Today is the one-year anniversary of David Bowie’s death, and it is worth noting, one trip through space later, how much that death still resonates. The global period of mourning that followed was not the performative grieving of many celebrity deaths but rather an ongoing shock, thanks in no small part to the lingering power of his stunning final missive, Blackstar, in which the artist speaks eloquently about his life and impending death. But that death was also turned into a sort of meme, as if the liver cancer that gradually, quietly killed him were also a celestial harbinger for the many celebrity deaths that would follow last year.
Accordingly, today the internet is awash with tributes. Two in particular speak about his online afterlife with the sort of prescience so often attributed to him. One is a tweet commemorating Bowie’s habit of lurking on his own official message boards (this was the mid-’00s, and message boards were legion), where he’d occasionally post as “Sailor.” In the image, Bowie playfully trolls a fan with a weirdly solipsistic viewpoint of his artwork.
If this seems weird—that a Starman would be hanging around reading fans comment online rather than, like, communing with the infinite—Gizmodo has also unearthed a 1999 interview in which Bowie discusses with shocking passion and clairvoyance the future of the internet itself. In it, he says that if he were 19 today, he would not be a musician—he’d be online, “a fan in the collective” drawn toward “the subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic and nihilistic” people gathered there.
Bowie goes on, prognosticating on the increasing segmentation in musical genres and the re-balancing of the scales of power in culture toward fans and users. The interviewer, kindly dolt Jeremy Paxman, totally does not get it, and Bowie, rather than getting frustrated, gets more eloquent. Gizmodo transcribes: