22 - Reality

Reality. Bowie's been living and dying and resurrecting and doing it all over again for ever. It's time to retire. So, right on the heels of Heathen he makes his retrospective retirement spectacular.

Why? Because reality is over. The world finally caught up with Bowie. Existence is just a stream of digital factoids and humans have no ability to reconcile any of it into a coherent meaningful existence. There's no ego to build out of that, it means Bowie really is nothing more than his discography. There's no knowledge anymore. He has to just wait. And wait he does, for 10 years. But that's in the future. Where are we now?

Art rock. The splotchy, colorful, scribbly, weird fonts and out of order typesetting kind of art rock. The Picasso meets Warhol wacky postmodern revival. We reinvented a word for it, that word is quirky.

New songs, very old songs (he'd been nursing "Disco King" since the 70s, but it never found a home until now).

Now, i've really thought about it and i don't think i'm making this up. This album is the composed death of David Bowie. It's hospital clean, he's sewed up all the wounds and the smell of freshly applied antiseptic floats on the air. Ben Gibbard has started the night shift behind the wheel of the death cab, my friends of friends the Starlight Mints are shaking hands with surrealism. There's no underground anymore, so there's no mainstream either.

Time to retire, with all these flashing lights and blurry images. We want an encore, but it sure sounded like he wasn't going to do one. By the end you get a very clear sense that the next character David Bowie was going to inhabit was himself, at home, no more pretend, no more show, no more ego.

So he undoes his bow tie, pours a double scotch, and sings a song to death itself in his best Sinatra impersonation. Man, Bring Me The Disco King really is an amazing finale. We know he'll make 2 more albums, but we didn't know that then. This was then end, and he did it in style.

23 - The Next Day