Guernica: Is that why so many people feel so bereft after his death?
Simon Critchley: The address of Bowie’s work has always been incredibly intimate and visceral. When “Starman” was performed on Top of the Pops on July 6, 1972 there’s this bit where he sings “I had to phone someone so I picked on you” and points right at the camera. In that moment he was picking you out, from the audience. The call was clear. You felt like he was allowing you to feel a whole range of things you didn’t even know existed. On one hand he mobilizes this self-conscious aesthetic of fiction and metafiction and irony in which everything is television and everything is a film set with this dystopian backdrop. It’s the most self-referential, most reflexive music we have, but it’s his inauthenticity that enabled this intimacy to happen. His music isn’t cold; it’s throbbing with desire. With warmth and love. It offers his listeners the possibility to synthesize themselves and to become something else, offers people new ways of being the kinds of people they want to be.
There’s an extraordinary vulnerability about Bowie’s work. He sang about isolation, despair, depression, and he sang about yearning for love, for actual human connection. Often those feelings are side by side in the same song. “Heroes” is like that. You’ve got the title track from Sound and Vision which is about depression and isolation and then the next track is “Be My Wife,” which is a demand for someone to please to come be with him. Bowie’s music is not a celebration of exile, it’s a yearning for connection—that’s what he’s left us.