Celebrate this Life on Mars

Believe it or not, we had this Martian Notifier Watch scheduled to run today long before the great David Bowie died. So here’s this watch. Here’s what we said about it when we sold a few thousand at $34 each. Here’s what you guys said about it on Black Friday when we sold a couple thousand more at $24. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s do something meaningful in this space. It’s our store. We can do that.

Hey, this is @jasontoon, the Meh writer. I know how gross it is when brands rifle through a dead person’s pockets for spare change. But I really wanted to use today’s story to talk about David Bowie, so if this coincidental Martian convergence gives me a chance to celebrate the kind of creativity that literally saves lives, I’ll run the risk of seeming crass. Because saving lives is literally what David Bowie did, by combining his deeply weird self with irresistible pop music. He reached a million misfit kids where they were, and told them they weren’t alone. You didn’t have to crawl to some shadowy downtown art space to find this:

David Bowie - “Life on Mars” (official video)

He was the original “it gets better” - ironically, often couched in the apocalyptic imagery he was obsessed with. Imagine being a maladjusted teenager in 1972, out of step with the gloopy leftovers of the fading hippie dream, and along comes this insectoid, short-haired freak singing a sweet song of Armageddon:

David Bowie - “Oh! You Pretty Things” on The Old Grey Whistle Test

I wasn’t one of those kids he was talking about, the kids whose lives he saved - not directly. I wasn’t born until 1974, and my particular teenage itch wasn’t scratched by theatrical sci-fi androgyny. But none of the punk rock I loved would have been the same without him. And my awareness of a life beyond my working-class St. Louis neighborhood was first piqued when I was ambushed by this insane SNL performance. I was five years old, up past my bedtime to catch a glimpse of the Coneheads, and holy crap, this:

David Bowie with Klaus Nomi - “TVC15” + “Boys Keep Swinging” on Saturday Night Live, 1979
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It was so disturbing I was literally afraid of the mention of David Bowie’s name for years afterwards. Imagine my surprise when I ran into him again on Friday Night Videos, with a supremely catchy example of the Top 40 new wave that was my first musical love:

David Bowie - “Modern Love” (official video)

Punk rock took over my life in my teens, especially the late '70s UK bands. It took me a few more years to realize how every one of them grew up on David Bowie tracks like these:

David Bowie - “Suffragette City” (Live Hammersmith 1973)

David Bowie - “Rebel Rebel”

Thus enlightened, I heard even Bowie’s most familiar hits with new ears. How could I have heard “Changes” so many times without recognizing how brilliant it was?

David Bowie - “Changes” (Live)

And what can I add to the triumphant melancholy of “Heroes”, except maybe that who else but David Bowie could have invented the concept of “triumphant melancholy”?

David Bowie - “Heroes” (official video)

Even when he dispensed with the drama for pure pop candy, he nailed it:

David Bowie - “Sound and Vision” (Live in Tokyo 1990)

Obviously I’m not digging up many deep cuts here. I’m no Bowieologist. I have friends for whom Bowie is the man, the center of their musical universe. That’s not me. But that just means I get to keep discovering Bowie songs into my dotage. It took me a while to get around to his Pin-Ups album, and then I was mostly interested in the covers of '60s bands I love, like the Who, Pretty Things, and Kinks. In the middle of all that, I was gobsmacked by his version of an old Merseys tune I’d never heard before:

David Bowie - “Sorrow”

Of course, he’d been a mod the first time around, and a pretty good one even if an unexpected Monkee kept him from finding fame under his real name:

Davy Jones & the Lower Third - “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving”

My favorite David Bowie performance, though, might be this one, from Extras:

David Bowie on Extras

Like everybody else, I’ve been listening to a lot of David Bowie over the last day or two. Some of it’s passingly familiar, some of it favorites I know by heart, some of it new to me. And there’s so much I’ve barely touched: his '90s and '00s work, the early mystical folkie stuff, the new album everybody said was amazing even before they knew it was his very intentional goodbye. I’ll get around to it. Or, should I say, it’ll get around to me, the way his songs always do: when I’m ready to handle such fearlessness and imagination.

Rónán Murray - “Life on Mars”