Music

When Nomi Met Bowie

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

December 15, 1979. For Klaus Nomi, his performance as a singer/dancer/weird presence for one single show behind David Bowie that night on Saturday Night Live seemed to be an indication that he was on the right path and he was headed to glory; instead, it was the high-water mark of his brief career.

When Bowie died in January 2016, SNL broadcast one of the songs from that appearance, a performance of “The Man Who Sold the World,” in which Bowie sings in a plastic tuxedo so rigid that Nomi and his co-backup, Joey Arias, were tasked with carrying Bowie to and from his place at the mic. (It was a gift from SNL because no complete, legal, clip of any of the three songs has been available online, as NBC is as legally rigid as Bowie’s tuxedo’s fabric was.) Nomi was so enamored with the plastic suit that he wore a similar one as his costume for the remainder of his career, but his tux was one Nomi could walk in but not sit in or bow to an audience while wearing, which made his own appearances in it similarly awkward.

Here is “The Man Who Sold the World” from that 1979 appearance (SNL/NBC already deleted the official clip; here is one I found):
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Bowie, ‘Blackstar,’ and a Thank You

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Saying more and meaning less
Saying no but meaning yes
This is all I ever meant
That’s the message that I sent.—David Bowie, “I Can’t Give Everything Away”

“Something happened the day he died,” sings one character in David Bowie’s longest single, “Blackstar,” which was released as a video in November 2015. At the moment he sings that line in the video, Bowie is a preacher holding aloft a religious book with a black star on its cover. He holds his hands prayerfully and sings earnestly, in the earnest way that signals that lies, or at least complicated truths, are about to be spoken.

Until today, the video and song were simply complex, a piling-on of images and references (the album is also called “Blackstar,” but the album cover only has a black star on it, not the word itself, along with portions of diamond shapes that spell out “BOWIE”), each of which was winking at the other and at past Bowie images and references. (Is the bejeweled skull in the video Major Tom?)

Reviewers and David Bowie experts were just starting to tuck into the multi-layered music and video meal that he had laid out this winter with two videos totaling 15 minutes and a seven-song album released on his birthday, which was Friday. But today is the day David Bowie died, though, or the day the news came out, and for a day at least, every one of the many available interpretations his music and recent work may fire up in one’s mind is filtered through that sad fact. We now know that he recorded the album and the videos knowing that this work was to be his epitaph and not a signal of future directions that his musical interests might take him.

Bowie was an artist for whom public image was one more tool in his expansive repertoire. A personal exit as artistic statement? In a life of many triumphs, this is one more, one last triumph. It is a selfish thing to say that one wishes an artist who produced so much—more than 25 albums, hundreds of songs, memorable acting performances on Broadway and in films and in his videos, an early Internet presence—would not leave us wanting more. But there you have it. I do. Sixty-nine is too young.
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For Christmas: ‘For the Time Being’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

During World War II, the poet W.H. Auden wrote a book-length poem entitled “For the Time Being.” It is subtitled, “A Christmas Oratorio,” and it is a retelling of the Christmas story, but with a 20th Century sensibility. His Herod, for instance, is a technology-loving king who loves that he lives in an Age of Reason and is ever-perplexed by faith and irked that he must hunt down and exterminate the baby Jesus.

An oratorio is a type of composition that was popular in the Baroque period and in churches and has not had many comebacks as a poetic or theatrical form because it never had a period of dominance. It never went away but it was never the first choice of writing mode for many writers. (Paul McCartney produced a quite famous one, “A Liverpool Oratorio,” two decades ago.) Auden was a poet of structures and forms, though, and he produced an attempt at almost every style and poetic structure in his body of work (about 400 poems and several full-length verse plays).
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