Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

Side of Manhattan was populated with sci-fi nerds,
not rock ’n’ roll Bowie-ists.
If I had to make an educated guess about his new
material, I would say that it might sound a lot like the
kind of romantic folk that Scott Walker, one of his
musical heroes, is famous for (perhaps a bit like Iggy
Pop’s underrated late-period Avenue B album).
Bowie made yet another talking head appearance in
the 2006 documentary on Walker entitled Scott
Walker: 30 Century Man, which he also produced.
This is a respectful way, I guess, of saying that his
days of “Suffragette City”–style rocking are likely
over now. And yet Bowie certainly looked like a
rocker singing “Arnold Layne” with David Gilmour at
a 2007 concert tribute to another hero, the late Syd
Barrett, so I have already contradicted myself and
joined the unusually long-running guessing game fullon.
A David Bowie album remains “TBA” on
Pauseandplay.com, metacritic.com and most other
upcoming-release bulletin sites.
And as I mentioned before, there were reports of
him headlining the Coachella Music and Arts festival
this year, and there will likely be next year. If he is in
fact retired, then Reality is a fine album to close on,
but he remains such a part of the rhythm of so many
lives that imagining a world where David Bowie
does not observe and process the same things we
all see every day, whether it’s politics, sex, culture, or
even bad TV and goof-ball YouTube clips, just feels,
somehow, a lot more lonely. “How many David
Bowie albums do you need?” I recall the writer Jon