David Bowie and William Blake or, Glam Ecology (Part 1)

A blog post from 2009 metastasized in 2022. Then Philip Hoare quoted Bowie in his Blake book, Andy Wilson wrote about it, and...

…I was off to the races. In one of his inimitably detailed and politically and artistically heartfelt reviews, Andy Wilson wonders why Hoare quotes Bowie in his new William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. I got interested, and wrote the following. Then I realized I wanted to republish the essay I had written on my blog on my very favorite Bowie song. It really is an essay, almost 4000 words long. I hope you like it. I’m going to publish it here in parts.

It’s a relatively obscure one, this song I love. It’s “New Killer Star” from Reality. And the video, the astounding video.

I wrote about it in 2009 and my cousin Lindsay and her partner Paul got really interested in it. Paul has hung out with Bowie. Paul has a knack of treating everyone the same, and called Bowie “Dave” and bought him a beer.

Then I “remixed” the essay in 2022. It was the closest I had got to writing something intense in quite a while. I wasn’t exactly blocked. I was writing the essence of Hell after all. But I hadn’t enjoyed writing an essay for a while.

Here’s what I wrote to Andy:

Bowie. Why [does Hoare quote him]? Surely it's because so much of his work is songs of experience. My favorite, “New Killer Star” is the terrifying idiot mind of George W. Bush and could easily have been by Blake (all the star imagery, the claustrophobic universe where if hills and stars are men there's no relief, no letup...).

The cartoon like way Bowie will brilliantly sketch something also Blakean, each image an augury of innocence ... it's recursively in "New Killer Star" with reference to W's grandiosity (“See my life in a comic...the little bubbles and action”).