often thought about Joshua Clover’s brilliant book 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About. I taught it several times and since it marries music, history and politics it is a framework I often return to in trying to analyze popular music. What Clover was describing in that book can be found two paragraphs above the previous quotations. The end of history as proposed by Francis Fukuyama correctly diagnoses a symptom of the end of the cold war—Clover refers to it as “the corresponding loss of bearing and narrative”—but choses to diagnose the symptom as proof of the physician’s ultimate success in curing the patient.

Clover writes: “This, then, is the situation. The antagonism that had been the story of the century, that provided for its structure and thus its navigation, has vanished—to be replaced by ‘this effacement of narrative coordinates and conceptual distinctions.’ The experience of this vacuum, left when structuring antagonism disappears and is not reinstated, manifests itself equally as a crisis of culture […] By the late twentieth, however, such a cultural vantage point has collapsed. This isn’t a failure internal to culture, but an unfolding of the developmental logic of the market state itself” (127). 

This diagnosis was written in 2009, in commemoration of the end of history’s twentieth anniversary. It was published the same year as Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and I believe both books speak to one another, and, in turn, speak to the political and cultural context of “Blackstar.”

In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher takes the work of Fredric Jameson, among others, to diagnose how much further capitalism has “seeped into the very unconscious” as to become unremarkable. It’s power, according to Fisher, mirrors what Clover says in 1989: “The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value” (4).

This is the solution to the crisis of culture engendered by 1989: with the loss of antagonism offered by the pre-1989 history, the vacuum can only be filled by late capitalism. Of course, Fisher is smart enough to realize that this analysis of post-Fordist capitalist culture was already well-analyzed by Jameson in his Postmodernism book. Jameson’s study, however, couldn’t diagnose the state of culture after the period in which he was writing, and, as Fisher correctly points out, is old enough to still hold the antagonism between modernism and post-modernism as a possible theater of cultural struggle.

For the then current moment (2009), that struggle has already been settled: “Capitalist realism no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living” (Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism 8).

According to Fisher what we now have is “capitalist realism[…] more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a king of invisible barrier constraining culture” (Fisher 16). In describing the central disaster of Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 Children of Men, the sterility of the human race, Fisher writes: “There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from a present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being” (Fisher 2) 

To bring Clover and Fisher together, it is the post-historical moment that captures this atmosphere Fisher describes here. Capitalist society sustained itself with Obama slow-jamming the news on the Tonight show as spectacular evidence that everything was fine. Even the re-writing of the Bush presidency and the War on Terror has been a retrospective justification for the maintenance of the new world brought about in 1989. What would be the opposite of this? Fisher argues that the foreclosure of that possibility is the symptom of capitalist realism, par excellence.

If I were going to attach a year to the atmosphere Fisher describes above, 2016 would be the year. Faced with a real threat from the right in Donald Trump, neoliberalism simply retreated to the comfortable narrative of another Clinton in the White House. Assuming that the electorate across the U.S. would prefer that to whatever reheated white-nationalist authoritarianism for dummies Trump was offering up. As Fisher and Clover could tell you, that narrative had exhausted itself most likely by 2008, but seriously seemed finished in 2016. This would suggest, then, that 2016 is similar to 1989 in that a certain narrative, even possible antagonism played out on the cultural stage, became unmoored after November 2016. The atmosphere had changed. It is into this atmosphere that David Bowie released Blackstar. 

I chose Blackstar and Bowie’s death in 2016 not only as cultural artifact that belong to the category 2016, but one that belongs to 2016 the concept. Bowie, beyond controlling the moon and the stars according to people on social media after his death, also is a perfect subject for both illustrating the tenants of, as well as the transformation of, the modernist/postmodernist struggle and what has come after. If there is one pop artist who embodies both the modernist streak of antagonism that belies taste, as well as the post-modern ahistorical need for reinvention, it’s David Bowie.