In response to the shocking and all too sudden death of rock legend David Bowie, Marilyn Manson contributed a piece to Rolling Stone detailing how Bowie’s music changed his life.
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Belgian theater director Ivo Van Hove, who worked closely with Bowie on his musical Lazarus which opened in NY in December, told Dutch public radio NPO that Bowie had been suffering from liver cancer.
“His death was no different from his life – a work of Art. He made “Blackstar” for us, his parting gift”, Visconti wrote on Facebook. He will always be with us.
The performance, which took place close to the Berlin Wall, saw him tell the crowd: “We send our wishes to all our friends who are on the other side of the wall” before launching in to the song. If successful, Blackstar will be Bowie’s 10th chart-topping album.
Bowie released his final album Blackstar on Friday, his 69th birthday.
“The record sees him put into words his thoughts about his own mortality”.
Released just days before his death, David Bowie’s final video clip, in which he lies in a hospital bed and sings about being in heaven, is a haunting case of life imitating art. He created wonderful, memorable songs seemingly out of thin air. “Changes” was nearly a career mission statement. He moved from one genre and fashion to another rapidly, excitingly and with consummate skill.
The album is part jazz but full of what NME described as “warped showtunes, skronking industrial rock, soulful balladeering, airy folk-pop, even hip-hop”. “Then I’ll kick myself, because it never quite sounds the way I would have done it”. “He is a true, true artist and I don’t know if I ever went, ‘Oh, I’m going to be that way like this, ‘ or if I arrived upon it slowly, realizing it was my calling and that’s what drew me to him”.
He mused: “He was such a prodigious worker that there must be a wealth of unreleased material in the vaults”.
A representative from the Vatican, astronauts aboard the International Space Station, artists, and musicians from every genre have been paying their respects on social media.
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“Although, right now, his death will shatter the pop world like an natural disaster”. All this is not surprising for a man who last performed live in 2006 and never wished to perform live again. He took disparate influences from literature, cinema, dance, mime and art and reassembled them as something new, exhilarating, exciting and distinctively Bowie.
