4 Not Quite Dying: Late Bowie

At the end of his life, which he sensed and then knew for sure was the end of his life, David Bowie walked the dead, with himself included among the dead. This chapter centers on Bowie’s two final records, The Next Day and Blackstar, to examine his self-mourning and self-elegizing, as in a long poetic tradition of such things, which allows Bowie to manipulate his experience of his own death a little, offer a kind of power over it. Donning new masks and killing off erstwhile selves was always Bowie’s stock in trade; here it is mortally for real. The self-alienation that defined Bowie’s changing personae—itself a sort of self-administered little death—offered the consolations of control over deaths dealt the characters he played rather than himself. In his last years this operation took on a whole new urgency, with no trace of self-pity. Bowie engaged what Edward Said (invoking Theodor Adorno) spoke of as “late style,” and did so by crossing it with a postmortem self: late work crossed with his own imminent lateness.