DAVID BOWIE AND THE SEARCH FOR LIFE, DEATH AND GOD https://ift.tt/N6lbIiZ

David Bowie (1947-2016) wasn’t an overtly religious musician, but he spent much of his life pondering metaphysical matters. As Guardian journalist Ormerod notes, Bowie read widely about Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist traditions, studied up on occult figures like Aleister Crowley, and occasionally worked matters of faith into his performances. (Most famously, at a 1992 tribute to Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, he dropped to his knees and recited the Lord’s Prayer.) Bowie would occasionally make explicit religious references in his songs—an early song, “Silly Boy Blue,” was inspired by his investigations into Buddhism, and his late musical and song “Lazarus” had clear Christian overtones. But more often a listener has to do a lot of reading between the lines, a task at which Ormerod is only intermittently convincing. It’s interesting to know, for instance, how Bowie’s song “Station to Station” was informed by the Stations of the Cross and how the musician worked his Buddhist interests into a soundtrack to the TV adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia. But often, Ormerod overreaches. There’s nothing substantively religious about Bowie playing “rock god” during his Ziggy Stardust era, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings about dancing don’t make “Let’s Dance” more than a featherlight pop tune. No question, religion mattered to Bowie, and the book is filled with quotes from the man about his interests and inspirations. But it is only intermittently persuasive that “when you look at Bowie’s career in this way, it becomes illuminated anew”; it’s more correct to say that some of his songs gain a few more intriguing opacities, which might have been better asserted in a substantive essay rather than in a book.

from Kirkus Reviews https://ift.tt/nOTKuVe