This brilliant quote perfectly sums up David Bowie's entire career
We'd never thought about him quite like this before
It’s been more than 18 months since David Bowie precipitated the downfall of civilization as we know it by going and dying at the wise old age of 69.
Without the Thin White Duke around to hold things together, just look at the mess we’re in now. We miss him more than ever, although he had the good grace to bless us with a masterful farewell album in the form of Blackstar, released just two days before his death was announced.
And one of the people who worked on that record, albeit a small contribution, was LCD Soundsystem main man James Murphy.
After unexpectedly reforming LCD Soundsystem, only five years after splitting up, seemingly for good, with a farewell concert, they’ve just released their first album since 2010’s This Is Happening in the form of American Dream.
Naturally, Murphy is currently embarking on a series of interviews to promote the record and in one of them, with The Guardian, he explained how he worked on Blackstar after contacting Bowie, who he had met through his work with Arcade Fire, with the idea of making an album ““with just the two of us in a room, together”. However, with sessions already underway, it didn’t quite work out – his final contribution amounted to “playing percussion on one track and suggesting a chord change on another”.
However, he also revealed the advice that Bowie gave him when he talked to him about how he was toying with the idea of reforming LCD Soundsystem, but that he felt uncomfortable about going through with it.
According to The Guardian, Bowie told him if the idea made him uncomfortable, then he should do it because being uncomfortable would make him work hard.
Murphy said:
“I didn’t imagine David Bowie ever felt uncomfortable. Because, of course, I’m thinking that David Bowie’s experience of being David Bowie is the same as I would imagine myself having, which would be: ‘Fuck everybody else, I’m David fucking Bowie.’ But that wasn’t his experience at all. He was David Jones, and he’d done nothing but make himself uncomfortable for his entire career.”
What an amazing quote. And it’s something that’s probably not acknowledged. That being David Bowie probably wasn’t the easy ride it might have appeared, and that it took a lot of hard work, and a lot of putting himself in difficult places, artistically, as well as a lot of talent.
Yeah, we still miss David Bowie.
(Images: Rex)
