[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] Autre Magazine's Favorite David Bowie Songs

Text by Adam Lehrer

What can I say about the late David Bowie that hasn’t already been eulogized at length by the great artists and writers of the world? Something personal, I suppose. I feel like every Bowie fan has that moment when the man’s music became something more to him/her than something they would passively hear on classic rock radio. My parents were big on Bowie, so naturally I had a natural instinct towards rejecting him. But I was big into skateboarding, and skateboarding videos introduced me to a whole world of art and even more so music (I got into Coltrane through the Mark Gonzalez part in Blind’s Video Days, Fugazi was introduced to me by Ed Templeton’s avowed love of the band, etc..). Perhaps some of you might remember a skateboarding video by a board company called Flip and its first big video, Sorry. Pro skater Arto Saari had the last part, and he used a one-two whammy of Bowie’s 1984 and Rock n’ Roll Suicide for the soundtrack. That was it. Bowie’s melodies provided an emotional resonance to the skateboarding that normally wouldn’t be there. Bowie’s music provides an emotional resonance to anything. The man seemed to just feel things more, and those hard-hitting and powerful feelings filtered from his mind through his music and into the world. Rock n’ roll would never be the same.

It might be an awful thing to write, but it doesn’t seem surprising that in the twilight of his life, that Bowie was able to record two of his greatest musical achievements. When I heard Blackstar for the first time, I was stunned at how experimentally powerful it sounded; it sounded like the beginning or something but in fact it was the end. Bowie’s best work always teetered on the edge of life, death, and re-birth. It was through death defyingly rampant cocaine use that Ziggy Stardust was birthed to the world, and the re-birth of his newly sober soul in Berlin gave us ‘Low.’ That vague flicker between life and the unknown was one of Bowie’s greatest creative sparks. It gave him purpose and resolution to leave lasting documents of his talent. In my opinion, The Next Day and Blackstar are the best pieces of music that Bowie put out since the ‘70s.

Growing up in a small and oppressively conservative town as an extroverted but geeky readerly type more concerned with finishing Infinite Jest than winning a basketball championship, Bowie was god. He taught us all how to be fiercely and commitedly ourselves. Seeing Bowie, dressed garish and flamboyant, with beautiful women on his arm gave me hope. I knew I could one day be a fairly weird and offbeat fella and still get laid one day once freed from the grips of the suburbs. That might sound callous and rude, but one must sympathize with the fact of how freeing that actually is. Bowie helped give me hope for a bright and excellent future.

There will never ever be a rock star so adept at the art of self-invention. Like Warhol, he made the state of famousness itself a sort of self-expression. He was the bridge that held together the art rock of Lou Reed and Iggy with the mainstream world. A masterful producer, a genius songwriter, and a multi-media genius, he was truly the best of us. 

My Favorite Bowie Album: Eleven Creative People Choose Their Favorite David Bowie Album

If you ask any one what their favorite David Bowie album is, they'll have an almost immediate response. Even people that don't have a favorite color, favorite artist, movie or dish - they have a number one favorite Bowie album. Of course, there will be a second favorite, a third favorite, a fourth favorite and beyond, but there is only one Bowie album in someone's life that means the most to them. Sure, each and every one of Bowie's albums changed music forever (and that is not an understatement) – even his last and final album Blackstar will live in the time vortex of some of the greatest music ever made. But, again, there is usually only one that rings the truest, like a personal message from Bowie himself. And it may take a while for Blackstar to be a favorite album, but wait until the new generation grows up, wait until the album ages and gets finer and finer with future musical epochs. There was literally no one like David Bowie. You can imagine his arrival on earth like a meteor's arrival, with the soil rippling and the air in waves from the shockwaves. When he left, it was like a crucial element, like oxygen, was missing from the atmosphere. Below, we asked a number of creative people what their favorite Bowie album is and here are their answers. 

1. Rosanna Arquette (Actress) / Favorite: Ziggy Stardust

2. Lucia Santina Ribisi (Artist) / Favorite: Hunky Dory

3. Sasha Frere-Jones (Writer and Music Critic) / Favorite: Station To Station

4. Clementine Creevy (Musician) / Favorite: Hunky Dory 

5. Jim Smith (Founder of The Smell In Los Angeles) / Favorite: Ziggy Stardust

6. Enoc Perez (Artist) / Favorite: Young Americans

7. Oliver Maxwell Kupper (Editor-in-Chief of Autre Magazine)  / Favorite: Scary Monsters

8. Andre Saraiva (Graffiti Artist and Hotelier) / Favorite: Heroes 

9. Brad Elterman (Photographer) / Favorite: Hunky Dory

10. Avalon Lurks (Musician) / Favorite: Bowie At The Beeb 

11. Devendra Banhart (Musian and Artist) / Favorite: Hunky Dory 

When A Hero Dies: Lorde Recalls Her Encounter With The Late David Bowie

text by Lorde

When a hero dies, everyone wants a quote. I woke up this morning with a tender head from tears and that big red cup of Japanese whiskey, gulped last night just after the news came. People were already asking me what I thought. It feels kind of garish to talk about oneself at a time like this, when the thing that has happened is so distinctly world-sized. But everything I’ve read or seen since the news has been deeply intrinsic in tone, almost selfish, like therapy. That’s who he was to all of us. He was a piece of bright pleated silk we could stretch out or fold up small inside ourselves when we needed to. 

Mr. Bowie, I guess right now we have to hang this thing up for a minute.

The night I met him I played at an expensive Vogue benefit with a lot of fresh flowers, honouring Tilda. I was not quite seventeen, America was very new to me, and I was distinctly uneasy and distrustful toward everything happening in my life that was putting me in these flat-voiced, narrow-eyed, champagneish rooms. I played my three songs, thrashing and twitching in platform boots. Afterward, Anna clasped my hand and said “David wants to meet you,” and led me through people and round tables with candles and glasses and louder and louder talk, and he was there.


"We'll always be crashing in that same car..."


I've never met a hero of mine and liked it. It just sucks, the pressure is too huge, you can't enjoy it. David was different. I'll never forget the caressing of our hands as we spoke, or the light in his eyes. That night something changed in me - i felt a calmness grow, a sureness. I think in those brief moments, he heralded me into my next new life, an old rock and roll alien angel in a perfect grey suit. I realized everything I’d ever done, or would do from then on, would be done like maybe he was watching. I realized I was proud of my spiky strangeness because he had been proud of his. And I know I'm never going to stop learning dances, brand new dances.

It's not going to change, how we feel about him. For the rest of our lives, we'll always be crashing in that same car.


Lorde is a musician and recording artist. Text taken from a public Facebook eulogy. Click here to follow Lorde on Facebook. Text by Gavin Doyle. Follow Autre magazine on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE