David Bowie

We hung out at S's place before heading to Absinthe for Motown night. At one point someone mentioned David Bowie and then suddenly everyone was enthusiastically declaring their undying devotion for him. S turned on her record player and David's lush voice began to seduce our senses...

S said it was the perfect moment to do what she had always dreamt of: reading aloud to us the liner notes on David's Space Oddity record. She grabbed the record and, standing before us, read the following with a kind of drunken passion:

Words cannot speak of music: they cannot elucidate nor illuminate. Both sounds enter

through the ears, but only music travels throughout and animates the whole body. David

Bowie has always known this.

Space Oddity, which opens this album, and which in 1968 brought David Bowie into music's

world arena as one to be reckoned with, inhabits and charges the whole being. As with all of

Bowie's music, it is both ecstatic and uncomfortable—discomforting. It dates early in the

mutable yet paradoxically consistent Bowie odyssey and remains archetypal. Its

achievement, and this is so of Bowie's music in general, is that it was NOW then, and it still is

now NOW: personal and universal, perhaps galactic, microcosmic and macrocosmic.

My life hasn't been the same since.