sticky_dojah said:I really like this. The song and the Berlin video footage gets me quite melancholic. I used to live in this part of Berlin for some time in the last 2 years and I will always have a soft spot in me for Mr. Bowie, he could even sing the telephone book for me, I would not care. Good to hear from him again.
This is kind of how I feel about it. Being a Berlin resident myself (and living in Sch??neberg), I love the footage too. I wondered for a moment whether or not it was contemporaneous or archive, until I clocked the tattoo parlour on the left-hand side of the entrance to Bowie's apartment building.
A friend on Facebook described the song as having the same "terrible historical self-awareness" displayed by the surviving Beatles when they did Free As A Bird. He also observed how, after never paying much attention to the public perception of him, it suddenly seems Bowie is happy to reflect it back. Valid points, but not really ones I agree with. I think it's reasonable for someone of his age, who's drifted into semi-retirement amidst rumours of serious debilitating illness and even impending death, to reflect upon the time and place of his greatest artistic triumphs. Even if you do think he's playing around with his own mythology, it's still not as self-indulgent or self-aggrandising as, say, the opening sequence to The Shootist or any number of Frank Sinatra songs.
It'd be the easiest thing in the world to wave this away with a comment about how he's not as interesting as he was in his 20s or 30s, and I have no doubt that loads of people will do just that. But personally, I'm curious to know whether Bowie's interesting as an artist in his 60s. Discovering that he hasn't lost his gift for an affecting melody will do to begin with. He may not have the same pressing need to perform as Leonard Cohen, for example, but the thought of him simply withdrawing from the world as his creativity slowly dissipated, with the long silence only broken by an announcement that, "following a long illness, David Bowie died in the early hours of blahblahblah", would have been very tough to take. Glad to have him back.
ocMcCoy said:This is kind of how I feel about it. Being a Berlin resident myself (and living in Sch??neberg), I love the footage too. I wondered for a moment whether or not it was contemporaneous or archive, until I clocked the tattoo parlour on the left-hand side of the entrance to Bowie's apartment building.
