As The World Falls Down
I didn’t want this to be my first real post on this blog, but I guess it will be.
My first encounter with David Bowie was as a litle girl watching Labyrinth, and I don’t think I am alone in that. I was born in December 1986, not quite half a year after the movie’s release. But that was the magic of the video library: Dad could bring home all these videos from the past and I could sit there and watch them on my own schedule. Mr Bean, The Lost Forests, and of course Labyrinth.
It was my first introduction to his music and also the world of child-stealing fae. There was music, funny creatures and, of course, that dress. Like so many little girls who watched Labyrinth, I loved that dress.
(And probably like many little girls, I watched the movie several years later to wonder how on earth I had managed to miss The Area. Because it is so obvious it should have been credited as the third star of the movie.)
A few years later, when I was about eight or so, I had my next run-in with the idea of David Bowie. (Yes, he was an idea, because my parents didn’t have his albums to play.) My mum took me to the hairdressers and I got a haircut with a short fringe that got spiked up with gel. Oh, I thought it was so cool and I looked amazing, and Mum and the hairdresser both agreed I looked like David Bowie with that haircut. I had no idea who David Bowie was at this time, but I thought he must have been a really cool guy to have a haircut so cool.
That promptly changed when I got to school. Kids will seize on any opportunity to pick on another kid, especially when that kid was already the big target of the school. My haircut was not cool, it was a stupid afro (eight year old Pakeha kids clearly didn’t know what an afro really was), and hey, let’s come up with a new nickname to really make Catherine feel bad. It got to a point where they told the new student teacher from America my name was “Afrine” – yes, that was the nickname – and he was horrified when he called me that and I got upset. Mr Anderson was pretty cool, though, and was one of the few teachers to really look out for me as he knew how kids were picking on me.
I never wore my hair like that again, and there was much hating on this mysterious “David Bowie”.
It was several years before I learned who David Bowie was, and reconciled the “cause” of that round of bullying with the strange yet wonderful blonde guy from that movie with the pretty dress. His music joined my collection and was listened to it regularly, Labyrinth was watched many times and deliberately used as a frame of reference for various writings.
There’s one form of inspiration that makes me feel rather weird, in light of his passing: David Bowie, in one form or style, was always an inspiration for some form of a god of death, a god of the underground. It’s obvious that this comes from Labyrinth and the Underground, but it still leaves me with a funny feeling now that he has passed.
Especially since the night before, Dad was talking about how Blackstar was released on his 69th birthday, and how he didn’t realise Bowie was 69.
My Dad is 64. Maybe that is why this hurts. David Bowie was a shining star, immortal in music even though he was mortal in life.
It’s part of it, anyway.
[su_align_center]Daddy, daddy, get me out of here
Ha ha, I’m underground
Heard about a place today
Nothing never hurts again[/su_align_center]
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