David Bowie

Yes, and who would have thought it? You come home on a winter Tuesday evening and no, you don't put a record on the turntable - that's what you did coming home from school in the 70s and then in the 80s - not even the CD that kept you company through the following decade, and for once not even one of the thousands of mp3s, impalpable and crammed into folders on your laptop. For the very first time, the first music of the evening comes via YouTube: as if to say there's no limit, sentimentally speaking, to how much worse things can get. But you have the excuse of having been mulling over a piece of news that's stayed with you, with surprise, since the morning; because it really is a surprise, even if accompanied by the disenchantment that now wraps around every piece of news, good or bad. It's January 8th, and that announcement gives you the chance to revisit that same wistful thought, as you would towards a distant friend you haven't heard from in far too long, and whose last news wasn't exactly the best.

Well then, David Bowie turns 66, and celebrates his birthday by posting online a video of a previously unreleased song. He does so after a silence of almost a decade, punctuated by too many bad moments (an illness, an interrupted tour, coronary angioplasty), by rare appearances so timid they barely seem to suit him (standing on stage alongside Arcade Fire, then David Gilmour and later Alicia Keys, but more than six years have passed since then), and after some news so fragmentary and reticent as to sound ominous: maybe he's depressed, maybe too many ailments have worn him down, maybe talk of retirement is a real possibility.

And yet where are you now, David? The withdrawal and the obsession with time passing had already crept into your artistic life with "Hours", but in 1999 one could still think of it as one of those brilliant overlaps between the man and the character that have defined your career: there was still the physique du role, the sly, charming smile, ever able to morph into a mask at will. But now? Now - amid all this - it's as if the playing with the melancholy of "Thursday's Child" ("A whisper of hope that seemed to fail"), and with the death of "Seven" ("I got seven days to live my life or seven ways to die") had turned into the tangible reality of "Where Are We Now?", with the difference that here the fiction is merely incidental, random, no longer essential. Everything seems tremendously authentic: a metempsychosis of pain, passing from character to man, wrinkles on the face that one doesn't want, and can no longer, hide.

In the same way, the voice too, once assured and forceful, takes on a cracked, subdued tone: so much water has flowed above and below the Berlin hero, whose places are now recalled with poignant longing, and, implicitly, deeds of glory and of ruin: Potsdamer Platz... Nürnberger Straße... Bösebrücke... eternal corners now emptied of the proud decadence of the hero he once was, and filled instead with a resigned, moving preservation of life and memory. The streets that in 1977 marked a return to a futuristically restless life, the narrowly escaped self-destruction made of drugs and assorted recklessness, now amble placidly along those same pavements, perhaps with no way out left. In the slow unfolding of a splendid, crepuscular melody, all that remains are indeed those places, hazy memories of a black-and-white Berlin, accompanied by an end brushed against all too closely ("Just walking the dead") in faded colours, in the expressions and hesitations that closely recall those with which Johnny Cash, with "Hurt", felt he had to leave us his final testament.

Here, thankfully, there's still a thread to hold on to, and it's the hope that clings to an ending where the question "where are we now?" remains - it's true - unresolved, but wears the comforting garb of reassurance: "...as long as there's the sun, as long as there's the rain, as long as there's the fire, as long as there's me, as long as there's you". And as long as there's David Bowie with his songs, yesterday, today, tomorrow, always.

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13/02/2026